Amy Tan Mother's Tongue Summary

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Amy Tan’s narrative, “Mother’s Tongue”, explains through opinions and experiences why speaking in “broken English” shouldn’t be seen as limiting or a communication and/or intellectual handicap. Instead it should be recognized as someone maintaining their culture and expressing oneself for who they truly are. Tan supports this argument with anecdotes, descriptions of her mother’s intelligence and providing evidence on how her mother’s way of speaking English led her to improving her own speech. The first thing I recognized was Tan’s approachable tone that seems to drip off the page. This may partially be due to the fact that I find Tan’s adolescent embarrassment, about her mother’s “fractured English” and the way people reacted to
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