Question

Consider Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” as well as the video you watched about code-switching. Identify and evaluate two examples of code-switching in Tan’s essay. How does this code-switching reflect Tan’s complex upbringing, cultural background, and life in American society?

Answer 1

Answer:

Code-switching is changing the way you communicate depending on whom you are talking to. For example, you would talk with your teacher differently than you would with your friends. In Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” the reader is presented with two different types of English language—Amy Tan’s perfect American English and her mother’s limited and sometimes incoherent English.

Although Amy Tan, who was educated in the United States, speaks Standard English, she sometimes code switches to a different kind of English—a language of intimacy, as she calls it—that she uses only while speaking to her mother or husband:

I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture, and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.

The reader also comes across another example of code-switching as Tan relays in perfect English what her mother is saying in “broken” English:

My mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."

And then I said in perfect English on the phone, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."

Tan’s mother’s English is limited and grammatically incorrect. A stranger might have a difficult time understanding her; however Tan grew up listening to this English and so she can perfectly understand it and interpret it for the rest of the world because her mother’s “impeccable broken English” helped her stay connected with their Chinese heritage and also helped her become the kind of writer she wanted to be:

I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with . . . I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

plato

Answer 2

Two examples of code-switching are when Tan speaks "incorrect" or "broken" English to her mom in the first personal anecdote (when she tells her mom not to buy something), and when Tan realizes that the English she's using for a literary event is strange to use in front of her mother. 

This code-switching reflects Tan's complex upbringing and Asian-American background, because, unlike many people who don't come from immigrant families or who don't speak several languages, she was acutely aware of certain sociolinguistic systems from an early age. For example, although Tan's mother's English makes sense to her, Tan would have to talk for her mother in several situations in order to be understood, to be taken more seriously, or even to be treated fairly.