—Anonymous
I believe that “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is a great work that can be related to our contemporary moment because it shows how people perceive the same language differently. When Amy Tan talks about her mother’s experiences with the language in America, I can relate to her because English is my second language. Many people migrate to the US, looking for better opportunities. But once they are here, they face many problems, and one of them is the language. One of the experiences that Mrs. Tan always faced was the fact that people judged her intellectual based on her “broken English” without knowing that her thoughts were perfectly fine. The problem was that she did not know how to express them in the appropriate words for others to understand. As Mrs. Tan, I had been in this situation when I first arrived in the US, in which others did not understand what I was saying and decided to ignore me or talked to me as if I was not smart. English was a barrier between many people and me, and like me, I know that there are many others.
