Language played an important role in Amy  Tan’s life. Due to Amy and her family being from China, English isn’t their first language. Since English isn’t the family’s first language Amy’s mother seems to struggle with speaking “proper” English which leads to them facing some obstacles, like Amy having to make phone calls for her mother pretending to be her mother and others making fun or her or being rude which leads to Amy being ashamed of her mother’s English. Unlike her mother, Amy is a English fluent speaker and is even able to code switch the ways she speaks depending on the situation she is in. It isn’t until one day while giving a speech, which her mother attended that she realized the different “Englishes” that she uses on a day to day basis. Her mother’s “broken English” as she refers to it has helped shape Amy into the reader and writer that she is today by making her more open to expressing herself in different ways. In the text she explains how her “mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear 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.

Since English is also my second language I can relate to Amy’s mother in the sense that in school we were taught a certain way to speak and any other way was considered “improper”. When I reached middle school that’s when “standard English” was really enforced it made it difficult because I didn’t know what made english considered standard or not. Often times people learning English seem to use incorrect terms without being aware since English is so complex and words can be used in many different ways and have different meanings. I personally am aware of how English is used around me because it helps me know how to communicate with the other person and how to interact with them.

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