Mother Tongue

                                                            Mother Tongue


I was not impressed with Amy Tam's commentary in her essay Mother Tongue. What is more, I am an immigrant to the United States, so I believe I have skin in this game. Furthermore, none of my grandparents had English as their first language, making my parents the equivalent generation as Amy Tam. I understand Chinese(correct me if I am wrong, but she never specified: Cantonese or Mandarin) has absolutely no correlation to English. Understandably, when Tam's mother moved to California, she started English from nothing! Similarly, two of my grandparents conversed in Hungarian amongst themselves, and spoke English and French with an accent, as they moved from Slovakia and Romania, to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Herein lies the difference; nothing mattered more to my grandparents than assimilation into North American culture. They did not teach my father and his siblings any of their 6 languages, only English. So, it sounds foreign to me when I read " I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well." First of all, what does "almost" imply? Secondly, Tam was in Pre-Med before transferring to English as a major in university, what possibilities were limited?  At no point throughout this memoir do I recall feeling compassion towards the victim mentality status Tam pontificates upon.