Summary Of Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

Amy Tan, the author of “Mother Tongue” properly executes this essay by making her points through consecutive aspects and examples to proof the reader of the current cultural racism. Tan focuses on real stories, with enough details for it to make it believable and so to persuade the readers. She uses a soft and calm tone, which in this case, since she is writing for an audience who are ignorant towards this topic, it’s much more efficient than an aggressive or threatening tone. She is trying to reach an ignorant audience for them to realize how hard it is for someone who is not from the United States and doesn’t speak the language “properly” to be able to live and to handle the everyday situations. Tan provides examples that develop the discriminatory …show more content…
She was a young girl who pretended to be her mother through the phone to make important business calls. With this Tan showed us the treatment difference that a person who, although being a kid, had a proper English would have compared to a person that had not, like her mother. Which was an embarrassing situation, most of it because Tan wanted her mother to get the respect from the society she deserves. This was an embarrassing situation for Tan, even a kid could realize how obvious society would look down to someone just because of their “broken” or “limited” …show more content…
She knew her English was limited and so the corresponding responses would be as well. In one of the examples throughout the essay, the doctors lose Tan’s mother’s CAT scan results of a benign brain tumor. These is a huge example of the difference treatment. A doctor would never allow himself to lose such a thing, and even less when it’s about a benign brain tumor which could cause death. I’m not saying they did that on purpose of course, but with this we can see how for people like Tan’s mother, people that need more facilities than difficulties, just to go through the day by day is a hard task. On things like that is when Tan, embarrassed, would come across her mother’s way and help her with an impeccable English, or at least, the English all the doctors were expecting from the very beginning. This example was provided so the reader could think of the possible many immigrant families that might suffer of this problem. In this case, Tan’s mother was lucky she had a kid like Tan that could help her any time she needed, although an immigrant family usually won’t be provided with a little helper like Tan is. An example like this, makes the reader realize that the actual immigrant families would have to go out there and being looked down for society with nothing they can do about if all they know is “broken English”. People usually think that because they cannot speak proper English, it’s because they are not smart enough