Rhetoricl Response:Mother Tongue

In the narrative essay,"Mother Tongue",(1990), the author, Amy Tan defines what "mother tongue" is to her in her own words and the effects it has had on her, based off of hearing her mother's English. Tan explains her reasoning by providing personal stories about her mother and how her "broken English" had so many cons, Tan had to help her numerous times. The purpose of this narrative essay is to showcase that even though you may be surrounded by "broken English", that's not what defines you and there are ways to work with it and around it. The audience of this essay would be anybody who has a different language other than English as their primary language.

Reading this narrative essay gave us insight on how the English language can be difficult to learn and speak to other nationalities trying to learn it. Being that English is all of our first language we, cant fully relate to how Amy Tan feels, nor her mother. But we can all say that we've seen or experienced first hand, communicating with someone with "broken language", and being confused and maybe sometimes frustrated because we don't understand what they are asking for or want. This essay has opened our minds up to now being able to understand both sides of the situation. Although we know the English language and they do not know it as well, but their trying as best as they can to communicate, be patient with them and try to help them because if the tables were turned, we wouldn't want them to treat us less than we are. And most of all we would want help too.

Tan's narrative essay is more effective and realistic when she goes into depth of the story about her mother and the CAT scan. "My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment.......a month ago." (page 158), in this paragraph she goes on and describes how the doctors lost the CAT scan and showed no interest in trying to find it until Tan had to come up there and speak the English language more clearly for her mother. Tan turned the effect of her mother's tongue as a positive effect by stating that "Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing , I had succeeded where it ............ her verdict: "So easy to Read." Tan majored in English and wrote fiction to prove to others that, she may grew up around "broken English" and spoke it, she can write as well, and so well that considering her mother's English, she is still able to read it.

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