Reading Analysis: Mother Tongue

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Thomas Barrett Mr. Nichols English 101 18 September 2013 Reading Analysis: Mother Tongue – Amy Tan You may be wondering how I chose a story with a name like “Mother Tongue”, and to be completely honest, I chose this story by allowing my girlfriend to open my book at a random page, in order for me to have a story that I “care” about. The story follows the dramatic, non-stereotypical life of Amy Tan as a young adult. I mention the “non stereotypical” subject, because she has made it a point in this short story to inform us of her struggle finding her educational path as a young adult. As a young Asian-American, she was pressured by her school to follow a path based in math, but throughout the years, it was apparent to her that she was better suited for a major in English. 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. I suspect it was an earlier realization, similar to the story she had told in the beginning of this short story. At the beginning of this story, Amy had a realization. At one of her speeches as an author, one small thing had completely changed the way

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