Our “Mother Tongue” is what gives us identity; it defines who we are, and therefore, people should value their native languages. The effect of western education on the relationship between parents and children is also another theme in the article. The initial bad relationship between Tan and her mother is caused by Tan’s feeling that that her mother is uncivilized and uneducated. This problem is common in the present world where once children have attained western education, they start disrespecting their parents or disassociating with them because they feel ashamed of the parents’ mother tongue influenced English. It is important that people learn to appreciate their parents irrespective of their level of education or their cultural background; after all, we owe our lives to
I think that her mother has been labeled or stereotyped. Also I believe that stereotyping is wrong. For instance, when Tan states, “It is the sort of English that is our language of Intimacy, the English that relates to family talk, and the English that I grew up with”. Amy Tan speaks in a “variation of languages like academic, a language she does not use at home, but uses when conversing with others outside her family or in her books”. Tan also uses“different English with her family (mother /husband) that she grew up with”.
Even her daughter as well as society later refers her mothers English as broken. And because of that in her younger years, Amy felt somewhat embarrassed by her mothers English. And felt that her view of her mother was legit because of instances as such in (3rd paragraph 507). “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
When these traits did not surface, Jing-Mei began to realize she did not have these traits and started to feel internally inferior. She slowly started to resent her mother’s continual control over her decisions and went in a different direction than her mother wanted her too. In Amy Tan’s short story, “Two Kinds”, the dialogue Tan includes within Jing-Mei’s flashback demonstrates that conflict and resentment can occur when not allowing your child to take his/her own path. In the beginning of the flashback, Jing-Mei’s mother is shown to be trying to control and dominate her daughter’s life. When she moved away from China, Jing-Mei’s mother had a vision that in America, you could be anything that you wanted to be.
This is the first time that Kingston explicitly tells which additions to the story are her own. Not only is she referencing the story at hand, but she is also alluding to her life. While her mother very much colored her childhood, Kingston will be dictating the direction of the rest of her life. Kingston tells the story of Ts’ai Yen, a poetess captured and made to live with barbarians. Towards the end of the tale, Kingston tells of a song Ts’ai Yen sings: “Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger…her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along” (209).
Tan emphasizes that fact that her mother recognizes her opportunities and interaction in life are limited by her English. When Tan was young she used to have to call people on the phone and act as if she was her mother in order to get people to pay attention to her when she had to yell at her mother’s stockbroker for not sending a check. Another occasion Tan describes is when her mother went to the doctor to get her results of a CAT scan, the doctors ignored her. She makes Tan talk to the doctor that they apologize for losing her results of a CAT scan and solve the problem. Tan comes to the idea that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families plays a large role in shaping the language of a child and opportunities in life.
Both of these writers were molded by their mothers. Each expresses how wonderful their mother really was, contrary to what the outside world may have thought. Tan expressed her feelings by talking about test and comparing English and math and how the language in the family could have affected how she did on test. Tan makes it understandable by letting the audience know that standard tests cannot determine a person's intelligence, she is trying to say how people have different ways of thinking and different types of intelligence, and yet these standard tests only can measure a certain type of intelligence, so it is unfair. The language barrier each had to overcome often
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.
Knowledge is not always power because the more you know does not necessarily mean you understand what you have learned. In the short story “Everyday Use”, education seemed to make a rift in the relationship not only between the mother and the daughter, but also between the sisters. Dee was one to always try and outsmart her family members always seeking answers knowing no one knew. It was mama who eventually got the community together to help send Dee to school so her daughter would be happy and satisfied. The values of heritage seem to have been lost with the gain of knowledge when Dee has gone to college.
However, I think the lack of females in advanced science and math classes has no definitive reason. Researchers constantly develop theories to try to pinpoint the exact reason girls drop advanced math and science classes. Some of these theories state boys do better in math and science because of genetics. Others say that girls have emotional issues that disallow them to achieve in math. Whatever the reason, parents need to start focusing on their daughters’ involvement in advanced science and math classes.