‘ Others view her mom’s Chinglish as broken, fractured, and limited language. However, according to Tan, it was nothing but the mother tongue that “helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world”. To Tan, her mom’s English “is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery”. To show us how her mom was treated unfairly by others, Tan offers an example. She used to call people on the phone to pretend she was her mom.
My Firsts Days in U.S. When I first came to U.S I was 16 years old. In the beginning of my new life in U.S was a little frustrating because of the language. For me was a very difficult thing and even now it still is. And in the following paragraphs I’m going to tell you some of my experiences on my first days in U.S. As soon as we came to U.S my mom told me that I have to start the school but she said “don’t worry the school is bilingual, they going to give you the classes in Spanish and they going to teach you English too” so I didn’t worry.
In Mother Tongue Amy made a great point when she spoke about how when she was fifteen years old her mother would have her call people on the phone and pretend it was her in order to ask and receive the correct information she needed. “I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well.” In this quote Amy is discussing that because English is not her first language it could have jeopardizes her future in school and how she would educate herself all throughout college. Most people can relate to this because she already has disadvantage growing up and attending school as a young
Anzaldua Summary “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” is an essay written by Gloria Anzaldua. Anzaldua was a six-generation Tejana and a prolific Writer, and this essay was published in her book named Borderlands/La Front era. Throughout this essay she gives some personal experiences of her childhood on racism, sexism, and linguistic prejudice. Basically throughout the essay she discusses her refusal to stop using her first language just to feel like she belongs there. This essay has a good discussion of Anzaldua defending the feelings and explaining how people like her feel when they are exposed to this because of the way she speaks the ‘American’.
However, she began having difficulties in her third grade. The is a reason for that she explains, “In the early 1990s, Nogales provided bilingual education — teaching English learners in both their native language and English — but only through the first two grades.“ Miriam also added that the teacher was the reason her daughter facing difficulties, the teacher did not speak Spanish and only taught in English and wasn’t interested in helping. Flores also mentioned that her daughter is very quite child even though the teacher said that her daughter talks a lot. She explained that her daughter talked a lot because she kept asking her classmate’s questions because she didn’t understand. This issue resulted in Miriam joining other Spanish-speaking Nogales families in 1992 in filing a federal suit to improve educational opportunity for non-English speakers.
Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” Summary In the essay “Mother Tongue” By Amy Tan she points out that we are often labeled and categorized by the way we speak. Tan notices how we unintentionally tend to use different Englishes when around different types of people. She tells how she was giving a talk, a talk she had already given to half a dozen other groups the only difference this time was her mother was in the audience. This was the first time she became aware that she uses different englishes. Tan explains that language in immigrant families tends to have a greater role in shaping the language of the child, and how it can limit the possibilities available to them.
The bulk of the story explains her experience with different writing styles after her decision to focus everything on English. When Amy had initially started her career as a writer, she had tried her hardest to use a complicated, “overly sophisticated” form of English with lines such as: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” She had never taken the time to think about the possible audience of her stories at this stage in her career. This has caused many lines in the original drafts of her stories to ultimately get scrapped because of the major breakthrough in her career. She had decided to begin writing in a style that would, “make sense” to her mother, using a dialect that would allow her mother to completely interpret and understand her stories. What she didn’t mention was what had caused such a change in her writing.
“Blending Culture” In Gina Valdes’ “English con Salsa” and Rhina Espaillat’s “Bilingual,” the merger of two cultures, Hispanic and American, is displayed with from the very beginning. These poems represent what many hispanic families or individuals face when trying to learn the English language. In “Bilingual,” the decision of what language to speak in the household is the root of a conflict between a father and daughter. Rhina Espaillat applies simple humor in the depiction of a common theme. “English con Salsa” and “Bilingual” illustrate that the learning and acceptance of a new culture may be achieved, but an individual’s own culture should never be relinquished.
Through the various techniques incorporated throughout the short story, the image and identity of Rachel’s character begin to come alive in between the lines of the text itself. Cisneros uses the use of countless similes to show that Rachel is a shy character compared to the others. When Rachel first starts getting accused by her teacher that the red sweater is hers, she feels, “Sick inside, like the part of [her] that’s three wants to come out of [her] eyes, except [she] squeezes them shut tight and bites down on [her] teeth real hard and tries to remember that [that day] [she] was eleven”. The first time Rachel stops herself from crying but the second time her teacher accuses her, she can’t help but let all of her tears fall and she starts “crying like [she’s] three in front of everybody” in her class. For most people, it takes a lot to start crying in front of a huge crowd especially if it has to do with classmates.
Mother Tongue In “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan writes about discrimination through “broken English” compared to Standard English and how people who speak “broken English” are usually taken advantage of. In Tans essay she quotes her mother’s speech to demonstrate her mother’s “broken English”. The quoted parts were filled with grammatical mistakes and the text was quite confusing. Yet, according to Tan “You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belittles how much she actually understands”. This reminds me of my childhood, because growing up I would have to constantly translate for my mother.