Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” is a narrative about how Tan felt vulnerable speaking so many different “Englishs” to those around her, but especially the type of broken English that her and her mother spoke to one another. In the narrative, Tan reflects on her realization of the struggles her mother had to go through as a first generation Asian immigrant coming to America. Almost immediately after arriving in America, Tan describes different ways her mother automatically faced prejudices. Immigrants in America have always been discriminated against. People like to believe in the American dream and that we live in a world with no racism. However, even though many progressive people are accepting, many institutions, companies, and individuals still see America as having a race hierarchy and anyone who does not look, speak or act in the same way they do, are automatically inferior. Tan often saw first-hand what her mother experienced and yet, she writes of how it was not empathy that she felt for her mother, but guilt and shame. The way she spoke different versions of English to her mother, her peers and later her audience shows the emphasis on how she was never comfortable with the way her mother spoke English, or the way she spoke English to her mother. Tan’s 1989 essay highlights the underlying racism in America and how different generations of the same family deal with the stereotypes.

Even in the late 1900’s, decades after millions of immigrants first came through Ellis Island and years after segregation had ended, people of non-European decent were discriminated against. Derogatory phrases and actions were often used to belittle these people and many of these out-of-date actions are still prevalent today. In the time of Tan’s childhood, many children of immigrants all felt the need to “Americanize” the earlier generations of their families. Tan had the same troubles these children had because often people could not understand what her mother was saying, and Tan would often have to “translate” her mother’s English into what others would consider “normal” English. This was a struggle for her, because of the embarrassment she felt that she had to communicate for her mother, but also the anger that she had towards people who would take advantage of her mother because of her English. 

Tan explains the guilt of the younger generations through her essay, through talking about the shame she felt when people told her they could not understand her mother and when she had to be her voice. The different Englishs Tan spoke to her mother, her peers and later her audience shows the emphasis on how she was never comfortable with the way her mother spoke English, or the way she spoke English to her mother. She does not realize this until she is giving a talk to her fans and her mother is in the audience. She later writes how she speaks the same English to her husband that she does to her mother, so this “broken” English is her language of love. The cultural context of younger generations assimilating better to America than older generations enhances Tan’s embarrassment of her mother’s speech because her mother did not assimilate to American culture the way she did.  In “Mother Tongue” Tan writes about how many of her books are based on her mother and their relationship. In “The Joy Luck Club”, one of the daughter’s values that she shares with Tan is success. Since Tan’s mother could never reach the level of success that she did because of the language barrier, Tan felt ashamed and guilty for feeling ashamed. Tan’s mother never assimilated in the ways that Tan herself could. Growing up, Tan learned perfect English through school, peers and watching TV. Her mother did not assimilate like that and was often discriminated against because of her thick accent and many people did not help her or was nice to her because they claimed that “they could not understand her”. Based on the cultural context of immigration, there is a strain between the parental figure and the child because the two generations are essentially living in two different cultures and therefore do not understand one another. Tan felt like this for a long time with her mother because she could not understand why her mother could not assimilate like she could because they had both been in the country for the same amount of time.  

Integration of overview with analysis of the story: You’re going to want to discuss how the historical or cultural context is evident in the story, as well as how it influences the events within the story. How are the aims of the Civil Rights movement evident in MLK, Jr.’s text? How do the protagonists from Gilman’s and O’Brien’s texts embody the symptoms of hysteria, post-partum depression, or PTSD? (You could do one paragraph per symptom and discuss how that symptom is evident in the protagonist’s or protagonists’ behavior, speech, etc.) How does the Vietnam War encapsulate the unfulfilled/broken promises of democracy for Stokely Carmichael? 

Integration of overview with analysis (or here you could move to an analysis of the story on its own terms)
