Amy Tan Mother Tongue

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There are roughly around six thousand five hundred languages worldwide. As migration increases these languages mix and create a combination of different languages. Humans use that language in a variety of ways to communicate their way of thinking. Amy Tan is a bestselling author who grew up in California as an immigrant and spoke the language of Chinese. Amy Tan in her essay “Mother Tongue” recounts her past experiences with her mother’s broken English. Tan’s purpose is to signify how her mother’s tongue influenced her life, writing and speaking and express how language separates, unites, or isolates those who don’t speak the common way as well as others. She utilizes a nostalgic tone reflecting on her experiences to people who disparage people…show more content…
Through the story on the political gangster in Shanghai, Amy’s mother narrated, “Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way” (Tan 6). By adding this anecdote to her essay, Tan is able to establish a credible and nostalgic tone towards her audience because she retells this incident exactly as it was told. This anecdote makes the concept of what “broken” language is easier for the readers to understand or relate to it if they’ve ever experienced hearing it. She later reveals what other people thought of her mother’s language, “Some say they understood none of it as if she was speaking pure Chinese. But her language was perfectly clear to me and helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world” (Tan 7). This goes to describe that the most people that Tan encountered were unable to effectively exactly what her mother was trying to say separating them with her mother because of language barrier. On the other hand Tan describes that her mother’s language shaped her views of the world, uniting her and her mother’s
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