Mother Tongue
10:38:00
I am someone who has always loved language. I spent a great deal of time thinking about 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.
One day, I was
giving a talk to a large group of people about my writing, my life and my book,
The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going
along well 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 speech. I was saying things literary people tend to say,
things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination…” and “There is an
aspect of my fiction that relates thus-and-thus”. It was a speech wrought with
grammatical phrases, burdened, it seemed to me, with complex forms of standard
English that I have learned in school, forms of English I did not use at home
with my mother.
One day I was
walking down the street with her and we were talking about the price of new and
used furniture. I heard myself saying, “Not waste money that way.” It was a
different sort of English, “family talk,” the language I grew up with. You
should know that my mother’s command of spoken English belies how much she
actually understands. She reads Forbes
magazine, watches “Wall Street Week,” converses daily with her stockbroker –
and grasp all kinds of things I cannot begin to understand.
Yet some of my
friends tell me they understand only 50% of what my mother says. Some say they
understand 80 to 90%. 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.
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. I have described the kind of English my mother speaks as “broken”
or “fractured.” But I wince when I say that.
It has always
bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as
if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness
and soundness. It limits people’s perception of the speaker. I know this
because when I was growing up, I believed that my mother’s English reflected
the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them
imperfectly, I considered her thoughts imperfect. And I had plenty of evidence
to support me: the fact that people in departmental stores, at banks, 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.
My mother has long
realised her limitations in English as well. And she wanted things to be
different for us. When I was growing up, Readers’
Digest was the only magazine that my parents subscribed to because it
contained “Word Power.” That elevated Readers’
Digest from entertainment to education. With polysyllabic “Word Power” as
our passport, our family had access to better opportunities. We – our parent’s
children – could win approval and rise like balloons above the masses.
I think my mother’s
English almost had an effect on my choice of career. The language speaking in
the family, especially in immigrant families, which are more insular, plays a
large role in shaping the language of the child. While my English skills were
never judged as poor, compared to mathematics they could not be considered my
strong suit. In primary school, I did moderately well in English but those
grades were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities were
in mathematics and science. And I had teachers who tried to steer me away from
writing and into mathematics an science.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy dispelling the
assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year at
university. I started writing non-fiction freelance the week after I was told
by my boss that writing was my worst skill and that I should think about accounts
management.
However, I later
decided to envision a reader for my short stories, and I decided on my mother.
So, because of this, I began to write using all the Englishes I grew up with:
the English I spoke to my mother, which may be termed “simple”, or “broken”; my
translation of her Chinese and what I imagined to be her translation of her
Chinese if she could speak in perfect English. Apart from what any critic had
to say about my work I knew that I had succeeded where it counted when my
mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”
(Adapted from Mother Tongue
by Amy Tan)
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| Amy Tan and her mother |
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