Mother Tongue

Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” is both an intimate investigation of her complex relationship with her mother and an indictment and analysis of the ways that English (and different forms of English) are perceived in US society. These two strands are woven together over the course of the essay, as Tan describes her complicated emotions regarding her mother as well as feelings of disillusionment with US schooling and standardized testing. All of Tan’s arguments fall against the backdrop of one of her repeated claims, that she is “a writer” (7). Since being a writer is central to Tan’s identity, “Mother Tongue” can be read as Tan’s attempt to process the underlying issues with how she relates to English and how she relates to her mother, a Chinese American immigrant who speaks what many would call “broken” English. Because of her upbringing, Tan had difficulty navigating the analytical modalities of US education; eventually, as Tan found success as a writer, she describes moving away from formal, widely recognized methodologies to write “using all the Englishes [she] grew up with” (8). This shift, which she describes in the essay’s concluding paragraphs, hints at the essay’s title: Tan finds true success and validation as a writer when she learns to effectively write in her mother’s tongue.

One of the fascinating linguistic arguments that Tan makes throughout the essay is that her mother’s English is actually more complex and vivid than the more formal English taught in school. This idea is introduced relatively early, as Tan describes the clarity she perceives in the way her mother tells stories, “full of observation and imagery” (7). Although Tan acknowledges the ways that her mother is perceived as less capable of speaking English, Tan describes her own difficulty with analogic analysis on standardized testing. To Tan, this issue stems not from an incapacity to understand English but from having a more profound way of understanding relationships through language due to being raised by her mother. Analogies only make sense to Tan by imagining “associative situation(s)” (7) rather than the seemingly useless associations they are supposed to conjure on common standardized tests. This different way of thinking, for Tan, stems directly from her mother’s language, the “language that helped shape the way [she] saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world” (7).

Tan concludes the essay with observations that extend her linguistic analysis into commentary on what she feels makes her successful in writing and portraying characters: figuring out how to “write stories using all the Englishes [she] grew up with” (8). To achieve this success, Tan first had to identify more precisely the “reader for the stories [she] would write” (8) and decided that she wanted that reader to be her mother. By picturing her mother as the ideal audience, Tan shifted from the more formal perspective taken by many writing programs and authors—that the general audience of a text primarily should be middle- or upper-middle class white people (and usually white men). By moving away from the formal language that Tan was taught was best, she gained a new perspective on writing and being more authentic to her intentions. Tan describes aiming “to capture what language ability tests can never reveal” (8). Much of Tan’s success as an author can likely be attributed to this change in her aims as a writer, when she began writing using different forms of English and with a different audience in mind. By altering her objectives even at the sentence level, Tan began writing in new, more interesting ways that even her mother found “easy to read” (8).

An important underlying argument in “Mother Tongue” is Tan’s subtle critique of the racist perspectives held by many institutions that limit Asian Americans’ abilities to succeed in linguistic pursuits like writing literature. Throughout the essay Tan is careful to position herself humbly, claiming only to be a writer, not a “sociologist” or “linguist” (7). By locating herself outside the academic sphere, Tan can present her critiques without much evidence, making suggestions about how Asian Americans are impacted by achievement tests that rely on specific constructions of the English language as well as by teachers who might steer Asian American students away from the humanities and into “math and science” (7). While Tan seems largely proud of her choice to write in her multiple Englishes, this argument is a vital aspect of her purpose in drafting “Mother Tongue” as an essay. By tying in the larger social implications of a culture that values some forms of writing and speaking over others, Tan carefully suggests that perhaps the proponents of more formal Englishes should adjust their views on the subject to welcome a wider group of people into the writing profession.