Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue is a reflective essay she recounts of her experience growing up as Chinese-American living with her immigrant mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her internal struggle for social acceptance by learning Standard American English through academic acquisition in comparison to the shame of her mother tongue which she saw as socially restrictive and depriving of her confidence to embrace her cultural heritage. Tan’s reconciles her internal conflict by accepting that English is a sophisticated form of communication in which all variations or dialects can teach us language sensitivity and maybe creatively enabling. The mother tongue or heritage language refers to the first language a child learns from infancy. It teaches children how to build communication skills using speech that has variations of accents, dialects, words, phrases, and modes of …show more content…
Her mother tongue was the external factor for social marginalization regarding prejudice, discrimination, or social interaction. Some of Amy’s friends understood varying degrees of her mother's speech ranging from 50% to 90%, while others recognized nothing she said (Tan). Nevertheless, her reading comprehension of the journalistic material and American novels demonstrated proper English literacy. Whereas people thought her mother tongue was obsolete and worthless, Tan described her mothers form of English as “vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery” she was not always sensitive to her mother tongue (Tan). It was a language that caused her to recoil whenever she heard her mother speak with Americans because she sensed their disdain for her mother tongue. Amy despised her mother and heritage language because of its representation of a type of social class that fell short of conventional