Tan
Posted on February 6, 2008
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Mother Tongue
by Amy Tan
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more
than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this
country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always
loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a
great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way
it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple
truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all — all the
Englishes I grew up with.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I
was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already
given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my
writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going
along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made
the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was
perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the
kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like,
“The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an
aspect of my fiction that relates to thusandthus’–a speech filled with
carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed
to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases,
all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and
through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my
mother.
Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I
again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I
do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used
furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.”
My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my
English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years
we’ve been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with
him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our
language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family
talk, the language I grew up with.
So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like,
I’11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I
videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother
was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same
last name as her family’s, Du, and how the gangster in his early years
wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison.
Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother’s
family, and one day showed up at my mother’s wedding to pay his
respects. Here’s what she said in part: “Du Yusong having business like
fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong — but not
Tsungming 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, very 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 lots 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.”
You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English
belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report,
listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads
all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease–all kinds of things I can’t
begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50
percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90
percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking
pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear,
perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is
vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language
that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of
the world.
Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother
speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as ‘broken” or
“fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered
me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it
were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain
wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited
English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is
limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited English speaker.
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. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she
had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her
thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to
support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at
restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service,
pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear
her.
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well.
When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to
pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or
even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time
it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her
small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New
York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get
on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very
convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he
don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me,
losing me money.
And then I said in perfect English, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned.
You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”
Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New
York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to
calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I
can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check
immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in
New York next week.” And sure enough, the following week there we
were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red
faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his
boss in her impeccable broken English.
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far
less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment,
to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a
month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best
English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize
when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for
nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she
told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her
husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would
not give her any more information until the next time and she would
have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not
leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And
when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect
English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be
found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and
apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most
regrettable mistake.
I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my
possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell
you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by
peers. But 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, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. While my English
skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not
be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well,
getting perhaps B’s, sometimes Bpluses, in English and scoring
perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests.
But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my
true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved
A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct
answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were
always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.
Those tests were constructed around items like fillintheblank
sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was, Mary thought he
was –.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland
combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy,
Mary thought he was charming:’ with the grammatical structure “even
though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites,
so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish,
Mary thought he was ridiculous:’ Well, according to my mother, there
were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what
Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you
were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship — for
example, “Sunset is to nightfall as is to .” And here you would be
presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the
same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is
to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew
what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the
images already created by the first pair, “sunset is to nightfall”–and I
would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising,
the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words –red,
bus, stoplight, boring–just threw up a mass of confusing images,
making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying:
“A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill precedes a fever.”
The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to
imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient
and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into
feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English,
about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer,
why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American
literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative
writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into
engineering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin
to answer. But I have noticed in surveys — in fact, just last week —
that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math
achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there
are other AsianAmerican students whose English spoken in the home
might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they
also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into
math and science, which is what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge
of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major
my first year in college, after being enrolled as premed. I started
writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my
former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my
talents toward account management.
But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first
I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences
that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language.
Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way
into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental
quandary in its nascent state.” A terrible line, which I can barely
pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should
envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided
upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So
with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts–I
began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the
English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be
described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of
a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her
Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and
what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak
in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to
preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. 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.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had
succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book
and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”
