Mother Tongue AMY TAN Amy Tan is a novelist whose work includes The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. You can learn more about her through her website, amytan.net. This essay, which was originally presented as a talk at the State of the Language Symposium in 1989, first appeared in Threepenny Review in 1990. I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all-all the Englishes I grew up with. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like," The intersection of memory upon imagina- tion" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"- speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it sud- denly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother. Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, and the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I a 83 Mother Tongue wurdenbei med Englis sier if it lacked dowwerd including family talk, the language I grew up this for re was talking about a English limited my aber English repressed the by of empirica ar ba pleber good ser serulid not hear Mr mother has wafeen, sheus frabesguise. I wa apple who ha New York. Sh heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way. My husband was we us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often used that become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has with what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, liquore political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's, Du, then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mother's wed. ding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong-but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man wall to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big lite become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen." 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. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her lan guage, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world. Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken or "fractured" English we were going to California. I had Ar very convinc And my mothe send me check, And then I said greed to send Then she bega in front of h make her be causes. If Id your mana lewing we wasiting the 84 Amy Tan སན་མར། way to describe it other than"broken, as if it were damaged and needed to be Bur / wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no used. "limited English,"for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker. English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited chat her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in depart ment stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if se poweb ପରe. they did not hear her. al people ။ COOR YSKA belis My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan." And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money." And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived! Then she began to talk more loudly."What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English. We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, She a 85 Mother Tongue ohr of four pe I to diagona el lexuld never el mar block ou காளைகல கழyes of the moon risin Warred, bu iyor making it surser pre of way I would 200he site Sunser, auch yenishment whi fave been thin ainement tese armore Asian she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CKT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they words sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact d nor give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference all called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English-lo and behold on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake. I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think this more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. Andi believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well , getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher This was understandable. Math is precise, there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judge- ment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, Such as, "Even though Tom was "And the cor Mary thought he was rect answer always seemed to be the most bland combination of thoughts , for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming" wich the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and fex Asian Amer Chinese studer questions I can last week--tha mach achievem are other Asian also be describ: who are steeri s what happen Fortunately, 1 kuproving as pa in colleg a freelance worst ski Bait wasn't ting what . The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in whicho were you "Sunset is to nightfall as supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship-for example, "And here you would be presented 86 is to ewa CH Amy Tan offering scoutscr, " tell you to ers. But I do thanks ant familiei ze of the child to tests, and he's ared to malo. did moderado coring pepe it those scars with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of rela tionship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. 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 mightfall--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as say of words---red, bus, stoplight, boring-just threw up a mass of confusing ing: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine punishment, which indeed did happen to me. I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys--in fact, just last week—that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me. Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management. But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state" A ter- rible line, which I can barely pronounce. bilities layas ed in the nines 70 CoreT e always Those pletior faster "Anda of thuyentes wardiga fortunately , for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envi- sion a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was 87 Mother Tongue AMY TAN Amy Tan is a novelist whose work includes The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. You can learn more about her through her website, amytan.net. This essay, which was originally presented as a talk at the State of the Language Symposium in 1989, first appeared in Threepenny Review in 1990. I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all-all the Englishes I grew up with. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like," The intersection of memory upon imagina- tion" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"- speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it sud- denly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother. Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, and the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I a 83 Mother Tongue wurdenbei med Englis sier if it lacked dowwerd including family talk, the language I grew up this for re was talking about a English limited my aber English repressed the by of empirica ar ba pleber good ser serulid not hear Mr mother has wafeen, sheus frabesguise. I wa apple who ha New York. Sh heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way. My husband was we us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often used that become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has with what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, liquore political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's, Du, then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mother's wed. ding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong-but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man wall to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big lite become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen." 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. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her lan guage, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world. Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken or "fractured" English we were going to California. I had Ar very convinc And my mothe send me check, And then I said greed to send Then she bega in front of h make her be causes. If Id your mana lewing we wasiting the 84 Amy Tan སན་མར། way to describe it other than"broken, as if it were damaged and needed to be Bur / wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no used. "limited English,"for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker. English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited chat her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in depart ment stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if se poweb ପରe. they did not hear her. al people ။ COOR YSKA belis My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan." And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money." And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived! Then she began to talk more loudly."What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English. We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, She a 85 Mother Tongue ohr of four pe I to diagona el lexuld never el mar block ou காளைகல கழyes of the moon risin Warred, bu iyor making it surser pre of way I would 200he site Sunser, auch yenishment whi fave been thin ainement tese armore Asian she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CKT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they words sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact d nor give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference all called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English-lo and behold on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake. I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think this more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. Andi believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well , getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher This was understandable. Math is precise, there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judge- ment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, Such as, "Even though Tom was "And the cor Mary thought he was rect answer always seemed to be the most bland combination of thoughts , for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming" wich the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and fex Asian Amer Chinese studer questions I can last week--tha mach achievem are other Asian also be describ: who are steeri s what happen Fortunately, 1 kuproving as pa in colleg a freelance worst ski Bait wasn't ting what . The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in whicho were you "Sunset is to nightfall as supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship-for example, "And here you would be presented 86 is to ewa CH Amy Tan offering scoutscr, " tell you to ers. But I do thanks ant familiei ze of the child to tests, and he's ared to malo. did moderado coring pepe it those scars with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of rela tionship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. 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 mightfall--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as say of words---red, bus, stoplight, boring-just threw up a mass of confusing ing: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine punishment, which indeed did happen to me. I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys--in fact, just last week—that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me. Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management. But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state" A ter- rible line, which I can barely pronounce. bilities layas ed in the nines 70 CoreT e always Those pletior faster "Anda of thuyentes wardiga fortunately , for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envi- sion a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was 87
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