Mother Tongue Quotes

And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her […] —a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, 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.

It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.

But to me, my 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.

It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used […] But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited-English speaker.

I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her thoughts were imperfect.

Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgement call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.

I wrote what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language.

I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.