Leah Zelson

Dr. D. James
Language 120013
September 9, 2012

Identifying the Mother Tongue
In her essay, Amy Tan emphasizes the powerful link there is between
language and identity through her experiences growing up in an immigrant family.
Tan stresses in her essay the huge effect that her mothers language had on her
identity as a person and a writer. As a daughter of a Chinese immigrant, Tan writes
about situations where she saw limitations imposed upon her mother because of
her language skills. She also discusses the perceptions and judgments that people
make when spoken to with imperfect English.
Tan asserts that the link between identity and language is incredibly strong
and can trigger equally strong emotions. While discussing her latest novel in a
public talk, she suddenly remembers that her mother is in the room. This is when
she hears her own speech and realizes the complexity of it, a direct result of years of
study, education and pragmatics. She is speaking to this audience in a completely
different way than she would at home. Her mother tongue, which refers to the
first language that a person learns and the language used in that persons home
country is literally her mothers tongue (mother tongue). The fact that Tan is so
moved just by seeing her mother demonstrates that her mother is a bigger part of
her identity than she realizes, and speaking proper English makes her feel that she is
omitting a big part of herself. I see this as evidence that the connection between her
mother and her identity is incredibly strong. Tans identity is so wrapped up in
language, that just by speaking proper English she feels she has discounted much of
her own background. When Tan changes the way she speaks, its as if she has two
separate lives one with her family and one with the outside world.
How someone feels about their own identity relies heavily on outside opinion
and perceptions. According to the Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity,
language is a central feature of human identity. When we hear someone speak, we
immediately make guesses about gender, education level, age, profession, and place
of origin (Spolsky, B. 181-192). Amy Tan knows this more than anyone. Growing up
with a Chinese immigrant as a mother, Tan saw firsthand the limitations of her
mothers broken English. People that Tans mother interacted with sometimes
perceived her to have low intellect or be unworthy of their time and sympathy. They
just did not take her mother seriously, so Tan would have to step in and help. For
example, acting as her mother, she would sometimes yell at people over the phone
to take care of business. Speaking in perfect English, things were much more likely
to work out. At a young age, Amy Tan was already seeing how powerful a tool
language was and how others perceptions could be very misguided. Their
assumption that her mother had low intellect was in fact false; as Tan points out:
You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she
actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily
with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease-all kinds of things I
can't begin to understand (77). The way her mother expressed her thoughts may have been
flawed, but there was quality to them.
Amy Tan also relays the importance of language for shaping her own world.
She believes it is really family influence that shapes a childs language and attributes
the imperfect way her mother speaks to the way she sees and responds to the world.
This is really important to her, because she now realizes that the way her mother
speaks is so much a part of her own identity. Tan refers to the way that she thinks
and sees the world to her mother tongue. I agree with the notion that the
language someone is exposed to growing up has a big effect on how they turn out to
be. Im sure the more sophisticated, grammatically correct English that I was
exposed to as a child helped me to communicate more effectively which largely
contributed to my identity.
Language also affected the way that Tan performed in school. Tan
remembers her days as a student taking achievement tests and never doing well
enough on the English section. According to the achievement tests, her strengths
lied in math and science. Growing up around broken English gave her a
disadvantage when answering word analogies. None of the same expressions,
grammatical rules or logistics that someone would hear in a non-immigrant family
were present in her household. Tan recalls, I knew what the tests were asking, but I
could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to
nightfall -and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the
lowering of a curtain of stars (79). The fact that Tan has an immigrant mother
definitely shaped her identity in that she believed she was weak in English.
However, from her mother she got the wonderful sense of imagery that is so
prominent in her writing. Tan heard a fullness and richness in her mothers speech
that shaped how she responded to the world and contributed to her own identity.
Amy Tans essay is easy for me to relate to, because I often see myself alter
my language in different social situations. With my friends I can be as informal as I
want and blurt out whatever is on my mind, but when I am with my family I do have
to be more respectful and censor some things. Though I didnt grow up in a family of
broken English as Amy Tan did, I can relate to some of her feelings about separate
identity resulting from language. Amy Tan makes two things very clear in her essay:
identity depends greatly upon language, and the way that others perceive and
respond to language contributes to personal identity. How we hear things growing
up ultimately shape the unique way we interact with the world.

Citations:
1) "Mother Tongue." Mother Tongue. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
2010. Web. 09 Sept. 2012. <http://www.yourdictionary.com/mother-tongue>.

2) Spolsky, B. (1999). Second-language learning. In J. Fishman (Ed.), Handbook of
Language and Ethnic Identity (pp. 181-192). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3) Amy Tan. "Mother Tongue." Originally published as "Under Western Eyes" In The
Threepenny Review, 1990, pp. 315-320. Reprinted by permission.