Mother Tongue

     In Amy Tan's personal essay "Mother Tongue" (2016), she discusses the difficulties of the English language. Amy Tan talks about different experiences she went through that happened in her yonger years while growing up with an immigrant parent. Tan uses rhetorical devices such as pathos throughout her personal essay in order to make the audience try to feel how she felt. The audience for this is other people who came from immigrant backgrounds.
     After reading this personal essay we felt confused at first as to why Tan never spoke "proper" English in her mother's presence. This led us to believe that Tan's mother felt ashamed of not knowing English the way Tan did. But as we kept reading we found out that there was more reasoning behind Tan's actions. When she mentioned that her mother read scholarly works with ease, we got the gist that the reason they spoke their unique language was because of the intimacy and special bond there was when they spoke to each other. This made us treasure and admire Tan's relationship with her mother, therefore allowing us to respect and appreciate Tan's unique perspective on language and writing.
     Tan experiences different situations because her mother is an immigrant and her English is very broken.When she is around different people, such as doing public speeches, she speaks differently than when she is around her mom using the language she grew up using. An example that she gave in the personal essay would be when she was with her mother talking about the price of new and used furniture. Tan said that she heard herself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” That was the reason  she described her mother’s English as broken or fractured. She realized her mother’s limitation of English when she said that she was fifteen years old, she used to call people on her mother’s behalf pretending that she was the one. Tan was feeling bad about how people treated her mother because of her limitation of the English language. She thought that her mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting her possibilities in life as well. Tan decided to write stories about her mother, for her mother. In the first stories she wrote, she used the English she grew up with in her text, the one she spoke with her mother.