Name: Instructor: Course: Date: “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan The article “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is mainly about the author’s thoughts and judgments on broken English in comparison to Standard English. Tan is an American writer who was born in China and is torn between two different worlds: the American society and the Chinese society, which have very diverse societal behaviors and values (Tan 142-146). Tan describes how she relates with her mother who, according to her, speaks broken English. She talks about the limitations of her mother’s English including its advantages and disadvantages. This paper provides a summary of the article, including its major themes.
In the beginning of “The struggle to be an All American girl”, Elizabeth Wong started out with describing Chinese school in her living town and wrote about her and her brother’s experience of changing their culture from Chinese to American since they were children. They went to the Chinese school because her mother pretention to keep their cultural estate even though they hated it. At the school, they learned not only Chinese but politeness as well. The school in her memory smelled like “mothballs or dirty closet”, and the principal was look like a “maniacal child killer”. She also described her learning Chinese like the most boring thing in the word by using some words as: “kowtow”, “chant”, “sing-san-ho” and ideographs letters.
Amy Tan explores the idea of variable language in her short essay Mother Tongue. Tan is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She grows up watching her parents, especially her mother, struggle with learning the English language. While her mother does gain skill in speaking the English language, she never masters language in the sense that we expect of someone who lives in an English speaking country. As a child, Tan is embarrassed by her mother’s difficulty in language and eventually she sees growing up the child of an Asian immigrant home as the reason she struggled in school to excel in reading and writing.
The story of the Cottingley Fairies is one of the best known controversies concerning the argument of whether fairies actually exist. It all began in July of 1917, with Frances Griffiths getting into trouble with her mother for coming home with wet shoes and stockings. In frustration, Frances' mother said that she didn't understand what attracted the two girls to the beck as there was nothing there to see. In her book, Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies, Frances says, 'I did what I had never done before. I answered her back, yelling, 'There is!
Leaving home at 16 doesn't even seem all that bad to me when I think about being away from this family. Everyone's down stairs having a great time laughing and I'm sitting in the bathroom crying about how much my life sucks and no one cares. My ducking father is a heroine addict that would choose coke or heroine over me any day and my mother is fucking addicted to her pain killers and sits home all day letting her child not eat for days. She won't give me money or take care of me. All she has to do is get a faking job and she won't even do that.
The novel traces the psychological development of the American daughter and her final acceptance of the Chinese mother and what the Chinese mother stands for. It is interesting to note that when Jing-mei Woo is asked by her three “aunts” to go to China in order to fulfill her mother’s long-cherished wish to meet her lost twin babies, Jing-mei shocks and upsets
Or, rather, it did have, but “Our mother died when I was two,” says Scout, “so I never felt her Absence”. (Charles J. Shields 42) Moving out of Monroeville, Harper attended Huntington College for Women. After one year she’d had all of the proper etiquette she could take and moved to the the University of Alabama, where she became the editor of the “politically satirical student newspaper”(George Marotous). Harper’s father and sister, Alice, were lawyers, and with her drive for civil rights, she tried to follow suit, but dropped out 6 months before graduation. Numerous unrewarding jobs kept her writing confined to weekends until a friend who believed in her work leant her the money to be able to write full time.
Also, Rex and Rosemary constantly throw their kids into situations that most average children could never handle. Such as forcing them to live in “cat houses” and constantly packing up in the middle of the night and moving. During this part of the book I begin to feel for Jeanette, because I was given the luxury of inflatable water wings and she is forced to drown to learn to swim. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle, wrote, “Mom frowned at me, ‘you’d be destroying what makes it special.’ She said, ‘it’s the Joshua trees struggle that gives it its beauty’” (38). I enjoy the mother’s outlook of the Joshua tree in this quote, it’s very positive, and reminded me of someone I know.
Why Chinese Mothers are Superior There are numerous different ways to raise your child, and the “Western” parents often wonder how the Chinese can get so successful kids and in this article Amy Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School and author of “Day of Empire” and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." explains how the difference in the Chinese and Western methods of raising your child. When I write Chinese- and Western parents it’s in a very loose way, just like Amy Chua writes in the article. Amy Chua has two girls, Louisa and Sophia, they live in New Haven. She comes with examples throughout the book on how she raised her two girls.
The Tiger is generally looked at as the living symbol of strength and power and generally inspires fear and respect,” Ms. Chua writes in her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (The Penguin Press, 2011). She proudly relates her own authoritarian upbringing and how she has learnt from the rigid parenting style her parents practiced in her childhood. Secondly, the tiger mother and the western mother differentiate by, mainly, their different ways of teaching their children. In short, the tiger mother rules her children and pressures them in any way in order for them to be good when they grow up. They can scold them and call them names just to motivate their kids to meet up to the parents high expectations.