How To Write A Mother Tongue Essay
The environment people live in has a subliminal ability to change their behavior to allow them to adapt to those around them. This can be best described through people’s unconscious actions that come as a result of who or what they are currently associating themselves with. In the short story, Mother Tongue, when Amy Tan is around her mom, she opts out for a dumbed down version of English to better suit her mother’s needs. Yet when around others, Tan uses a more scholarly version of English as a facet of her representation. Even more, Amy goes to great heights to change herself as a person just for the sole motive of acting in accordance to her environment. As a result, the present environment shapes Amy’s identity because Amy’s behaviour changes constantly so that she can adapt to those that surround her.
Although it may be unintentional, Amy uses unconventional English with her mother in attempt to talk more like the way her mother talks. When Amy exclaims to her mother, “not waste money that way”, she is utilizing the same broken up English that her mother often uses (Tan 1). Although Amy’s mother understands English that “[Amy] cannot even begin to understand”,
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Amy is acting just as any other human being naturally would; she wants to act in accordance to the people that surround her in order to better fit in. Beginning with her subconscious use of language around her mother and all the way to her scholarly words with an educated group, Amy is constantly trying to adapt to the current situation around her. Moving on, Amy continues to show her change of identity when she explicitly changes her style of writing in order to connect with a different category of audience. In fact, Amy’s flexible behaviour itself is a fronting aspect of her identity and its ability to change as per the
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