Mother Tongue Study Guide

Born to Chinese immigrants in Oakland, California in 1952, Amy Tan spent her early years in the San Francisco Bay Area. She then relocated to Europe with her mother and younger brother after losing her father and older brother to brain cancer. She finished high school in Switzerland. Returning to the United States for higher education, Tan attended a total of five colleges and universities, double-majoring in English and Linguistics and obtaining her Bachelor of Arts from San Jose State University in 1973; shortly after, she obtained her Master of Arts in 1974. Travelling to her mother’s hometown in Shanghai, China in 1987, Tan learned about the family her mother left behind when immigrating and met half-sisters she didn’t know she had, inspiring part of her critically acclaimed novel The Joy Luck Club. Originally existing as three short stories, The Joy Luck Club came together as one in 1987 and quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 40 consecutive weeks. Tan’s experiences navigating cultural divides and working through her complex relationship with her mother also appear in works such as The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

The United States has a fraught history of xenophobic policies and attitudes towards Chinese immigrants—a history that undoubtedly informed Amy Tan’s experience growing up in the United States. In 1882, congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which instituted a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. This law was a response to increasing anti-Chinese sentiments in the United States—sentiments that had been developing since the Gold Rush in the late 1840s and early 1850s, which was when the first major influx of Chinese immigrants arrived in the country. As many workers during the time period sought to establish themselves by mining for gold, gold itself became harder to come by. As a result, many white Americans began to resent Chinese immigrants, projecting their frustrations with the competitive nature of goldmining onto new arrivals. This established a markedly racist and xenophobic attitude in the cultural landscape of the United States in the 19th century, and this attitude only became more pronounced with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which wasn’t repealed until 1943. This tumultuous history serves as a backdrop of sorts for works like “Mother Tongue,” which explores the difficulties of navigating the entrenched biases against Chinese immigrants that unfortunately still exist in various forms in the United States. 

Before its publication as an autobiographical essay in The Threepenny Review in 1990, “Mother Tongue” was Tan’s anticipatory response to her fellow panelists at the 1989 “The State of the English Language” conference. Describing her mother’s influence on her writing style, Tan highlights the role her “mother tongue” plays in her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. Similarly, Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter further illustrates mother-daughter relationship dynamics and examines the power of language, especially in the context of the Chinese diaspora. Another nonfiction title worth considering alongside Tan’s work is Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which explores what it means to grow up within the AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) community as a first-generation child of immigrants. Featuring her own personal relationship with the English language, Minor Feelings exemplifies the experience Hong and Tan share as they were, and are, affected by American English and the society that shapes it.