Answer:
Tan begins her reflective essay by telling her readers about the different types of “Englishes”
that she uses on various occasions. She describes the kind of English she uses while giving a
speech:
A speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly
seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms
of standard English that I had learned in school and through books.
As the essay progresses, readers are told about the kind of English she was exposed to while
growing up—her mother’s broken English:
Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off-the-street kind. . . . Now important
person, very hard to inviting him. . . . He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I
gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.
While growing up, Tan was embarrassed of her mother’s broken English: “I know this for a
fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of
her. I was ashamed of her English.”
Thus, Tan discusses the English language throughout this excerpt to illustrate her complex
relationship with her mother as well as with those who spoke English fluently.
