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Amy Tan is an American writer whose novels examine family relationships, especially those of mothers and

daughters. She has written several bestselling novels, such as The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.

Tan has a BA and MA from San Jose State University.

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 thus-and-thus”—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’ll 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 Tsung-ming 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. But 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. Today, some

of my friends tell me they understand fifty percent of what my mother says. Some say they

understand eighty to ninety 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. It captures my

mother: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her

thoughts.