Amy Tan

When Amy Tan gave a speech, her mother was in the same room. That was he first time that her mother had heard her give a speech. Her mother was kind of shocked because Amy was using the language that she doesn’t normally use when she is with her mother one on one. This adds to the essay because it shows that Amy has learned as she was growing up to talk in a way that we think as “normal”. Amy used to be embarrassed by her mothers tongue and now Amy is a writer. It just shows us that Amy saw the way that her mother was treated while she was growing up and Amy didn’t want to go through the same thing.

When Amy’s mother was talking about the gangster, her mother’s language was so broken – but that’s all her mother knows. To her mother, her language is “normal” because that’s how she had talked her whole life. Some people understand fifty percent of what her mother says. Others say understand more than half and some say that don’t understand anything that she says. Amy claims that the way her mother speaks has shaped the way that Amy sees things. It bothered her that people’s perceptions of people with broken language were limited because they didn’t think that they were as intelligent. I think it was a great idea for Amy to include excerpts of what her mother has said in her essay because it gives the reader an idea of what she is talking about when she refers to “broken language”.

When Amy was growing up, people in department stores, at banks and at restaurants didn’t take her mother seriously and didn’t give her the service that everyone deserves. I believe that it was important that Amy included this because it supports Amy’s theory that sometimes – most of the time – people reflect intelligence on the way they talk.

When Amy was in her teenage years, she used to have to call people on the phone for her mother because of the way that her mother was treated. The time that it was time to call the stockbroker in New York, Amy had to call. Amy’s mother...