thesis of mother tongue by amy tan

A Summary and Analysis of Amy Tan’s ‘Mother Tongue’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her use of English, as well as her attitude to it.

You can read ‘Mother Tongue’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Amy Tan’s essay below.

‘Mother Tongue’: summary

Amy Tan begins her essay by offering her personal opinions on the English language. She recalls a recent talk she gave, when, upon realising her mother was in the audience, she was confronted with the fact that the formal standard English she was using in the public talk was at odds with the way she spoke at home with her mother. She then contrasts this with a moment when she was walking down the street with her mother and she used the more clipped, informal English she naturally uses with her mother, and her husband.

Tan calls this a ‘language of intimacy’. She points out that her mother is intelligent and reads things which Tan herself cannot begin to understand. But many people who hear her mother speak can only partially understand what she is saying, and some even say they can understand nothing of what she says, as if she were speaking pure Chinese to them.

Tan calls this clipped informal language her ‘mother tongue’, because it was the first language she learned and it helped to shape the way she saw the world and made sense of it.

Tan notes the difficulty of finding a term to describe the style of English her mother, as a Chinese immigrant to the United States, speaks. Many of the terms, such as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’, are too negative and imply her English is imperfect.

She acknowledges that when she was growing up, she was ashamed of the way her mother spoke. Her mother, too, was clearly aware of how her use of the language affected how seriously people took her, for she used to get her daughter to phone people and pretend to be ‘Mrs Tan’.

She observes that her mother is treated differently because of the way she speaks. She recounts a time when the doctors at the hospital were unsympathetic towards her mother when they lost the results of the CAT scan they had undertaken on her brain, but as soon as the hospital – at her mother’s insistence – called her daughter, they issued a grovelling apology.

Amy Tan also believes her mother’s English affected her daughter’s school results. Tan acknowledges that, whilst she did well in maths and science, subjects with a single correct answer, she was less adept at English. She struggled with tests which asked students to pick a correct word to fill in the blanks in a sentence because she was distracted by the imaginative and poetic possibilities of other words.

Indeed, Tan conjectures that many Asian American children are probably encouraged to pursue careers in jobs requiring maths and science rather than English for this reason. But because she is rebellious and likes to challenge people’s assumptions about her, Tan bucked this trend. She majored in English at college and began writing as a freelancer.

She began writing fiction in 1985, and after several false starts trying to find her own style and idiom, she began to write with her mother in mind as the ideal reader for her stories. Indeed, her mother read drafts of her work.

And Tan drew on all the Englishes , plural, that she knew: the ‘broken’ English her mother used, the ‘simple’ English Tan used when talking to her mother, the ‘watered-down’ Chinese her mother used, and her mother’s ‘internal’ language which conveyed her passion, intent, imagery, and the nature of her thoughts. When her mother told her that what she had written was easy to read, Tan knew that she had succeeded in her aims as a writer.

‘Mother Tongue’: analysis

The title of Amy Tan’s essay is a pun on the expression ‘mother tongue’, referring to one’s first language. But Tan’s language, or ‘tongue’, has been shaped by her actual mother, whose first language (or mother tongue) was not English, but Chinese.

The different forms of English that mother and daughter speak are also a product of their backgrounds: whilst Tan’s mother is a Chinese immigrant to America, Tan was born in the United States and has grown up, and been educated, in an English-speaking culture.

Much of Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club is about daughters and their relationships with their mothers. But Tan’s interest in language, both as a cultural marker and as a way of expressing thought and personality, is also a prevailing theme of the novel.

In this respect, if the parable ‘ Feathers from a Thousand Li Away ’ acts as preface to the novel, ‘Mother Tongue’, in effect, acts as a kind of postscript. It helps us to understand the way Tan approaches and uses language within the stories that make up The Joy Luck Club .

An overarching theme of Tan’s novel is mothers emigrating to America in the hope that their daughters will have better lives than they did. This is a key part of ‘Feathers from a Thousand Li Away’, and it helps us to understand Tan’s conflicted attitude towards her mother’s use of language as explored in ‘Mother Tongue’.

Many of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club , such as Betty St. Clair in ‘The Voice from the Wall’, feel isolated from those around them, never at home in America, and hyper-aware of their outsider status, despite becoming legal permanent citizens in the country. Tan’s autobiographical revelations in ‘Mother Tongue’ show us that her own mother struggled to be taken seriously among Americans, and Tan diagnoses this struggle as a result of her mother’s different way of speaking.

Tan, by contrast, used standard English – what used to be referred to, in loaded phrases, as ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ English – and was thus able to succeed in getting herself, and by extension her mother, taken seriously by others. Language is thus more than just a cultural marker: Tan reveals, in ‘Mother Tongue’, the extent to which it is a tool of power (or, depending on the use, powerlessness), particularly for those from migrant backgrounds.

In this connection, it is noteworthy that Tan chooses to focus on the school tests she undertook before concluding that her mother’s ‘broken’ style of English has been misunderstood – not just literally (by some people who’ve known her), but in terms of the misleading perceptions of her it has led others to formulate.

The class tests at school which reduced English proficiency to an ability to recognise a ‘correct’ answer are thus contrasted with Tan’s resounding final words of ‘Mother Tongue’, which see her seeking to capture the passion of her mother, the ‘nature of her thoughts’, and the imagery she uses: all things which her daughter has clearly inherited a respect for, and which school tests fail to capture or observe.

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The Analysis of Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

2022, Bartın Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Ethnic minorities in America are always in the search of identity because of being far away from their cultural and traditional practices. In this process, they try to construct their identities within the connections to their past and present together. At that point, ethnic autobiography creates an insightful perspective in that it presents the existing links among the members of a community: a common past, and a political project for the future of that community. (Renán, 1990,19) There are many ethnic groups living in America, and one of them is the Chinese Americans. America is like a mosaic with various ethnic groups living there. This study will seek “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan in the light of ethnic autobiographical considerations. This autobiographical source indicates how the language creates boundaries and it pushes characters into silence. This silence is a kind of psychological loneliness and cultural alienation. Tan closely experiences the otherness with her ethnic difference and she uses the genre of ethnic autobiography while narrating her personal memories because the real issues always affect the readers more deeply. Besides the sociological concerns such as language, it also explores the life of Tan with her own personal expressions. Thus, it is a kind of sociological, cultural and biographical text, and it also deals with multi-dimensional critical outlooks. It is also a great example inside protest literature because it criticizes ethnic discrimination with the examples from the life of Chinese American. From which perspectives does “Mother Tongue” approach the ethnic issue? How do the Chinese-Americans suffer from hardships in American society? What does the identity of Chinese-Americans mean for themselves? This paper tries to light on these questions in the framework of different ethnicities in America.

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Gülden YÜKSEL

The aim of this study is to discuss anxiety and identity issues pertaining to ethnic roots and heritage in Americanized life in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. To express ethnic anxiety and identity, Amy Tan, a Chinese American writer, uses differentstories of different characters mainly based on the mother and daughter relationship rather than focusing upon one story in her fiction. The tradition of storytelling is important for ethnic writers in order to attain their ethnic identity since stories enable those who are not able to experience past learn their culture, heritage and past. This study focuses on how the totality of individuality is split due to ethnic anxiety and how a diasporic mother functions to restore that totality by making her daught er understand her worth and reconcile with her Chinese culture and ethnic identity. The connection between mother and daughter is important to lessen ethnic anxiety. Mother functions as a transmission of heritage and culture and daughter reproduces culture in the light of mother. Keywords: Ethnic, Anxiety, Identity, Heritage, Culture, Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Mother, Daughter.

hiu laam wong

Lisa Dunick

This thesis examines the relatively new literary field of Asian American literature, and highlights the theme of identity in relation to the recent theories regarding racial melancholia. It takes Freudian psychoanalysis as its starting premise to argue for ‘transformative racial melancholia’ in hybridised Asian American subjects for whom a condition of loss is experienced in the combined processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialisation. I examine several novels by contemporary Asian American women and argue that these texts explore both racial and gender melancholia as conditions of loss. However, I suggest, these novels also demonstrate the process of depathologising melancholia within Asian American subjects and the restoration of a healthy psyche. A positive sense of identity within melancholic conditions is elicited when a healthy psyche is established. My thesis interrogates the way a constructive sense of identity is made available through avenues of intersubjective c...

Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Comparative Literature which is defineci as the study of the literatures of two or more groups differing in cultural background and in language, concentrating on their relationships to and influences upon each other, opens new fields to reframe the most controversial and cornplicated queslion of "cultural identity" in multicultural America. in this article, lhrough the study of Chinesc-American woman writer Amy Tan's four short stories: Two Kinds, Waiting Between tlıe Trees, Double Face and A PaJr of Tickets, taken from her work; The Joy Luck C/ub and four Chicano short stories:, written by Chicano writers; Lois Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Magdalena, and Roberla Fernaııde1., we aim to draw a picture of an essential sel/andan unessential sel/ in a comparatiue frame .

Yu-Min (Claire) Chen

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INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON LITERATURE, CULTURE AND LANGUAGE VAN YÜZÜNCÜ YIL UNIVERSITY

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The aim of this study is to provide history of Amy Tan’s narrative on Chinese-American identity in settings she establishes in her novels, as well as to examine the Chinese-American identity in Amy Tan’s novel, The Hundred Secret Senses. As a Chinese-American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience, Amy Tan’s bestselling 1995 novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, bears a fictional story at first glance, it is based on Amy Tan’s experiences and on stories told by her mother. In her novel, Tan reveals Chinese identity characteristics in an immigrant half-sister, Kwan, of the main character, Olivia. Ghosts and ghost stories from Chinese past also serve as a mediator for novel’s structure and plot, these stories show parallelism with characters’ real-life experiences and resolution of both parallel relations overlaps. Amy Tan successfully employs superstitious and surreal elements thanks to ghosts intermingled with realistic migration experiences of Chinese-American characters. Setting and metanarrative style in this novel reveal great deal of information about experiences from Amy Tan’s life and from immigrant past of Chinese Americans during the 20th century and the migration fiction genre in general.

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King-Kok Cheung

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Mother Tongue

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Mother Tongue — An Analysis of “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

An Analysis of "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

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Table of contents

Summary of mother tongue by amy tan, analysis of language usage, examination of cultural influences, language and power dynamics.

• Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue,” The Threepenny Review , no. 43, 1990, pp. 6–8.
• Crystal, David. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge, 2012.

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Mother Tongue Analysis Essay

Introduction.

Over time, language has played a fundamental role in various societies across the globe. From enhancing simple things like general communication to creating a viable environment for social, economic, political and economic growth, language and literature have become very crucial tools in the growth of human life through constant progress. It is based on these reasons that some important aspects of language will be analyzed in this paper.

In essence, this paper seeks to analyze the essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, in which various aspects of language and rhetorical evaluation are detailed. It is important to note that Amy Tan not only uses the article to give us an insight into her world of writing and the continuous commitments she made to better her mastery of the English language, but she also expresses different rhetorical values and emotional aspects of her mother tongue that greatly helped in advancing her expertise in English and literature. It is upon these features of her language learning that the rhetorical evaluation, in this paper, will be done.

Topic Statement: An individual’s mother tongue contributes greatly to the advancement of one’s expertise and mastery of language and literature.

Thesis Statement: Even though there are many aspects and characteristics of mother tongue that are important in facilitating skill in language and literature, the most important ones are the educational qualifications and academic expertise, mastery in the use of emotions to express ideas, and the appeal to shared values of the audience.

Brief Summary of the Essay

In brief, the essay is a literary account given by Amy Tan about her life and how she gradually learned various aspects of the English language. Some of these issues include the differences between her “professional” English (the English she spoke at official forums like lectures or when writing) and her “intimate” English (the English she spoke at home with family and friends), the language and literature challenges brought by her mother tongue (Chinese) in speaking good English, and how we should generally strive to use simple English (or any language, for that matter) that is easy to understand by both native and non-native English speakers.

In expressing these important facts, ideas, notions and opinions, Amy Tan personalizes her talk by using her literature audience, her mother and her husband as examples of her mother tongue influence on her English.

These personal accounts of her life and the people close to her greatly help in passing the intended message to the readers since many people, especially audiences that use English as a second language, can easily relate to her personal experiences.

Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies

Is the author qualified.

Considering the fact that Amy Tan is not a native English speaker, she has strived to master the English language to the point that she earns a living out of her writings like the Joy Luck Club; it is evidently clear that she is indeed highly qualified as a good English writer and speaker.

In addition, Amy Tan’s good qualifications are demonstrated by the fact that she has been able to give over half a dozen talks to different groups of people on how to improve on their English. Furthermore, Amy is not a professional, she would have not been able to give these many lectures in an efficient way.

Finally, Amy Tan’s qualification and trustworthiness as an effective English communicator are made clear when her mother, who has a “limited” skills in English, is able to read Amy’s book until she gives the verdict “so easy to read”.

Does the author appeal to the shared values of her audience?

To a great extent, Amy Tan appeals to the shared values of her targeted audience, people whose English speaking or writing skills are somewhat influenced by their mother tongue. This literary appeal is, essentially, the reason Amy’s mother is able to read her book in an easy way.

Again, despite the influence of her Chinese mother tongue, Amy Tan still manages to master the English language and gives lectures to a professional audience while ensuring that she follows all the necessary English speaking skills principles.

As we move towards the end of her essay, Amy embraces the need to find a way of communicating and appealing specifically to audiences like her mother who needed simple English, the English that she grew up with. Being able to appeal to the values of both complex and simple English audiences is undoubtedly a great literary skill.

However, it is worth stating that there are some sections of the essay where Amy admits that her initial writings were majorly based on her life experiences and her environment. In as much as this may be viewed as a good thing, the writings do not entirely represent the happenings in other places that people struggle with the influence of mother tongue on their English. For example, the family routines, while she was growing up or the “judgment” calls she made when faced with tricky English tests, are not the same for all non-native English speakers.

Does the author use emotions effectively?

Amy Tan’s many adventures and experiences as she strived to learn English evoke a lot of feelings. For example, when she felt mad and rebellious when her mother did something that she thought was not good for her learning. On the other hand, she praises her mother and the influence of their mother tongue in shaping who she was as a writer.

There are also instances that Amy talks about how she felt about her writings and career progress as a writer. All these good and bad feelings clearly demonstrate her effectiveness as a speaker and writer on the use of emotions to make her readers feel or react to her work in a certain way.

Overall Evaluation of the Text’s Effectiveness

Through different language tools, personal experiences and literary expression of certain emotional issues, Amy Tan greatly communicates to her readers. Of course there are some instances in the essay that she overstates her experiences and opinions to the point of forgetting about her audiences and the need to be precise. Nonetheless, in overall, her essay can be said to be effective.

From the above analysis, it is evidently clear that a person’s qualifications and academic expertise, mastery in the use of emotions to express ideas, and the appeal to shared values of the targeted audience are key factors that greatly contribute towards the improvement or worsening of mother tongue’s influence on language mastery. For this reason, language learners should ensure that these aspects are keenly considered in their learning processes.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, April 8). Mother Tongue Analysis Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-essay-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/

"Mother Tongue Analysis Essay." IvyPanda , 8 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-essay-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Mother Tongue Analysis Essay'. 8 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Mother Tongue Analysis Essay." April 8, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-essay-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/.

1. IvyPanda . "Mother Tongue Analysis Essay." April 8, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-essay-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Mother Tongue Analysis Essay." April 8, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-essay-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/.

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Mother Tongue

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Self-Acceptance

Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” showcases Tan ’s English as it is spoken at home in contrast with its standardized , educational form at school. Inspired by her first talk on her novel The Joy Luck Club (a talk that her mother attended), Tan examines moments of tension between the “ language of intimacy”—what some would describe as “broken,” “fractured,” or “limited” English—that she uses with her mother and the “standard English” she learned in school.

Expressiveness and the Limits of Language

Over the course of “Mother Tongue,” Tan elaborates on the limitations of language by exploring her complicated relationship between her mother ’s spoken English and the “ standard ” form she is taught at school. First recognized as a difference in sound while delivering a talk on The Joy Luck Club , Tan addresses the rhythmic and tonal shifts in each of her “ Englishes ” by directly quoting conversations with her mother. Though employing…

Throughout “Mother Tongue,” Tan considers ways that prejudice is internalized, leading people to place limits on themselves. Tan witnesses racially-motivated prejudice at a young age, observing how customer service workers and medical professionals treat her mother dismissively because of the way she speaks English. Calling these instances “empirical evidence” of her mother’s mistreatment as a result of her non- standardized English, Tan describes the effect these events had on her own perceptions of her mother…

Storytelling and Asian-American Voices

Amy Tan ’s “Mother Tongue” challenges the limits of language as she documents the struggles she and her mother have faced as Chinese-American English speakers. Combining direct quotations from her mother with her own expositional accounts of past events, Tan illustrates the multiple ways in which stories can be told, emphasizing a broader understanding of language by her mother than outsiders such as her stockbroker, doctor, and customer service workers give her credit for. This…

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis

In the article Mother Tongue , Amy Tan, a daughter of Chinese immigrants brought up in America, describes the importance of the mother tongue in her life. The definition of “mother tongue” relates to the language of the country of her origin, as well as the tongue her mother speaks. The latter is a mixture of Chinese of her mother’s thoughts and English of her expression of them. The author argues that such a blend of two languages used in the family where she grew up, shaped the way she perceived the realities of life, expressed those realities, and made sense of the world.

To give evidence of it, Tan provides three different aspects of the influence of the language of her mother on her. Throughout the paper, this impact seems to be negative, which is proved by the two examples, such as her wrong perception of her mother’s thought ability, and prevention of success at school. However, in the end, Tan comes to the third aspect, stating that, ultimately, she could make these limitations beneficial to her. In this essay, it will be demonstrated that such a turn from the negative points to the positive makes the paper persuasive, and the whole argument complete.

The first point discovered in the article is the author’s perception of her mother, along with the observed public opinion about her. As Tan writes, in her view, mother’s imperfect English “reflected the quality of what she had to say,” and “her thoughts were imperfect” as well as their expression (p. 79). Moreover, the author finds proof of her view as she observes the impact of “broken” English on her mother’s public life, diminishing the account given to her, and the quality of service she is provided with. Though Tan describes her mother’s experience, it is implied that the author also could be in the same situation, had she been at the same level of language proficiency as her mother is.

The second negative aspect of the influence of the “limited” English of her mother is her inability to be successful in English class at school. As the author notices, while “math is precise,” language is always “a matter of opinion and personal experience” (Tan, p. 80). Thus, having at the background of the consciousness her mother’s ways of expression, she could not provide the right answers as they after were appearing in her mind as “the most bland combinations of thoughts” (Tan, p. 80). Besides, the language she is used to has influenced not only her language skills but also her perception of life, more associative than logical.

At last, the author comes to the point where she decided to choose English as the primary occupation. Despite the challenges and public perception of her English, she turned to creative writing as her profession. That was the time she realized “how much Chinese she was,” and started to observe “all the Englishes” she grew up with to improve her writing (Tan, p. 77). As she describes, all she was writing started to be addressed in her mind to the particular reader, who was no one else than her mother. She considered different variants of English: the one she used to speak to her mother, and her mother spoke to her; her translation of mother’s Chinese, and her mother’s translation. However, the most important was that she tried to discover the mother’s “internal language,” having understood that her initial assumption of the equality of thought and expression was wrong. It seems Tan was successful in it, having heard her mother, with her limited skills, saying that her quite complicated book is easy to read.

In conclusion, it might be argued that Tan is convincing in her argumentation and demonstrating different sides of the mother tongue’s influence on her life. Three aspects that she uses as evidence for the argument are considerable and typical, and the right succession of them makes the paper truly persuasive. The article, thus, demonstrates success in overcoming the challenges of “mother tongue” and turning them into benefits, providing an inspiring example for the readers.

Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing , edited by David Hamilton, et al., St. Martin’s Press, 2001, pp. 77-82.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, February 6). “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis. https://studycorgi.com/analysis-of-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan-essay/

"“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis." StudyCorgi , 6 Feb. 2022, studycorgi.com/analysis-of-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan-essay/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) '“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis'. 6 February.

1. StudyCorgi . "“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis." February 6, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/analysis-of-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan-essay/.

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StudyCorgi . "“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis." February 6, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/analysis-of-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan-essay/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan: Overview and Analysis." February 6, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/analysis-of-mother-tongue-by-amy-tan-essay/.

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