Blog Post #2, Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

I was reading an essay in class earlier this week called Mother Tongue written by Amy Tan, the story/essay is about the author Amy (A fluent English speaker) who discusses her life so far growing up under a Chinese mother in the United States of America who speaks "fractured" or "broken" English. Fractured or broken English refers to limited English or poor English. A major thing Amy Tan in her story talks about is how the English speaking so therefore Western world is starting to stereotype English speakers who come from different countries and ethnicity. Basically she is stating that Non Native English speakers are being stereotyped and overlooked and not really been taken seriously by the Native English speakers.

One big story that really caught my eye in the story relating to the stereotyping was when her mother at the hospital at an CAT scan area and the hospital apparently lost her (Amy's mum) CAT scan and couldn't find it and they were acting very rude as they showed no sympathy as family members had died because of brain tumours or emotions or even said sorry to her about it. The hospital didn't take Amy's mum seriously and stated they would not give her any more information and had to organize another appointment to know about anything more but her daughter Amy (who is an absolute fluent speaker of the language) immediately speaks to the hospital about it and suddenly the hospital just changes their attitude, behaves more nicely and says that they had found the CAT scan. This shows the difference between a Non Native English speaker and a Native one and the difficulties and disadvantage it is being a Non Native English Speaker.

The hospital pretty much doomed her mother to not be very smart just because of her limited English speaking skills. I have to admit it but I feel like a couple of times I may have perceived someone as being more smart and intelligent just due to the quality of English they use and the words they say. Growing up in a country like Australia, there was here and there some stereotypes to people who were not native speakers of English so therefore I have been raised a little bit with how people are perceived "worse" due to not being the native speakers or having a lower level of English speaking. I think this is all FALSE, we are either raised in a native country that speaks English fluently so we catch onto it or we are not. If we are not then we have a lower chance of speaking English fluently but that should not determine that we are worse. The stereotyping is completely wrong, it is the equivalent of saying a person born and raised in Australia who speaks fluent in English goes to China. There he or she will have to speak Chinese, of course his or her Chinese will be poor and limited due to having 0 experience from learning or speaking Chinese but that doesn't make him or her less intelligent. Language is a worldwide thing, we know some languages others don't and we speak some languages better than others and some worse. Just because your English is not as good, doesn't mean you are not as intelligent as the person who is more fluent and has better English speaking skills than you.