I read something really, how do I put this, interesting, in class today. Okay, so quick sidebar, I wouldn’t really say that it was tugging-at-the-heartstrings relatable in the sense that I don’t want to fold too quickly into the emotional side of this piece just because I happen to also be Asian-American, you know? But that aside, what I read today was Mother Tongue, originally it was released as a talk in 1989 and then, published by the Threepenny Review in 1990. It’s a personal essay by Amy Tan. Who is she, you might ask, well, she’s a Chinese American author (loving the range of representation we’re reading by the way, I would say ten out of ten for that by itself), and allow me to flex a bit for her. She went to more than one college, and got a BA in English and Linguistics, and an MA in Linguistics. Not to mention, she dropped out of pre-med against the will of her asian mother, which deserves it’s own honorable mention because that is terrifying. Oh, also, crazy fun fact, okay maybe not so fun once I actually say it, but when she was studying at Berkeley, her roommate was murdered and she had to identify the body. The incident and obviously, the trauma from it, left her mute for a while, and on the death day every year for the next ten years, she wouldn’t be able to speak on that day. Insane fact, right? Another not so fun fact, to make her more relatable for us, she also suffers from depression and struggles with suicidal ideation. Which as you may know, felt that heavy in my time. Okay, but let me actually talk about the actual essay.
Mother Tongue, at its very core, is about the this one specific and ignorant idea that I feel like only really exists in America; where if someone doesn’t speak English ‘fluently’ they are considered less intelligent or if I can be blunt, they’re considered dumb. And I’m using quotes for ‘fluent’ because the frame of reference for ‘fluent English’ is based on white standards, and to quote the second essay I’ll be talking about later on, written by June Jordan, “White standards control our official and popular judgments of verbal proficiency and correct, or incorrect, language skills, including speech.” And she was right then, and now, and chances are, she will be far into the future. Amy Tan tackles this ideology in a very personal way in her essay, having it centered around her mother and how Amy Tan herself felt through the years handling this, from childhood to now adulthood. Her piece gives off this feeling of a child going through emotions that feel too big for herself at the time, from handling grown conversations for her mother to then coming to a gradual understanding of the situation.
It’s this almost very first generation way of thinking right? The embarrassment and shame you feel when growing up, being alienated because you’re already not like everyone else, then on top of that, having to feel the struggle of filling in the spaces that your parents can’t fill, and that distance from them because you aren’t like your parents or their parents either. Having shoes too big to fill would be a closer description, but now imagine you had to fill those shoes with your hands. Not the best metaphor but I think the confusion and frustration comes across. Amy Tan gives this example where her mom had her call up the stockbroker in New York, pretending to be her mother, to ask for a check that her mom hadn’t been sent. And she just paints this really realistic picture of what it’s like, down to the awkwardness of a child pretending to be older than they actually are, to then the shame that creeps up on your neck when her mom eventually goes to said stockbroker, and starts yelling at them in her ‘impeccable broken English.’ It gives me second-hand embarrassment reading it, because I remember being in that exact position when I was younger, and that lingering emotion comes back full-force. One thing I will note, is that because this is being written from an adult’s point of view now, I think it translates better to us, aka her audience. Let me explain.
The main thing that sticks out to me, is this moment where Amy Tan says that she winces when she refers to her mother’s English as ‘broken’ or ‘fractured’. Showing growth aside, let’s unpack the years of having to unlearn something that society tries so hard to engrain in you; that ‘unperfected English’ is not enough. That ‘limited’ English is exactly that, and that the people speaking it, are a reflection of that ‘English’. Amy Tan does this lovely thing, of making this essay about growth and realization so easily digestible to anyone reading it. While no one has these exact memories, they can overlay their own experiences over hers, and find common ground, especially those with immigrant parents. Same sentence, different font is how I would put it. Those reading this essay feel seen, I know I felt like that when I was reading it. The transition of shame to acceptance to realizing it was never one individual’s burden to bear is something I know I one hundred precent felt. The Asian American experience is a unique cog in the machine. I won’t get too much into it but, as someone who is Asian American, I can say the selling point of her essay is it’s realistic, and raw, and up-lifting portrayal of growing up with a parent who’s English was never good enough in society’s eyes. It’s clear from obviously my emotional response and the general theme of her essay that her intended audience would be Asian-Americans.
Amy Tan in her essays constantly disproving the American idea of fluency. With every story she provides, it’s planned, plotted to make you sympathize, and most importantly, challenges that idea. In addition to that, her mother’s character is expanded with each example. The first example of the political gangster in Shanghai fleshes out her mother as her own person, her story about that situation broadens the reader’s idea about her character. Showing that her life is not limited to just the US, Amy Tan is saying to us that her mom has her own experiences and stories to tell that isn’t based around her English, that this goes far beyond even the essay she’s writing. The second example, with the stockbroker, showcases her mother’s interests in areas that most people would consider for ‘intelligent people’, such as reading Forbes, listening to Wall Street, etc. All sorts of things that Amy Tan said herself that she can’t begin to understand. And finally, the last example for Amy Tan I’ll talk about because this is getting pretty long, is the ‘far less humorous’ one. Where her mother had gone to a hospital for an appointment, to talk about a benign brain tumor that showed up on a CAT scan she received a month ago, and the hospital lost her CAT scan. Long story short, her mother argued with the doctor, who in the end called her daughter who spoke perfect English, and oh isn’t it a surprise, they suddenly had answers. You can see in the examples how Amy Tan scales down with each one, the first is in reference to the world, then you go a little smaller, to the general fact of life her mother lived, then you go even smaller, and it’s the personal experience her mother goes through. I think it’s neat, how Amy Tan closes in on her examples for her mainly Asian-American audience, effectively drawing us in, because if I’m being honest, I didn’t really begin to understand her examples until the second one. The first was hard for me to get but that just goes to show to broad Amy Tan’s writing can go, and how intimate it can be.
Okay, now you know the general idea of Amy Tan and her whole essay. Now let’s analyze June Jordan and why I brought her up when I’m talking about Amy Tan, because while they wrote about different topics, like I said, same sentence, different font. The essay I’m going to be referencing by June Jordan is, ‘Nobody Mean More To Me Than You, and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,’ because it’s a piece that’s more relevant than ever in todays time. It was a bit difficult for me to read this piece, because while I can’t directly relate to it, it has elements that made me think back to Amy Tan’s ‘broken English’ rhetoric. June Jordan was a Jamaican American bisexual poet, activist, and teacher. Modern day Da Vinci if you ask me. But in this essay, she speaks specifically about how white standards pushed the idea of how black English isn’t considered ‘proper’ and how it served to perpetuate the idea that Black people were less educated and less intelligent just because they spoke an English that wasn’t ‘up to standard’. Similar to Amy Tan’s theme of how her mother was limited in life because of her ‘limited’ English. More than just that, June Jordan also writes in that essay about the life of a student of hers, named Willie Jordan, whose brother is brutally killed by white policemen and how her class rose up and mobilized what they were taught in an attempt to bring justice to his death. The setting of this essay really aids in the sudden tonal shift at the end, the tension that we didn’t know was building up finally overflowing.
June Jordan does an extraordinary job at providing examples and giving them a life of their own, if you ask me. With every rule she writes down, she gives context and background as to why and not just ‘it is how it is’, like a lot of ‘standard’ English happens to work. For example, rule number 3; ‘if it don’t sound like something that come out somebody mouth then it don’t sound right. If it don’t sound right then it ain’t hardly right. Period.’ She then follows it up with how two weeks into composition of Black English, and the students ‘agonizingly’ trying to spell it out, they arrived at the conclusion that Black English is a predominantly meant to be spoken. It really nails into the readers that the rules are there for a reason and the Black English wasn’t born out of laziness in respects to the English language. In fact, in an article written on the NY times by James Baldwin, he details it perfectly, ‘people evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances…in order to not be submerged by a reality they cannot articulate.’ Black English is just that, a means of communication that evolved from the inherent need to find control in situations they had none over. Or in not as many words, ‘Black English is the creation of the black diaspora’. This article explains how Black English came to be and June Jordan expands on that, and lists out why it is the way it is.
In the article, James brings up a really interesting example. Of how ‘jazz’ was originally a sexual term in the Black community before white people ‘purified’ it, in an age where they attempted to imitate and glorify Black experiences and culture. Yet despite wanting everything to do with Black culture, white people consistently reject it and minimize its history at the same time. In June Jordan’s essay, following the death of Reggie Jordan, Willie Jordan’s brother, they chose to write a message to the news, in Black English, and to no surprise, it was rejected. June Jordan writes, ‘Newsday rejected the piece…none of the TV news reporters picked up the story. Nobody raised $180,000 to prosecute the murder of Reggie Jordan. Reggie Jordan is really dead’. The finality of the situation hits the reader like a brick. Us as the audience is predominantly made up of those who can relate to the situation or at the very least empathize with it. Everyone in the audience knows someone who knows someone who has experienced something like this, if not gone through it themselves. Loss doesn’t discriminate and the pain of that is universal. Actions often have consequences but life is also unjust and unfair. The universe won’t be any more favorable to you just because you’re a good person, and that’s hard to swallow. But the finality of it all hits different, and even more now as you read this, you’re reminded of how common this unfairness really is.
On the topic of setting and why it plays quite a large role in the way June Jordan appeals to one’s emotional side, much of the text is written in the safe space of a classroom, where a group of Black students are learning about their spoken language, that before this, was regarded as ‘not right’ or unworthy of spending time even unraveling the specifics, shown by the reactions of those around them, ‘you studying that shit? At school?’. But after being taught that it is something worth exploring, that Black English has purpose and reason and is just as valid and correct is Standard English, for it to all be thrown back at you by people who will never know the struggle, it’s harsh and final, coming to terms with this reality. And the way June Jordan wrote it, honestly takes my breath away. It’s a serious issue, being written in a manner that does its best to showcase the unbelievable nature of the situation. James Baldwin writes that the brutal truth of the matter is white people are unwilling to bend to Black experiences unless it serves the white purpose, which June Jordan nails with her expression and flow of her essay.
I didn’t mean to do such a dramatic tonal shift but it’s a serious issue to talk about. Especially since American was built on slavery and the Black experience differs from a lot of others. I’m in no way comparing the two, it’s not an argument of who had it worse. We’ll get no where with arguments like that, it only serves to drive us apart when the larger issue isn’t between the two communities. I brought the two authors together to talk about mainly because the topic is similar. They both deal with the language they were raised with in their respectively community, and they both talk about the stigma and prejudice they’ve faced because of it whether it be internalized or shown in discriminatory ways from outside forces. In what I’ve read of June Jordan and Amy Tan, they both have a clear cut goal. To bring awareness to the issue and in some ways, alleviate that outsider feeling that their audience may feel. Their examples draw in the readers and makes the individual experience something that can be felt by all. Especially regarding everything that is happening now with the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the Stop Asian Hate movement.
As of March this year, after everything that happened with the Black Lives Matter movement and more recently, the string of violent attacks against Asian Americans, these essays are more needed than ever. It’s all too easy to read and relate to these issues from an outside past perspective, but now we are living it. And even for a little, if the anxiety can be eased by sharing experiences, then I believe the essays have served their purpose. While I won’t and can’t speak for the Black experience in regards to June Jordan, I will say that in light of recent events in the Asian American community, Amy Tan’s essay helped me put a lot of things into perspective. Although things have escalated, I know that my turmoil is not my own. To have others help shoulder the pain can be a crutch. On a bit of a lighter note, while it does make me a bit more depressed that not much has changed since these pieces were published, I at the very least can hold out hope that we are not alone. Change can and will come. There is enough of us fighting to put it into motion.
In conclusion, I know this has gotten bit long, not a bit, a lot actually. We did get quite serious towards the end but it had to be done. Such is life and all of that. I just thought it was an interesting essay to build on and to address. Got a bit side tracked on other topics as well but what can you do? It’s important to reflect on writing that makes you think. My favorite quote that fits quite well to this giant train of thought of mine is, ‘things that are worth doing are worth taking the time to do’. Take time to really delve deep into the quotes and ideas that stick to your head. Who knows, maybe you’ll even get an essay out of it. But anyways, that was my delve into rhetorics in personal essays and whatnot. How was your class?
