Amy Tan Mother Tongue Analysis

Based on Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” it is evident that language has an affect on our lives. Language defines the type of person I am generally and it has had an affect on my choices as well as my lifestyle. Depending on my friends, family, and others I talk to my choice on language tends to vary. My decisions in life, sometimes, are influenced by the language I use and my surroundings. Language has become my way of seeing life in a different perspective. In Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” she discusses the way the language that she was taught affected her life in so many ways. I can agree and relate to Tan’s article since I as well came from a bilingual home. I respected my parents so I always honored the language they spoke, most of the time I believe I spoke their language out of habit, it was our language as a family. In Tan’s article she quotes “So easy to read” (Tan 391) when she spoke about her mother’s verdict on her book. I had a similar story occur in my family since my mother had a tough time reading and understand english while I was growing up. I honored the way she defended herself even with her “broken” english and taught me that language is just a way of seeing the world depending on your language you can determine the way you want to go. I grew up in a bilingual
In some job interviews, depending on who was interviewing me, I would either talk in some sort of “slang” or spanglish. It obviously didn’t help me much and I never had a stable job. Once I got older and was associating myself with other people who spoke what is called “proper english” I actually matured and saw that there were so many opportunities for those who spoke the language everyone found “acceptable” or “correct”. The more time I spent with those friends the more I learned about the world and actually my choice of language improved as well as my