July 17, 2016

In the article "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan she writes about both hers and her mother's experience with language. Tan admits she is "not a scholar or English or literature" (Tan 2006) but expresses her thoughts and supplies empirical evidence about how both she and others judged her mother's intelligence by how she spoke English. Tan introduces us to the concept of "Englishes", i.e. the English used in her household; the English she was taught in school; the English she writes in. Tan writes about the possibility that students, particularly Asian Americans, may be steered away from careers in Literature or creative writing because of the "broken or limited"(Tan, 2006) English used in their homes.
I continue to feel that Tan's main goal of the article is to get us to think about the ways we view people who speak "limited or broken" English. As a continuation of the author's goal she writes about how really listening to her own talk as she spoke to various groups about her writing life and her book "The Joy Luck Club” caused her to realize the "whole talk sounded wrong." What she was hearing and learning, perhaps for the first time, was that she was not using one of the "Englishes" that she "did not use at home with my mother."
I did identify some new key points and these are how Tan writes about how she thinks "about the power of language--the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth."
One way the reading supports this is when she writes about the possibility that there are so few Asian Americans involved in creative writing because of the limitations of the English spoken in their homes. In other words, I believe Tan is demonstrating the effects that "broken or limited English" (Tan, 2006) can have on Asian Americans and the career choices they are steered towards such as Engineering rather than creative