ESSAY

Mother TongueDon't judge a book by its coveror someone's intelligence by her English.By Amy Tan • Art by Gabe Leonard

I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannotgive you much more than personal opinions on theEnglish language and its variations in this countryor others.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I amsomeone who has always loved language. I amfascinated by language in daily life.

I spend a great deal of my time thinkingabout the power of language—the way it canevoke an emotion, a visual image, a complexidea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool ofmy trade. And 1 use them all—all the Englishes1 grew up with.

Recently, I was made keenly aware of thedifferent Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to alarge group of people, the same talk I had alreadygiven to half a dozen other groups. The talk wasabout my writing, my life, and my book The JoyLuck Club, and it was going along well enough,until I remembered one major difference thatmade the whole talk sound wrong. My mother wasin the room. And it was perhaps the first time shehad heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kindof English I have never used vn\h her. I was sayingthings like "the intersection of memory and imagi-

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nation" and "There is an aspect of my Fiction thatrelates to thus-and-thus"—a speech filled withcarefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened,it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms,past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms ofstandard English that I had learned in school andthrough books, the forms of English I did not useat home with my mother.

Just last week, as 1 was walking dovm the streetwith her, I again found myself conscious of theEnglish I was using, the English 1 do use with herWe were talking about the price of new and usedfurniture, and I heard myself saying this: "Not wastemoney that way." My husband was with us as well,and he didn't notice any switch in my English. Andthen I realized why. It's because over the twentyyears we've been together I've often used the samekind of English with him, and sometimes he evenuses it with me. It has become our language of inti-macy, a different sort of English that relates tofamily talk, the language I grew up with.

vccahKEENLY: sharplyWROUGHT: put together, created

LANGUAGEBARRIERSYou should know that my mother'sexpressive command of English belieshow much she actually understands.She reads the Forbes report, listens toWall Street Week, converses daily withher stockbroker, reads ShirleyMacLaine's books with ease—allkinds of things I can't begin to under-stand. Yet some of my friends tell methey understand fifty percent of whatmy mother says. Some say theyunderstand eighty to ninety percent.Some say they understand none of it,as if she were speaking pure Chinese,But to me, my mother's English isperfectly clear, perfectly natural. It'smy mother tongue. Her language, asI hear it, is vivid, direct, full of obser-vation and imagery. That was thelanguage that helped shape the wayI saw things, expressed things, madesense of the world.

Lately I've been giving morethought to the kind of English mymother speaks. Like others, I havedescribed it to people as "broken" or"fractured" English. But I wince whenI say that. It has always bothered methat I can think of no way to describeit other than "broken," as if it weredamaged and needed to be fixed, asif it lacked a certain wholeness andsoundness. I've heard other termsused, "limited English," for example.But they seem just as bad, as ifeverything is limited, includingpeople's perceptions of the limited-English speaker.

I know this for a fact, because whenI was growing up, my mother's"limited" English limited my percep-tion of her. 1 was ashamed of herEnglish. I believed that her Englishreflected the quality of what she hadto say. That is, because she expressedthem imperfectly, her thoughts were

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imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidenceto support me: the fact that people in departmentstores, at banks, and in restaurants did not take herseriously, did not give her good service, pretendednot to understand her, or even acted as if they didnot hear her.

My mother has long realized the limitations ofher English as well. When I was a teenager, sheused to have me call people on the phone andpretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to askfor information or even to complain and yell atpeople who had been rude to her. One time it wasa call to her stockbroker in New York. She hadcashed out her small portfolio, and it just sohappened we were going to New York the nextweek, our first trip outside California. I had to geton the phone and say in an adolescent voice thatwas not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."

My mother was standing in the back whisperingloudly, "Why he don't send me check, already twoweeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."

And then I said in perfect English on the phone,"Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You hadagreed to send the check two weeks ago, but ithasn't arrived."

Then she began to talk more loudly. "What hewant. I come to New York tell him fiont of his boss,you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm herdown, make her be quiet, while telling the stock-broker. "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don'treceive the check immediately, I am going to haveto speak to your manager when I'm in New Yorknext week." And sure enough, the following week.

Amy Tan walking with her mother.

there we were in front of this astonished stock-broker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet,and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting athis boss in her impeccable broken English.

BLENDINB DLD AND NEW

Lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there arenot more Asian-Americans represented in Amer-ican literature. Why are there few Asian-Americansenrolled in creative writing programs? Why do somany Chinese students go into engineering? Well,these are broad sociological questions 1 can't beginto answer. But I have noticed in surveys—in fact,just last week—that Asian-American students, as awhole, do significantly better on math achievementtests than on English tests. And this makes methink that there are other Asian-American studentswhose English spoken in the home might also bedescribed as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps

I began to write storiesusing all the EnglishesI grew up with.they also have teachers who are steering themaway from writing and into math and science,which is what happened to me.

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoythe challenge of disproving assumptions madeabout me. 1 became an English major my first yearin college, after being enrolled as pre-med. Istarted writing nonfiction as a freelancer the weekafter I was told by my boss at the time that writingwas my worst skill and I should hone my talentstovrard account management.

But it wasn't until 1985 that I began to vmtefiction. At first I wrote what I thought to be wittilycrafted sentences, sentences that would finallyprove I had mastery over the English language.Here's an example from the first draft of a storythat later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but

without this line: "That was my mental quandaryin its nascent state." A terrible line, which I canbarely pronounce.

Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into here,I later decided I should envision a reader for thestories I would write. And the reader I decided onwas my mother, because these were stories aboutmothers. So with this reader in mind—and in factshe did read my early drafts—I began to writestories using all the Englishes 1 grew up with: theEnglish I spoke to my mother, which for lack ofa better term might be described as "simple"; theEnglish she used with me, which for lack of abetter term might be described as "broken"; mytranslation of her Chinese, which could certainlybe described as "watered down"; and what I imag-ined to be her translation of her Chinese if shecould speak in perfect English, her intemallanguage, and for that 1 sought to preserve theessence, but neither an English nor a Chinesestructure. I wanted to capture what languageability tests could never reveal: her intent, herpassion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speechand the nature of her thoughts.

Apart from what any critic had to say about mywriting. I knew I had succeeded where it countedwhen my mother finished reading my book andgave me her verdict: "So easy to read" •

From The Opposite of Fate, by Amy Tan. Copyright ©2003 by Amy Tan. Used by permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I vccahEMPIRICAL; based on observation

QUANDARY: a state of perplexity or doubt

Amy Tan was born in Oakland,

Calif., in 1952. Her parents moved

to the United States from China a

few years before her arrival. Tan

has observed the culture clash

between the two countries of her

heritage for most of her life, and her writing often

reflects it.

Tan's first novel. The Joy Luck Club, explores

relationships between Chinese mothers and their

American daughters. In "Mother Tongue," she

relates her patient and complex love for her mother.

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