Amy Tan Mother Tongue Essay

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Mothers tongue and two Kinds the essay “Mother Tongue” addresses characteristics of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Identify these characteristics. How are they represented in “Two Kinds”?

In Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” she illustrates the characteristics of both first and second generation immigrants. Also, she uses her short story “Two Kinds” to represent these characteristics. First generation immigrants are the first of their family to move to the United States. Tan’s essay describes her mother as a limited English speaker and describes her English as limited, broken and fractured (Tan essay, 3, 7). In “Two Kinds” the mother who is first generation in America also was a limited English speaker, throughout the story speaks in “broken
There is a similar example of this In “Two Kinds” the mother also reads “People magazine” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not “and is able to understand them to quiz her daughter (Tan TK,443). To quiz her daughter in the story, the mother needed to read, then understand the content of the quiz and this is hard especially when English is it your first language. This shows how the mother is intelligent enough to understand English. The last characteristic shown of first generation immigrants in Tan’s work was they were both determined. In “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan’s mother was trying to get a check sent in the mail from the New York stock broker, when the check did not come , she went to New York and confronted him in person (). This clearly shows that she was determined to get the money that she was entitled too. In “Two Kinds” the mother in the story was determined for her daughter to try her best, and become a prodigy in some way. She constantly quoted her daughter, got her piano lesson by cleaning someone’s home to trade and even saved up enough money to by her daughter her own piano so she could practice(). She was determined to set her daughter up for success and did everything in her power to help her out. Amy tans essay also showed

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