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.