Amy Tan (Essay Date 1990)

SOURCE: Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." In The Best American Short Stories 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, pp. 196-202. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991.

In the following essay, originally published in The Threepenny Review in 1990, Tan explains her youthful embarrassment of and adult pride in her Chinese mother's use of English.

I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade...