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Self-Acceptance
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mother Tongue, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Over the course of “Mother Tongue,” Tan elaborates on the limitations of language by exploring her complicated relationship between her mother’s spoken English and the “standard” form she is taught at school. First recognized as a difference in sound while delivering a talk on The Joy Luck Club, Tan addresses the rhythmic and tonal shifts in each of her “Englishes” by directly quoting conversations with her mother. Though employing characteristically shorter sentences that omit subject particles and pronouns, Tan hesitates to describe the English spoken with her mother as “broken” or “limited.” Instead, she calls attention to the limiting nature of standardized English taught within the classroom, writing about her struggle to “correctly” answer fill-in-the-blank questions and complete word analogies. For Tan, there is no single right answer, as the power of imagination and subjective experience displaces “standard” associations with vivid, imaginative scenarios.
Shaped by her mother, Tan’s understanding of—and approach to—language is expressive. Standard English, according to Tan, doesn’t appropriately communicate the passion and imagery that her mother’s English does. “Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind,” Mrs. Tan says, describing a Chinese political gangster and his business to her daughter. Mrs. Tan’s addition of “like off the street kind,” while a sentence fragment, captures the essence of her speech by providing visual detail—most people can imagine a roadside fruit stand based on this fragment. Tan’s “mother tongue”, then, expresses ideas in ways that don’t fit within the limits of “standard English.” By highlighting her experiences with the English language as a Chinese-American storyteller and her struggle to synthesize the “Englishes” she speaks, then, Tan suggests that “standard” English itself can be limiting and that stereotypically “broken” languages are just as expressive as these standard forms—and perhaps, in some cases, even more expressive. Moreover, the essay implies that expressiveness is what makes language useful and important in the first place, so her mother’s supposedly fractured English is just as meaningful and functional as standard English.
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Expressiveness and the Limits of Language ThemeTracker
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Expressiveness and the Limits of Language Quotes in Mother Tongue
Below you will find the important quotes in Mother Tongue related to the theme of Expressiveness and the Limits of Language .
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.
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It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.
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I wrote what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language.
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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.
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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.
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