Language makes up an important part of someone’s identity. Language can reveal a lot about a person such as their ethnicity, perhaps their culture or even their interests in learning. “Mother tongue” by Amy Tan, shows how language plays a role in her life. Language in Tan’s case, played the role of a barrier that Tan had to overcome to reach success. As a young child, Tan disliked her “mother’s English”, she felt embarrassed when her mother spoke because her English was described by many as “broken”. Tan felt that “her [mothers] English reflected the quality of what she had to say… because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect.” Because of this certain bias towards “broken English” speakers, Tan explains that when going to department stores, banks, restaurants or doctor visits etc., the workers would not take her mother seriously because they correlated lack of English to a lack of intelligence. This lead her to believe that her “mothers English… had an affect on limiting [her] possibilities in life… [and] that it affected her results on achievement tests, IQ tests…” because academically she excelled in science and math but not in writing or reading since she grew up in a household where “broken English” was the norm for her. This shaped young Tan into a person that did not believe will have many opportunities for themselves in the future. Growing up however, she went against the assumptions made on her and disproved them by becoming an English major and beginning her writing career. She was breaking the barrier that language had become in her life. It was not until recently, that Tan realized that not many Asian-Americans are represented in literature, beginning to question why not many Asian-Americans enroll in writing courses and it made her think that “there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’” and that perhaps their teachers are also discouraging them from writing and English and into math and science as they did to her because of her English.
I believe that people who learn English as a second language are constantly aware of the way language is used around them. Take me into consideration, I was raised in a Mexican household and being the first in my generation to be born in the U.S, I was surrounded hearing my family speak only Spanish. When I watched cartoons was the only time I was exposed to the English language up until I started pre-school which was when I started to interact with children who spoke English. At the time, transitioning from the English I spoke in school to the English I would rarely have to speak in at home, was somewhat of a difficult task because I constantly had to remind myself that my parents English was different than mine, their English was more simpler than mine in terms that if I were to describe a food as “exquisite” in school, I would have to describe it as “very good” at home. Growing up like this makes you aware of how constant language is being used around you, how it is always changing when you enter a room full of foreign speakers compared to a room full of English speakers.

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