Mother Tongue by Amy Tan and Sacha Z

632 Words2 Pages

The essays Mother Tongue by Amy Tan and Sacha Z. Scoblic’s Rock Star, Meet TeeTotaler are both stories of personal experience. The essays are written in an informal style, yet sophisticated phrasing, as well as confident writing in order to bring out sympathy and understanding from the readers. Both essays are narrated through both author’s own thoughts and feelings throughout their stories, as both become open and personal. The following paragraphs will compare and contrast how both essays have similar themes about overcoming obstacles in life, yet Sacha’s essay is more about the need to fit into society without changing oneself, while Amy’s is disproving assumptions society places on language and what true purpose of language.
To begin, Amy Tan was born in California to Chinese immigrant parents (Literature for Life 117). The story focuses on how Amy’s mother was always looked down on because she did not speak proper english. Amy had to grow up using different Englishes: what she learned in school, and the English she had to use at home which was a product of her culture. Amy strives to disprove how society thinks, just because someone has “broken” English means they have low intelligence or understanding. Even though society feels that her mother's language is “broken” her mother understands things Amy and numerous others could never begin to. Amy states how her mother reads Forbes reports, listens to Wall Street Week, and converses with her stockbroker, and yet friends and others can not understand what her mother says. So this proves that language in society is more than just communication, language is a social tool of measuring an individual's worth. Even when Amy’s teachers in school tried to steer her in oth...

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...ature for life 842).
In the end, both essays revealed struggles the authors had to go through in their life and overcame the obstacles along the way. Amy’s essay showed there was more to a person than their language even if society deemed their language “broken”, while Sacha’s essay proved society should not have a say in finding one’s identity or to define themselves. Both essays help the reader relate to numerous struggles in society and how to overcome those hurdles even if the journey might be long, and in the end the journey will be worth all the effort.

Works Cited

Scoblic, Sacha Z. “Rock Star, Meet Teetotaler.” Literature for Life. Ed. X. J. Kennedy,
Dana Gioia, and Nina Revoyr. New York: Pearson. 2013. 840. Print.
Tan, Amy . “Mother Tongue.” Literature for Life. Ed. X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia, and
Nina Revoyr. New York: Pearson. 2013. 117. Print.

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