Amy Tan Mother Tongue Summary

518 Words3 Pages
Amy Tan had shown to feel emotions throughout the many anecdotes she shares within the lines of her short story, ‘Mother Tongue’. Countless of those emotions were directed towards her Mother’s broken English” which lead her to feel three major emotions. First there had been the embarrassment at an early age, the anger she had towards certain people when in her pre-adult stage, and finally the concluding thought of adoration towards her mother once she finally cared to understand. In the beginning of Tan’s story she describes a time in her childhood that she felt very embarrassed of her Mother’s broken English. She wrote tales of when she had to undergo many challenges when she was younger since many people didn’t try enough to actually understand her mother so she found herself quite ashamed. In one of the paragraphs she describes the way she felt with, “…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,” (II 13, Mother Tongue). She wasn’t very fond of having to talk for her mother on the phone and…show more content…
It became a major issue in yet another story of hers as she explained an incident that happened when her mother went in to get a CAT scan. They had informed her mother that it was lost for the time being and she would have to come back another day. To this Tan’s Mother demanded for her to be there and word for word she had written, “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,” (II 14, Mother Tongue). Tan had become enraged finally realizing that this has been done countless times before. Everybody treated Tan with reason but took advantage of her Mother’s imperfect English. After concluding this, little by little did Tan start understanding her mother
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