Question

In the “Mother Tongue” excerpt, Tan uses the word English more than 40 times. How does Tan’s description of and relationship with the word English change over the course of the essay?

Answer 1

Tan begins her reflective essay by telling her readers about the different types of “Englishes” that she uses on various occasions. She describes the kind of English she uses while giving a speech:

A speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books.

As the essay progresses, readers are told about the kind of English she was exposed to while growing up—her mother’s broken English:

Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off-the-street kind. . . . Now important person, very hard to inviting him. . . . 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.

While growing up, Tan was embarrassed of her mother’s broken English: “I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English.”

Tan even blamed her mother for her average scores in English tests at school:

I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. . . . I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT.

However, later in life, Tan realized that her complex relationship with her mother also gave Tan a deeper relationship with language and words. In her writing, Tan wanted to highlight the language lessons she learned from her complex relationship with her mother and her mother’s broken English: “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.”

Thus, Tan discusses the English language throughout this excerpt to illustrate her complex relationship with her mother as well as with those who spoke English fluently.

Step-by-step explanation:

Answer 2

At first, Tan feels confined by what is "supposed to" be English. She is uncomfortable when she realizes that the English she uses for her literary endeavors are different from the English she speaks with her mother. By the end of the piece, Tan expresses that there are multiple Englishes, and that the type of English spoken between her mom and herself is not "broken" but instead full of imagery. Instead of feeling confined by English, she has discovered its flexibility and multiplicity.