My Father Writes To My Mother By Elizabeth Wong Analysis

Both stories, The Struggle to be an All-American Girl by Elizabeth Wong and My Father Writes to my Mother by Assia Djebar, explore the ramifications of foreign languages.
Elizabeth Wong’s essay The Struggle to be an All-American Girl details her experiences learning Chinese at an alternate school to where she receives her general education. Wong talks about her brother’s habit to be “especially hard on [her] mother, criticizing her, often cruelly, for her pidgin speech-smatterings” (Wong 1) because English is not her natural language. The brother’s degradation of the mother allows him a certain power over her. She is forced to feel inadequate because of her poor English communication skills. The brother takes advantage of language to create power for himself. …show more content…
Furthermore, Wong’s father also uses his power to provide his wife with an English name to have power over her. He decides to “[assign] her an American name that her tongue would not allow her to say” (Wong 1). I believe that this use of language to create power by the father and brother is deplorable. Their behaviour connects to our society because we see language being used as a barrier every day against refugees. It is a common argument that immigrants should not be accepted to Canada because they do not know our language. It is an unfortunate fact of our country that language is a divisive factor in our decision making. I believe that in order for us to continue to grow as a society, we must not allow language to be used as a weapon of fear.
Djebar’s story explains how, in her protagonist’s culture, it is commonplace for women to refer to their husband’s without pronouns and for men to rarely address their wives at all. The mother and father depicted in the