, ,In the story, “Superman and Me,” a young Indian boy living on an Indian preserve in Washington state was heavily influenced by his father’s intrigue and love for reading. At a young age, before he learned to read, he understood the idea of a paragraph as “a fence that held words,” and the words in the “paragraph worked together for a common purpose.” He began seeing the whole world in terms of paragraphs which led to his early reading and advanced reading abilities when attending school. However, there existed a stigma that “Indian children were expected to be stupid…expected to fail in the non-Indian world.” Therefore, “those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.” The Indian boy refused to be part of the stigma, he kept reading anything and everything with words, in an effort to save his life. Breaking down the barrier that “writing was something beyond Indians,” the boy grew up to become a writer and occasionally visited schools to teach young Indian children to write, in order to save their lives.
In Amy Tan’s piece titled Mother Tongue, Tan begins with describing how her “tone”, or use of English, changes when she speaks to her mother compared to when she speaks to her husband. After providing an example of something her mother said, Tan explains that as a range of people listens to her mother speaks, she receives different levels of understanding from each; from understanding everything to understanding nothing, and everything in-between. Because of her mother’s “broken” English, Tan often took on the role of assisting her mother with communication. Tan further explains the possibility of her mother’s English limiting her possibilities in understanding and language skills. For example, she describes how she often struggled on word analogies and English portions of standardized exams. However, after even being discouraged and told that her writing was one of her weakest attributes, Tan majored in English and became a writer in nonfiction and fiction. Her writing and vocabulary comprised of “all the Englishes she grew up with,” simple, broken and watered down. Unshaken by the critic’s comments about her first book, she old cared about her mother’s verdict after reading the book: “So easy to read.”