Mother Tongue

In Amy Tan's Mother Tongue, Tan touches upon the different kind of 'Englishes' that she learned to use throughout her life. She was made aware of these different versions of the same language when she was giving a speech to a large group of people. Tan used perfect English and realized that her mother in the audience always heard a more choppy and unnatural version of that same language when it was just the two of them alone. Tan then used examples of the English that her mother was known to speak and used this to show how even though it is the same language, there can be many variations and broken down pieces of the same words we use everyday.

Tan copies a very long quotation from her mother, which was a story about her wedding day and a gangster that showed up to show his congratulations.
"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 want 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 like become a mafia. Now important person, ver 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 a lot 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."
This quotation was used in its entirety because Tan purposely wanted to show the garbled and unique version of English that her mother speaks. If Tan had chosen to paraphrase, the point of how different her English is would have been lost. It would be like if Tan had grammatically fixed up this paragraph to not make it seem as bad. Even though her thoughts on the matter are shown through the emotion of the story, people would be less willing to be respectful towards her because of the choppy English.

Tan also struggled with having to be the speaker of the family on behalf of her mother. She would have to go on the phone pretending to be her mother to get money back or to get important medical information. Tan realized that Americans would not treat her mother with the level of respect or urgency of a native English speaker, so Tan had to be the one to earn the respect for the both of them with her correct language. This forced Tan to be fearful of being treated the same way as her mother, so when she decided to go into the writing world despite having no support from her teachers, she worked tirelessly to become witty and write profoundly in a foreign language. Instead of creating these profoundly beautiful sentences, she butchered the language by making it seem unnatural and confusing to even native speakers.

Language is an integral part of every culture. Each society demands that one must learn their home country's language or be treated like a second class citizen. There is such a fine line that needs to be walked for bilingual persons because they must always face the consequences of speaking an unnatural or incorrect version of these different languages. Tan emphasizes that societies should come to accept different versions of language and that they should interpret their thoughts in the ways they need to, because emotional responses can portray meaning just as much as garbled sentences.