Mother Tongue — Vocabulary
Amy Tan
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And all the other pairs of words —red, bus, stoplight, boring—just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever."†

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.†

But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child.†

My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.†

And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:' Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him.†

She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors.†

So with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts—I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.†

And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, I.Q. tests, and the SAT.†

And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.†

So I never did well on tests like that The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship — for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as _ is to _ ."†

In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her.†

Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers.†

My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.†2 more

During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family's, Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison.†