Amy Tan’s life was centered and revolved around language. She is a writer and spends her “time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.” It was a pure passion and love for language that took part in her. But Amy came to a realization of how she speaks different Englishes. Spiraling to her embarrassment towards her mother, the inability to do well in English, and understanding the biases towards people learning English as a second language. Hence, giving ignition to a better perception about who she is and where she stands in society.

The epiphany that struck Amy was when she was giving a talk about her book, The Joy Luck Club. It didn’t take her long to discover that her mother was present and listening. For Amy, the way she was speaking was completely different from how she spoke with her mother. It was the type of “speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with normalized 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.” From this, Amy was not taught how to speak English by her mother. She had to actually adapt to learn two different Englishes. Due to this, she would see the way it limited her mother. However, when she was a teen, she discusses the way she felt ashamed. Specifically, because in “department stores, at banks, and the 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.” As a witness, Amy saw the things her mother had to endure and experience. But because she was embarrassed and had a limited perception of “broken” English speakers, she didn’t see the way society downgraded and diminished people like her mother. Amy’s mom was not categorized as a proper English speaker. Rather she was labeled as someone who spoke “broken” or “fractured’ English.

Personally, I think learning a second, third, even fourth language is something to take pride in.

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