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Language Barrier

In: English and Literature

Submitted By jduller28
Words 910
Pages 4
Language should not be the basis of a person’s intelligence, or should not be used as the measuring tool of a person’s intelligence. It should not define a person or their ability to succeed. In “Mother’s Tongue”, Amy Tan explores the idea of variable language in which she explains that even a language other than English can be a crucial contributing factor to youths. The story centers on discriminations done on Amy and her mother. Amy Tan is a daughter of an immigrant family. She is a fictional writer who grew up watching her parents, especially her mother struggle with the English language. When she was a child, she was embarrassed by her mother’s inability to express herself in a proper English. In the story, she observes experiences in which she grew up with different kinds of English. One of the examples in which she notices that she was using a different English was when the author and her husband took “Not waste money that way” (Tan 1) as grammatically acceptable. She sooner figured out the reason why her husband did not have negative remarks about her statement and it's for the reason that she, herself has been speaking in broken English just like her mother. Still, it should not serve as an excuse for other people to make her feel like she is less of a person. All her life her mother was looked down because of the fact that she could not speak proper English. Amy Tan has numerous interactions in which she has to play the part of her mother so she could help her deal with important people. When Amy was young she pretended to be her mother on the phone to get the people’s attention, like when she has to yell at her mother’s stockbroker for not sending her a check. In another instant, Amy’s mother was treated poorly when she had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. The doctors snubbed

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