| antithesis |
1 I
AM NOT a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more
than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this
country or others. |
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2 I
am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved
language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal
of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke
an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea,
or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them
all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.
| Q3: |
Why does Amy
Tan begin her essay with the disclaimer that she is "not a scholar" of
the English language? How and how well does she otherwise establish her
authority on the subject? That is, what does she see as the difference
between a scholar and a writer? |
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sentence
variety |
3 Recently,
I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving
a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to
half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing,
my life, and my book,
The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along
well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole
talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first
time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English
I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection
of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that
relates to thus-and-thus" -- a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical
phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past
perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English
that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I
did not use at home with my mother.
| Q4: |
In paragraph
3, Tan writes fairly long sentences until she writes, "My mother was in
the room." Why is this sentence shorter? What is the effect of the short
sentence on the reader? |
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| anecdote |
4 Just
last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found
myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with
her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard
myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us
as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized
why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often
used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it
with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English
that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
| Q5: |
Explain what
Tan means by "different Englishes." |
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5
So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like,
I'll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped
and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about
a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's,
Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her
family, which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful,
far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mothers'
wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part:
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| allusion |
6
"Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind.
He is Du like Du Zong-- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people
call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people.
That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family.
Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until
that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting
him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect
for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese
custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay
too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see. I heard it. I gone to boy's
side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."
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7
You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies
how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report,
listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker,
reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease -- all kinds of things
I can't begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand
50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent.
Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese.
But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's
my mother tongue. Her language, I heard it, is vivid, direct, full of observation
and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things,
expressed things, made sense of the world.
| Q6: |
What is the significance
(meaning and importance) of the reference to Tan's mother reading the Forbes
report and listening to Wall Street Week? |
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8
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother
speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured"
English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I
can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged
and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness.
I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem
just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions
of the limited English speaker.
| Q7: |
Why does Tan
put quotation marks around "broken" and "limited"? What other words can
describe this different English? |
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9
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's
"limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of
her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what
she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts
were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the
fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did
not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to
understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
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10
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well.
When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend
I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to
complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a
call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio
and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week,
our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say
in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."
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| dialogue |
11
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't
send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."
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12
And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned.
You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."
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13
Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York
tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm
her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker," I can't tolerate
any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going
to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure
enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker,
and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs.
Tan was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
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| anecdote |
14
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that
was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment,
to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month
ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes.
Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had
lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem
to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact
diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She
said they would not give her any more information until the next time and
she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would
not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And
when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English
-- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises
that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering
my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
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transition |
15
I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities
in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that
a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But
I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant
families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language
of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement
tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged
as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit.
In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses,
in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile
on achievement test. But those scores were not good enough to override
the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in
those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
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16
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct
answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always
a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests
were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion,
such as, "Even though Tom was ,
Mary thought he was ." And the
correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts,
for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming," with
the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to
some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even
though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well according
to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have
been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests
like that.
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17
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you
were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship -- for
example, "Sunset is to nightfall
as
is to ."
And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one
of which showed the same kind of relationship:
red is to stoplight,
bus is to arrival, chills is to
fever, yawn is to boring.
Well, I could never think that way. I knew what tests were asking, but
I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first
pair, "sunset
is to nightfall" --
and I would see
a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering
of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words -- red, bus, stoplight,
boring -- just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible
for me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall"
is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten
that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation,
for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching
a chill at night, which turns into feverishpneumonia as punishment, which
indeed did happen to me.
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18
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English,
about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why
there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature.
Why are these few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs?
Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad
sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys
-- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always do
significantly better on math achievement test than in English. And this
makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English
spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And
perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing
and into math and science, which is what happened to me.
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19
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge
of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first
year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction
as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing
was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.
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20
But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And
at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences,
sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language.
Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way
into the Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was
my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can
barely pronounce.
| Q8: |
Why does Tan
show us the sentence: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state?"
What is wrong with this "terrible" sentence? |
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21
Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I
should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader
I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers.
So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts
-- I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the
English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be
described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of
a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese,
which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined
to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English,
her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but
neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language
ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the
rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
| Q9: |
Tan first gives
examples of "family talk" (paragraph 4) and only later classifies them
(paragraph 21). Why does she follow this order? How would the effect be
different if she reversed the order? |
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22
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had
succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book
and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."
| Q10: |
How does identifying
her mother as her intended audience help Tan make her own language more
effective? |
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