mother tongue by amy tan thesis statement

A Summary and Analysis of Amy Tan’s ‘Mother Tongue’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her use of English, as well as her attitude to it.

You can read ‘Mother Tongue’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Amy Tan’s essay below.

‘Mother Tongue’: summary

Amy Tan begins her essay by offering her personal opinions on the English language. She recalls a recent talk she gave, when, upon realising her mother was in the audience, she was confronted with the fact that the formal standard English she was using in the public talk was at odds with the way she spoke at home with her mother. She then contrasts this with a moment when she was walking down the street with her mother and she used the more clipped, informal English she naturally uses with her mother, and her husband.

Tan calls this a ‘language of intimacy’. She points out that her mother is intelligent and reads things which Tan herself cannot begin to understand. But many people who hear her mother speak can only partially understand what she is saying, and some even say they can understand nothing of what she says, as if she were speaking pure Chinese to them.

Tan calls this clipped informal language her ‘mother tongue’, because it was the first language she learned and it helped to shape the way she saw the world and made sense of it.

Tan notes the difficulty of finding a term to describe the style of English her mother, as a Chinese immigrant to the United States, speaks. Many of the terms, such as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’, are too negative and imply her English is imperfect.

She acknowledges that when she was growing up, she was ashamed of the way her mother spoke. Her mother, too, was clearly aware of how her use of the language affected how seriously people took her, for she used to get her daughter to phone people and pretend to be ‘Mrs Tan’.

She observes that her mother is treated differently because of the way she speaks. She recounts a time when the doctors at the hospital were unsympathetic towards her mother when they lost the results of the CAT scan they had undertaken on her brain, but as soon as the hospital – at her mother’s insistence – called her daughter, they issued a grovelling apology.

Amy Tan also believes her mother’s English affected her daughter’s school results. Tan acknowledges that, whilst she did well in maths and science, subjects with a single correct answer, she was less adept at English. She struggled with tests which asked students to pick a correct word to fill in the blanks in a sentence because she was distracted by the imaginative and poetic possibilities of other words.

Indeed, Tan conjectures that many Asian American children are probably encouraged to pursue careers in jobs requiring maths and science rather than English for this reason. But because she is rebellious and likes to challenge people’s assumptions about her, Tan bucked this trend. She majored in English at college and began writing as a freelancer.

She began writing fiction in 1985, and after several false starts trying to find her own style and idiom, she began to write with her mother in mind as the ideal reader for her stories. Indeed, her mother read drafts of her work.

And Tan drew on all the Englishes , plural, that she knew: the ‘broken’ English her mother used, the ‘simple’ English Tan used when talking to her mother, the ‘watered-down’ Chinese her mother used, and her mother’s ‘internal’ language which conveyed her passion, intent, imagery, and the nature of her thoughts. When her mother told her that what she had written was easy to read, Tan knew that she had succeeded in her aims as a writer.

‘Mother Tongue’: analysis

The title of Amy Tan’s essay is a pun on the expression ‘mother tongue’, referring to one’s first language. But Tan’s language, or ‘tongue’, has been shaped by her actual mother, whose first language (or mother tongue) was not English, but Chinese.

The different forms of English that mother and daughter speak are also a product of their backgrounds: whilst Tan’s mother is a Chinese immigrant to America, Tan was born in the United States and has grown up, and been educated, in an English-speaking culture.

Much of Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club is about daughters and their relationships with their mothers. But Tan’s interest in language, both as a cultural marker and as a way of expressing thought and personality, is also a prevailing theme of the novel.

In this respect, if the parable ‘ Feathers from a Thousand Li Away ’ acts as preface to the novel, ‘Mother Tongue’, in effect, acts as a kind of postscript. It helps us to understand the way Tan approaches and uses language within the stories that make up The Joy Luck Club .

An overarching theme of Tan’s novel is mothers emigrating to America in the hope that their daughters will have better lives than they did. This is a key part of ‘Feathers from a Thousand Li Away’, and it helps us to understand Tan’s conflicted attitude towards her mother’s use of language as explored in ‘Mother Tongue’.

Many of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club , such as Betty St. Clair in ‘The Voice from the Wall’, feel isolated from those around them, never at home in America, and hyper-aware of their outsider status, despite becoming legal permanent citizens in the country. Tan’s autobiographical revelations in ‘Mother Tongue’ show us that her own mother struggled to be taken seriously among Americans, and Tan diagnoses this struggle as a result of her mother’s different way of speaking.

Tan, by contrast, used standard English – what used to be referred to, in loaded phrases, as ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ English – and was thus able to succeed in getting herself, and by extension her mother, taken seriously by others. Language is thus more than just a cultural marker: Tan reveals, in ‘Mother Tongue’, the extent to which it is a tool of power (or, depending on the use, powerlessness), particularly for those from migrant backgrounds.

In this connection, it is noteworthy that Tan chooses to focus on the school tests she undertook before concluding that her mother’s ‘broken’ style of English has been misunderstood – not just literally (by some people who’ve known her), but in terms of the misleading perceptions of her it has led others to formulate.

The class tests at school which reduced English proficiency to an ability to recognise a ‘correct’ answer are thus contrasted with Tan’s resounding final words of ‘Mother Tongue’, which see her seeking to capture the passion of her mother, the ‘nature of her thoughts’, and the imagery she uses: all things which her daughter has clearly inherited a respect for, and which school tests fail to capture or observe.

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Mother Tongue

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Amy Tan’s Story “Mother Tongue” Essay (Critical Writing)

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A large number of Americans now speak English as a first language but what becomes rare is the fact that it is very difficult to find two people who speak exactly the same English. It is this argument that is made by Amy Tan in her story Mother Tongue.

Amy is a first-generation Asian American who migrated to Oakland from China. She became a famous writer in Oakland and in this story, she narrates her experiences about the English she uses and about how the people around her influenced the way she conversed. At home, she spoke with her mother in broken and uneven English so that she understood in view of her faint knowledge of the language. In speaking with people while she worked or with whom she dealt professionally, she used clear and grammatically correct English.

Amy’s mother dreamt of coming to America with her daughter in order to get away from poverty and to provide a better quality of life for her. Amy Tan became a writer and in Mother Tongue, she describes her relationship with her ancestry and traditions. For her English as a language becomes a creative tool and she shares how she was affected by the imperfect English of her mother. The story becomes very consequential and universal since it is not merely about the language itself; it also delves into the relationships with parents and about social and ethnic influences. One is bound to ponder about the consequences of leaving his or her country and then living in a new country. The questions and issues that arise pertaining to maintaining one’s identity and ancestral roots.

In writing about the limited knowledge that her mother has of English, Amy Tan is able to show how this lack of knowledge is perceived by others around her and how it impacted her while she was growing. Her audience is primarily her mother who has been reading her writings. But she also addresses a broader audience in terms of the entire generation of Americans who have immigrant parents. This is so because she wants to highlight the several problems faced by such children daily.

She has attempted to make people aware of the struggles faced by emigrants. In being inadequately equipped in regard to the command of the English language, they are not always viewed seriously. They are either ignored or people intentionally pretend as if they have not understood them. Amy Tan considers that it is alright to speak different kinds of English with different people which depends on the kind of person one is speaking to; whether it is a teacher, instructor, friend or a family member.

The story relates to coping with change and involving oneself in the balancing act. Amy Tan emphasizes the role of the generation gap and how difficult it becomes at times in avoiding having a complex in regard to the parents’ inability to keep up with the status that one expects from them in maintaining his or her professional image. Surely, all such meanings could apply to any of us without necessarily experiencing them upon leaving one’s home country.

Amy Tan has used rhetorical appeals, logos, ethos, and pathos in the story in attempts to appeal to the readers and to explain her messages by using emotion and logic. She explains that in growing professionally a person’s way of life is bound to change and there is a tendency to see the parent’s house as not meeting his or her expectations. Although the same language is spoken by all at home, there appears to be something lacking in terms of keeping up with the status that one reaches after having become professionally successful.

The story is ultimately about losing a lot and returning home, in some ways after a long gap, and then feeling proud again about what a person is and what his heritage is. While she was a child Amy Tan would feel embarrassed about her mother being unable to express herself clearly. She felt bad when children would say that her mother’s English is broken, “as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed” (Amy Tan, 2009).

She would believe people at that time when they said that “her English reflected the quality of what she had to say” (Amy Tan, 2009). She came to believe about her mother that she was wrong because she would express very imperfectly all that she wanted to say, which made her believe that something was lacking in her. Her mother taught her with different perspectives as compared to the way other children were taught, which was the reason why she did not fare well in achievement tests. Amy Tan grew up with the belief system that Asian students could not make a profession out of the English language and that they were best suited in professions such as accounting and engineering.

Only after she grows up does she realize the richness that lay in the different thought processes that she was exposed to. Since she “happens to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions” (Amy Tan, 2009), she started to concentrate on making a career in English and began to write in the language. It was at this time that she realized the importance of the heritage she inherited from her mother, which made it possible for her to use different aspects of the language. After mastering the language, she reminisces about her mother, “I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech, and the nature of her thoughts” (Amy Tan, 2009).

She realized the richness she got from her mother and had no qualms about making her the first reader and critic of her writing work. Indeed, it was a remarkable achievement for her which is evident from what she wrote: “I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: so easy to read” (Amy Tan, 2009). From Amy Tan’s story, one does realize that each one of us has had similar experiences some time in life. We all have the hidden talent and in revealing the same we need to be away from the family, or more specifically to be separated from our heritage to realize and understand our true potential and capabilities.

Works Cited

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue. Web.

David Guy, Wheel of Fortune, 2003, The Washington Post.

• Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”: The Distraction of Illusions
• Colonialism in the Short Story “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad
• The Gaps Showed in the Amy Tan’s "The Joy Luck Club"
• Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club Review
• Linguistic Identity. “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan
• American Literature: Death Comes for the Archbishop
• “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
• Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle
• The Boogeyman: a part of a chapter
• "The Native Problem" by Robert Sheckley
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Analysis of Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

2022, Bartın Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Ethnic minorities in America are always in the search of identity because of being far away from their cultural and traditional practices. In this process, they try to construct their identities within the connections to their past and present together. At that point, ethnic autobiography creates an insightful perspective in that it presents the existing links among the members of a community: a common past, and a political project for the future of that community. (Renán, 1990,19) There are many ethnic groups living in America, and one of them is the Chinese Americans. America is like a mosaic with various ethnic groups living there. This study will seek “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan in the light of ethnic autobiographical considerations. This autobiographical source indicates how the language creates boundaries and it pushes characters into silence. This silence is a kind of psychological loneliness and cultural alienation. Tan closely experiences the otherness with her ethnic difference and she uses the genre of ethnic autobiography while narrating her personal memories because the real issues always affect the readers more deeply. Besides the sociological concerns such as language, it also explores the life of Tan with her own personal expressions. Thus, it is a kind of sociological, cultural and biographical text, and it also deals with multi-dimensional critical outlooks. It is also a great example inside protest literature because it criticizes ethnic discrimination with the examples from the life of Chinese American. From which perspectives does “Mother Tongue” approach the ethnic issue? How do the Chinese-Americans suffer from hardships in American society? What does the identity of Chinese-Americans mean for themselves? This paper tries to light on these questions in the framework of different ethnicities in America.

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Gülden YÜKSEL

The aim of this study is to discuss anxiety and identity issues pertaining to ethnic roots and heritage in Americanized life in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. To express ethnic anxiety and identity, Amy Tan, a Chinese American writer, uses differentstories of different characters mainly based on the mother and daughter relationship rather than focusing upon one story in her fiction. The tradition of storytelling is important for ethnic writers in order to attain their ethnic identity since stories enable those who are not able to experience past learn their culture, heritage and past. This study focuses on how the totality of individuality is split due to ethnic anxiety and how a diasporic mother functions to restore that totality by making her daught er understand her worth and reconcile with her Chinese culture and ethnic identity. The connection between mother and daughter is important to lessen ethnic anxiety. Mother functions as a transmission of heritage and culture and daughter reproduces culture in the light of mother. Keywords: Ethnic, Anxiety, Identity, Heritage, Culture, Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Mother, Daughter.

hiu laam wong

Lisa Dunick

This thesis examines the relatively new literary field of Asian American literature, and highlights the theme of identity in relation to the recent theories regarding racial melancholia. It takes Freudian psychoanalysis as its starting premise to argue for ‘transformative racial melancholia’ in hybridised Asian American subjects for whom a condition of loss is experienced in the combined processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialisation. I examine several novels by contemporary Asian American women and argue that these texts explore both racial and gender melancholia as conditions of loss. However, I suggest, these novels also demonstrate the process of depathologising melancholia within Asian American subjects and the restoration of a healthy psyche. A positive sense of identity within melancholic conditions is elicited when a healthy psyche is established. My thesis interrogates the way a constructive sense of identity is made available through avenues of intersubjective c...

Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Comparative Literature which is defineci as the study of the literatures of two or more groups differing in cultural background and in language, concentrating on their relationships to and influences upon each other, opens new fields to reframe the most controversial and cornplicated queslion of "cultural identity" in multicultural America. in this article, lhrough the study of Chinesc-American woman writer Amy Tan's four short stories: Two Kinds, Waiting Between tlıe Trees, Double Face and A PaJr of Tickets, taken from her work; The Joy Luck C/ub and four Chicano short stories:, written by Chicano writers; Lois Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Magdalena, and Roberla Fernaııde1., we aim to draw a picture of an essential sel/andan unessential sel/ in a comparatiue frame .

Yu-Min (Claire) Chen

Esther Godfrey

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON LITERATURE, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE VAN YÜZÜNCÜ YIL UNIVERSITY

Mehmet Şentürk

The aim of this study is to provide history of Amy Tan’s narrative on Chinese-American identity in settings she establishes in her novels, as well as to examine the Chinese-American identity in Amy Tan’s novel, The Hundred Secret Senses. As a Chinese-American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience, Amy Tan’s bestselling 1995 novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, bears a fictional story at first glance, it is based on Amy Tan’s experiences and on stories told by her mother. In her novel, Tan reveals Chinese identity characteristics in an immigrant half-sister, Kwan, of the main character, Olivia. Ghosts and ghost stories from Chinese past also serve as a mediator for novel’s structure and plot, these stories show parallelism with characters’ real-life experiences and resolution of both parallel relations overlaps. Amy Tan successfully employs superstitious and surreal elements thanks to ghosts intermingled with realistic migration experiences of Chinese-American characters. Setting and metanarrative style in this novel reveal great deal of information about experiences from Amy Tan’s life and from immigrant past of Chinese Americans during the 20th century and the migration fiction genre in general.

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King-Kok Cheung

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Mother Tongue

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

“Mother Tongue” is an autobiographical essay in which Amy Tan identifies the varied nature of language in her everyday life. As a result of her mother ’s presence at a talk for her book, The Joy Luck Club , Tan becomes acutely aware of the many different “ Englishes ” she speaks. Tan realizes that this is the first time her mother has heard her daughter speak in such a setting and with such a professional tone. Tan associates the English she speaks at events with the standardized forms of English she learned in school.

Tan tells stories of her past, contrasting the English she uses at home—her “mother tongue”—with standard English. Tan speaks in the same English as her mother when they are alone and in front of her husband—he is used to her changes in speech and does not detect Tan’s shift when she responds to her mother. Referencing a recent conversation she recorded, Tan relays a story her mother shared about a Chinese political gangster; parts of the transcript perfectly capture the rhythm of her mother’s speech and the detail she provides. Tan refrains from describing her mother’s English as “broken” because it suggests that her mother’s knowledge is somehow lacking. Instead, she argues that it shows the limited perceptions others have of her mother. Her mother’s stockbroker and doctors demonstrate their own closed-mindedness, refusing to take her seriously and requiring Tan to facilitate conversations on her mother’s behalf.

Tan describes her own childhood experiences with standardized English. She struggled with her English studies because of the way her mother’s use of language influenced her internal problem-solving skills, and Tan illustrates her frustration and the way she used this frustration as motivation. Instead of admitting defeat, Tan vowed to “master” the English language, assimilating to standardized English and forgoing the use of her “mother tongue” outside interactions with her mother. It isn’t until the start of her writing career with The Joy Luck Club that she realizes that the English she writes in is unapproachable and difficult to read. As such, in finding her way back to her “mother tongue,” Tan shifts her focus to an imagined reader, using a voice that she has grown to love and accept—the voice of her mother.

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Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" Summary: Language, Identity, and Communication

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The power of language, language and identity, barriers and opportunities in communication, conclusion: embracing linguistic diversity.

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