Growing up in a Chinese household in an American society, language played quite an integral role in Amy Tan’s life. This is evident, because she mentioned that at home the English language was used rather differently than the structure of the English language she learnt in school. As Amy herself said, “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.” Because of this language deficit, Amy struggled with mastering English tests, not that she failed, but there were concepts of the language that she didn’t perceive in the way expected of her to understand. She stated,” While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to Math, English could not be considered my strong suit.” She went on to say,”For me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.”

Amy considered the English of her mother’s tongue to be ‘broken’ in comparison to the standard English used by English speakers. Because of this gap, along with others telling Amy that ‘she was not the greatest English speaker’, as well as her own perceptions of her English language capability, she used these bricks thrown at her to build her own castle. Amy enrolled in college as an English major and clearly excelled at it. She used her ‘limitations’ as motivation to succeed. Amy shaped her language competency by utilizing all the Englishes she grew up with as well as the ones she adopted. “Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all – all the Englishes I grew up with.” – Amy Tan

Miss Tan came to realize her language biases on a few occasions. One occurrence was upon giving a talk to a group of people, a forum in which her mother was in attendance. Amy was in front of her audience giving the speech of a lifetime using the structure of ‘perfect’ English, and on seeing her mother it dawned on her that she was using the kind of language she never uses with her mother at home. She was made aware of the vast differences there were to what some people may comprehend and what others may not. To clarify, Amy said, “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.” Another instance in which Amy noticed her biases, was when she found that she would become embarrassed by her mother’s use of the English language. Because of this, Amy held the notion that her mother’s thought processes of English were imperfect which didn’t allow her to express herself well enough, seeing it as a limitation. Tan herself said, “My mother’s ‘limited’ English limited my perception of her.”

Over time, Tan also noticed the bias of others towards her mother because of the way she spoke. There were times, as a teen, she would have to pretend to be her mother in order to handle a business transaction or be the one to take care of her mother’s medical appointments. Due to her mother’s lack of finesse in the arts of the English language, in different arenas of day to day life, people would often not take her seriously and had a lack of consideration for her all because they were never able to fully understand what she tried to say or explain to them which made her dependent on her daughter’s language skills.

I do believe that people who learn English as a second language are constantly aware  of the way language is used around them, given that a language barrier may often cause misunderstandings and miscommunication. It forces them to create comparisons between their native tongue and the English language along with the challenges of how, when, and where to use certain words to make a complete, coherent sentence.

I am for sure aware of how the English language is used around me. I grew up in an environment where Patois is the most commonly used lingo but English is the dominant language factor. Hence, in speech, I automatically recognize when something said or written is considered to be grammatically incorrect, although, I myself is prone to making such errors.

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