In the personal essay, "Mother Tongue", written by Amy Tan (1990), the author asserts that growing up in a "broken English" speaking home caused many hardships and challenges that many immigrants have to face due to the way they speak.  She illustrates this reality by giving examples of her personal interactions with her family and the community at large, and the responses that were received from the community because of it.  The development of Tan's essay implies that immigrants are often misunderstood when speaking the English language, it informs the reader of the hardship and consequences those individuals and their families face because of how they speak in order to enlighten them so immigrants will not continue to be stereotyped. Tan is targeting other writers, scholars, especially those in the literary field as her audience, her relationship to them is the use of language and the understanding of it incorporated in their writing..

  

Reading Tan's narrative, we were able to see a descriptive visual of the challenges immigrants face in everyday life. I faced a similar situation this past holiday when I traveled with my family to Nairobi, Kenya.  My wife's father is Kenyan. His English is still very difficult at times for me to understand, because of the accent. I have to listen very closely. Tan wants to change our perception of how we view our interaction due to language and treat each other with respect.  The alternative is misunderstanding sometimes with negative results.  Tan tells the story of how her mother had her translate a phone conversation with her stockbroker by pretending to be her mother.  Not because she couldn’t understand or speak for herself, but because she recognized that people were rude to her because they could not understand.  She had cashed out a stock portfolio and had not received her check, and she wanted answers.  Another example, a hospital visit that did not go very well.  Vital information was lost, a diagnosis was not properly explained and a patient was left confused all because people were too impatient to take the time to understand her.  Tan also illustrates her point by citing a survey that asserts Asian students always do significantly better in math than in English.  She proposes that this may be due to the English being spoken in the home may be also described as "broken or limited".  "And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math".  It seems misunderstanding can also lead to stereotyping

Language is a very powerful and useful tool.  Effective communication is vital to our very existence.  Having command of the English language can make life easier. For immigrants, having someone effectively listen to them makes life easier.  To gain understanding where you can respond, one must critically listen to be able to decipher the intent of the speaker.  I loved how Tan ends this essay by stating how she envisioned the readers she would write for, one being her mother.  She stated how she would utilize the different Englishes she grew up with in her writing. All of this in a effort to preserve essence of the language, not a English or Chinese structure. She states, "I wanted to capture what language ability test can never reveal, her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech, the nature of her thoughts".  This sentence resonated with me because it takes being able to look past what we perceive what something looks like or sounds like on the surface, to see the true beauty of a person and all that they have to offer.