How CAN SOMEONE WHO LIVES IN INSANE LUXURY BE A STAR …

442 ChapterEight/Definition

How CAN SOMEONE WHO LIVES

IN INSANE LUXURY BE A STAR

IN TODAY'S WORLD?Ben Stein

Ben Stein (1944- ) graduated from Columbia University with a degree in econom-icsand from Yale Law School. He has worked as a lawyer and as a law professorfor anumber ofyears. In the 1970s he was a speechwriter and lawyer for President RichardNixon. A columnist and editorial writer for major newspapers and magazines, he isalso the author or co-authorof sixteen books.In addition, he has written scriptsandhas acted in film, television, and commercials. "How Can Someone" was the final bi-weekly column in a series titled "Monday Night at Morton)-" published by E!Online,a Webzine devoted to entertainment news and celebrity gossip. Morton)- is a famouschain of steakhouses. The column originally appeared in December 2003 and hasawide distribution on the Web.

On Writing: Stein, a widely published, prolific writer, once indicated to an in-

terviewer that writing is one of the things he likes the least. Although, he added, hedoes it nevertheless.

BEFORE READING

Connecting: Are you ever interested in the celebrity gossip? Do you ever readany of the many publications or watch any of the television shows devoted tothe lives of Hollywood stars?

Anticipating: What are the circumstances that seem to have led Stein to writingthis particular column?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put aheading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFI-NAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column forso long that I cannot even recall when I started.

2 I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believeitwould never end. Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to doitmaybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much forso long I came to believe it would never end.

But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass.In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have knownforever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights.

4 He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a columnabout the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

Ben Stein/How Can SomeoneBe a Star in Today'sWorld? 443

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person 5and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, whilebetter than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings inthe rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, 6and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in anelevator, in which we agreed that Splendorin the Grasswas a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will 7be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Holly- 8wood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly peo-ple, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or womanwho makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of acamera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head 9into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. How can a man or woman who makesan eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today'sworld, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive asa role model?

Realstarsare not ridingaround in the backsoflimousinesor in Porsches 10or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they haveVietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but theyare not heroes to me any longer.

Areal star is the soldierof the 4th Infantry Divisionwho poked hishead 11into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb ora hall of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and thegratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road 12north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. 13soldierin Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ord-nance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her asideand threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in Cali-forniaand a little girl alive in Baghdad.

I no longer want to perpetuate poor values by pretending that who is 14eatingat Morton's is a big subject. The stars who deserve media attention arenot the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol thestreetsof Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bod-

iesbattered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.We put couples with incomes of$100 million a year on the covers of our 15

magazines.The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military paybutstand on guard in Mghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarinesandnear the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor 16values,and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who iseatingat Morton's is a big subject.

444 ChapterEightlDefinition

17 There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The police-men and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea ifthey will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people whohave been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers andnurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kindmen and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

18 Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at theWorld Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

19 Now you have my idea of a real hero.2D Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity.

Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the run-ning for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.

21 We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what hap-pens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when weturn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could everdofor ourselves.

22 In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directorsof the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

23 I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that mat-ters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way.Yearsago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comicas Steve Martin-or Martin Mull or Fred Willard-or as good an economistas Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotelyclose to any of them.

24 But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above

all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came tobemy main task in life.

25 I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and wellindeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attentionto them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, wentinto extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sisterand me reading him the Psalms.

26 This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiersin Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help

others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lamlife God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. Timis my highest and best use as a human.

27 A5so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. Butlthink the best guidance I ever got was &om the inauguration speech of D~mocratJohn F. Kennedy in January of 1961.

28 On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good conscienaour only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forti. . . asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth,work must surely be our own."

29 Andthen to paraphrasemyfavoritepresident,mybossand mend RicharrNixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a

Judy Brady/1Wanta Wift 447

I WANT A WIFEJudy Brady

Judy Brady was born in 1937 in San Francisco, California, and received a B.RA. in

paintingfrom the University of Iowa. As afreelance writer, Brady has written essaysontopicssuch as union organizing, abortion, and the role of women in society.Currently an

activist focusing on issues related to cancer and the environment, she has edited sev-eral bookson the subject, including One in Three: Women with Cancer Confrontan Epidemic (1991).

Brady's most frequently reprinted essay is "1 Want a Wife," which originallyappeared in Ms. magazine in 1971. After examining the stereotypical male demandsin marriage, Brady concludes, "Who wouldn't want a wife?"

BEFORE READING

Connecting: In a relationship, what separates reasonable needs or desiresfrom unreasonable or selfish ones?

Anticipating: What is the effect of the repetition of the phrase "1want a . . ."in the essay?

Ibelong to that classification of people known as wives. 1 am A Wife. And,not altogether incidentally, 1 am a mother.

Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from 2a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He isobviouslylooking for another wife. As 1 thought about him while 1was iron-ingone evening, it suddenly occurred to me that 1, too, would like to have awife.Why do 1want a wife?

1would like to go back to school so that 1can become economically in-dependent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me.I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while 1 am going toschool1want a wife to take care of my children. 1want a wife to keep track ofthe children's doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine,too.1want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. 1wanta wife who will wash the children's clothes and keep them mended. 1wanta wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges fortheir schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with theirpeers,takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. 1want a wife who takes care of thechildrenwhen they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the chil-drenneed special care, because, of course, 1cannot miss classes at school. Mywifemust arrange to lose time at work, and not lose the job. It may mean asmallcut in my wife's income from time to time, but 1guess 1can tolerate that.


Needless to say,my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children whilemy wife is working.

4 I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife whowill keep my house clean. A wifewho will pick up after me. I want a wife who willkeep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will seeto it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find whatI need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who isa good cook. I want a wife who will plan the meals, do the necessary groceryshopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaningup while I do my studying. I want a wife who will care for me when I am sickand sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school. I want a wife to goalong when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to carefor me and my children when I need a rest and change of scene.

5 I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about awife's duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to

explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. AndI want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.

6 I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When mywife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of thebabysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want toentertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal,serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about the things thatinterest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the chil-dren are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do notbother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feelcomfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed thehors d'oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wineglassesare replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as theylike it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself.

7 I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes lovepassionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I amsatisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attentionwhen I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete re-sponsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want awife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter upmy intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that mysexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, af-ter all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.

8 If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wifeI already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one.Naturally I will expect a fresh, new life; my wife will take the children and besolely responsible for them so that I am left free.

9 When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quitworking and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completelytake care of a wife's duties.

10 My God, who wouldn't want a wife?

Judy Brady/!want a Wife 449

QUESTIONS ON SUBJECT AND PURPOSE

1. In what way is this a definition of a wife? Why does Brady avoid a moreconventional definition?

2. Is Brady being fair? Is there anything that she leaves out of her definitionthat you would have included?

3. What purpose might Brady have been trying to achieve?

QUESTIONS ON STRATEGY AND AUDIENCE

1. How does Brady structure her essay? What is the order of thedevelopment? Could the essay have been arranged in any other way?

2. Why does Brady identify herself by her roles-wife and mother-atthe beginning of the essay? Is that information relevant in any way?

3. What assumptions does Brady have about her audience (readers of Ms.magazine in the early 1970s)? How do you know?

QUESTIONS ON VOCABUlARY AND STYLE

1. How does Brady use repetition in the essay? Why? Does it work?What effect does it create?

2. How effective is Brady's final rhetorical question? Where else in theessay does she use a rhetorical question?

3. Be able to define the following words: nurturant (paragraph 3), harsd'oeuvres(6), replenished(6), monogamy(7).

WRITING SUGGESTIONS

1. For Your Journal. What do you look for in a possible spouse or"significant other"? Make a list of what you expect or want from arelationship with another person. Once you have brainstormed the list,rank each item in order of importance-which is most important, andwhich is least important? If you are in a relationship right now, tryevaluating that relationship in light of your own priorities.

2. For a Paragraph. Using the material that you generated in yourjournal entry, write a paragraph definition of the kind of person youseek for a committed relationship. Be serious. Do not try to imitateBrady's style.

3. For an Essay. Define a word naming a central human relationshiprole, such as husband,lover,friend, mother,father, child,sister,brother,orgrandparent. Define the term indirectly by showing what such a persondoes or should do.

4. For Research. What does it mean to be a wife in another culture?Choose at least two other cultures, and research those societies'expectations of a wife. Try to find cultures that show significantdifferences. Remember that interviews might be a good source ofinformation-even e-mail interviews with wives in other cultures.

Robin D. G. Kelley/The Peoplein Me 451

THE PEOPLEIN MERobin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley (1962- ) was born in New .YorkCity and raised in Harlem, Seat-tle, and Pasadena, California. A g;raduate of California State University, LongBeach, Kelley earned his MA. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Ange-les. Currently a professor of history at Columbia University, Kelley has been called"the preeminent historian of black popular culture writing today. " The author andeditor of many books, Kelley)- most recent collectionsof essaysinclude Yo' Mama's Dis-Funktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997) and FreedomDreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002).

On Writing: Complimented in an interview on the accessibility of his writ-ing, Kelley replied, "That)- the biggest compliment, because that)- the one thing Itry to achieve, only because I can't understand academic writing myself. I'm just notthat smart. "

BEFORE READING

Connecting: Who are the people in you? What do you know about yourancestors?

Anticipating: Kelley prefers the word "polycultural" rather than "multicul-tural." Why? What is the difference?

"So, what are you?" I don't know how many times people have asked me

that. "Are you Puerto Rican? Dominican? Indian or something? You must bemixed." My stock answer has rarely changed: "My mom is from Jamaica butgrewup in New York, and my father was from North Carolina but grew up inBoston. Both black."

My family has lived with "the question" for as long as I can remember. 2We're "exotics," all cursed with "good hair" and strange accents-we don'tsound like we from da Souf or the Norwth, and don't have that West Coast-by-way-of-Texas Calabama thang going on. The only one with the real WestIndian singsong vibe is my grandmother, who looks even more East Indian thanmysisters. Whatever Jamaican patois my mom possessed was pummeled out ofherby cruel preteens who never had sensitivity seminars in diversity.The resultfor us was a nondescript way of talking, walking, and being that made us notblack enough, not white enough-just a bunch of not-quite-nappy-headederugmas.

My mother never fit the "black momma" media image. A beautiful, de-mure, light brown woman, she didn't drink, smoke, curse, or say things like"LawdJesus" or "hallelujah," nor did she cook chitlins or gumbo. A vegetarian,sheplayed the harmonium (a foot-pumped miniature organ), spoke softly with


textbook diction, meditated, followed the teachings of Paramahansa Yo-gananda, and had wild hair like Chaka Khan. She burned incense in our tinyHarlem apartment, sometimes walked the streets barefoot, and, when she couldafford it, cooked foods from the East.

4 To this day, my big sister gets misidentified for Pakistani or Bengali orEthiopian. (Of course, changing her name from Sheral Anne Kelley to MakaniThemba has not helped.) Not long ago, an Oakland cab driver, apparently aSikh who had immigrated from India, treated my sister like dirt until he dis-covered that she was not a "scoundrel from Sri Lanka," but a common blackAmerican. Talk about ironic. How often are black women spared indignitiesbecausethey are African American?

5 "What are you?" dogged my little brother more than any of us. He cameout looking just like his father, who was white. In the black communities ofLos Angeles and Pasadena, my baby bro' had to fight his way into blackness,usually winning only when he invited his friends to the house. When he gottired of this, he became what people thought he was-a cool white boy. Todayhe lives in Tokyo, speaks fluent Japanese, and is happily married to aJapanesewoman (who is actually Korean passing asJapanese!) He stands as the perfectexample of our mulattoness: a black boy trapped in a white body who speaksEnglish with a slightJapanese accent and has a son who will spend his life con-fronting "the question."

6 Although folk had trouble naming us, we were never blanks or aliens ina "black world." We were and are "polycultural," and I'm talking about allpeoples in the Western world. It is not skin, hair, walk, or talk that rendersblack people so diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most of them are products ofdifferent "cultures"-living cultures, not dead ones. These cultures live in andthrough us every day, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy ormeaning. "Polycultural" works better than "multicultural," which implies thatcultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side-a kind of zoologicalapproach to culture. Such a view obscures power relations, but often reifiesrace and gender differences.

7 Black people were polycultural from the get-go. Most of our ancestorscame to these shores not as Africans, but as lbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Kongo, Barn-bara, Mende, Mandingo, and so on. Some of our ancestors came as Spanish,Portuguese, French, Dutch, Irish, English, Italian. And more than a few of us,in North America as well as in the Caribbean and Latin America, have Asianand Native American roots.

8 Our lines of biological descent are about as pure as O.J.'s blood sample,and our cultural lines of descent are about as mixed up as a pot of gumbo.What we know as "black culture" has always been fluid and hybrid. In Harlemin the late 1960s and 1970s, Nehru suits were as popular-and as "black"-asdashikis, and martial arts films placed Bruce Lee among a pantheon of blackheroes that included Walt Frazier of the New York Knicks and Richard Roun-

tree, who played John Shaft in blaxploitation cinema. How do we understandthe zoot suit-or the conk-without the pachuco culture of Mexican Ameri-can youth, or low riders in black communities without Chicanos? How can we

RobinD. G. K.elley/ThePeoplein Me 453

discuss black visual artists in the interwar years without reference to the Mex-ican muralists, or the radical graphics tradition dating back to the late 19thcentury, or the Latin American artists influenced by surrealism?

Vague notions of "Eastern" religion and philosophy, as well as a variety 9of Orientalist assumptions, were far more important to the formation of theLost-Found Nation ofIslam than anything coming out of Africa. And Rasta-farians drew many of their ideas from South Asians, from vegetarianism to mar-ijuana, which was introduced into Jamaica by Indians. Major black movementslike Garveyism and the African Blood Brotherhood are also the products ofglobal developments. We won't understand these movements until we see themas part of a dialogue with Irish nationalists from the Easter Rebellion, Russianand Jewish emigres from the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and Asian socialistslike India's M. N. Roy and Japan's Sen Katayama.

Indeed, I'm not sure we can even limit ourselves to Earth. How do we 10make sense of musicians Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Lee "Scratch" Perryor, for that matter, the Nation of Islam, when we consider the fact thatspace travel and notions of intergalactic exchange constitute a key source oftheir ideas?

So-called "mixed race" children are not the only ones with a claim to mul- 11tiple heritages. All of us are inheritors of European, African, Native American,and Asian pasts, even if we can't exactly trace our bloodlines to these continents.

To some people that's a dangerous concept. Too many Europeans don't 12want to acknowledge that Africans helped create so-called Western civiliza-tion, that they are both indebted to and descendants of those they enslaved.They don't want to see the world as One-a tiny little globe where people andcultures are always on the move, where nothing stays still no matter how manytimes we name it. To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dy-namism is not to give up our black identity. It does mean expanding our defi-nition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the richdiversity within us with new eyes.

So next time you see me, don't ask where I'm from or what I am, unless 13you're ready to sit through a long-ass lecture. As singer/songwriter AbbeyLincoln once put it, "I've got some people in me."


1. Why is the question "What are you?" not a simple one?

2. The first section of the essay (through paragraph 5) deals with Kelley'sfamily. What does their story have to do with the rest of the essay?

3. What might be Kelley's purpose in the essay?


1. Does Kelley's opening paragraph catch your attention? Why or why not?

2. How would you characterize the first five paragraphs in Kelley's essay?What is he doing? What organizational strategy does he use?


MOTHER TONGUE

Amy Tan

Born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to Chinese immigrants, Amy Tan graduatedfrom San Jose State University with a double major in English and linguistics and

an M.A. in linguistics. Tan did not write fiction until 1985, when she began the sto-ries that would become her first and very successful novel, The Joy Luck Club(1989), also a popular film. Tan ~children ~book The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994)is the basisfor the daily animated television series, Sagwa, The Chinese SiameseCat (PBS). Her most recent novel is Saving Fish From Drowning (2005).

On Writing: Asked about her writing, Tan responded: "I welcome criticismwhen I'm writing my books. I want to become better and better as a writer. I go to awriter~ group every week. we read our work aloud." In another interview she com-mented, "I still think of myself, in many ways, as a beginning writer. I'm still learningmy craft, learning what makes for a good story, what~ an honest voice."

BEFORE READING

Connecting: How sensitive are you to the language that you use or your familyuses? Are you ever conscious of that language? Are you ever embarrassed byit? Are you proud of it?

Anticipating: In what ways does the language of Tan and her mother "define"them in the eyes of others?

I am not a scholar of Engiish or literature. I cannot give you much more thanpersonal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country orothers.

2 I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always lovedlanguage. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of mytime thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion,a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of mytrade. And I use them all-all the Englishes I grew up with.

Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. Iwas giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already givento half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, mylife, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough,until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk soundwrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she hadheard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never usedwith her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagi-nation" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"-aspeech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly

Amy 'Tan/MotherTongue 457

seemed to me, with nominalized fonns, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases,all the fonns of standard English that I had learned in school and through books,the fonns of English I did not use at home with my mother.

Just last week, I waswalking down the street with my mother, and I again 4found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use withher. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heardmyself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us aswell, 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 thatsame kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It hasbecome our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates tofamily talk, the language I grew up with.

So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'll 5

quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotapedand then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking abouta 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 fam-ily,which was rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful,far richer than my mother's family, and one day showed up at my mother'swedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part:

"Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He 6is Du like Du Zong-but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people callputong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man wantto ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong fatherwasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like be-come a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way,came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for making big cel-ebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinesesocial life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come tomy wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA din-ner. Chinese age I was nineteen."

Youshould know that my mother's expressive command of English belies 7

how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbesreport, listens to WallStreet week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of ShirleyMacLaine's books with ease-all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yetsome of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says.Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none ofit, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is per-fectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it,is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language thathelped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.

Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother 8speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured"English. But I wince when I say that. It has alwaysbothered me that I can thinkof no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed


to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard otherterms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if every-thing is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.

9 I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "lim-ited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I be-lieved that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is,because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And Ihad plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in de-partment stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did notgive her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if theydid not hear her.

10 My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well.When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretendI was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to com-plain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to herstockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just sohappened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first tripoutside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voicethat was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."

11 And my mother wasstanding in the back whispering loudly, ''Why he don'tsend me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."

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

13 Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to NewYork tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm herdown, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate anymore excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have tospeak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure enough,the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, andI was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, wasshouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.

14 We used a similarroutine just fivedaysago, for a situation that wasfarless humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, tofind out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes.Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost theCAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to haveany sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagno-sis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said theywould not give her any more information until the next time and she wouldhave to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leaveuntil the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doc-tor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English-Io andbehind-we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that aconference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering mymother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.

Amy Tan/Mother Tongue 459

I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possi- 15bilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that aperson's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I dothink that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant familieswhich are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child.And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and theSAT.While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math,English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moder-ately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoringperhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But thosescores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities layin math and science, because in those areas I achieved & and scored in theninetieth percentile or higher.

This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct an- 16swer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always ajudgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests wereconstructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as,"Even though Tom was _, Mary thought he was _." And the correctanswer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for ex-ample, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming," with thegrammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sortof semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tomwas foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother,there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and whatMary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.

The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were 17supposed to find some sort oflogical, semantic relationship--for example,"Sunsetis to nightfall as _ is to _." And here you would be presented with a listof four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red isto stoplight,busis to arrival, chillsis to fever,yawn is to boring.Well, I could neverthink that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out ofmy mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunsetis to nightfall"-andI would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the low-ering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words-red, bus,stoplight,boring-just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for meto sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is thesame as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answerright would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my be-ing disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turnsinto feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.

I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, 18about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why thereare not more Asian-Americans represented in American literature. Why arethere few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do somany Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological


questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys-in fact, justlast week-that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better onmath achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that thereare other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home mightalso be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teach-ers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, whichis what happened to me.

19 Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the chal-lenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English ma-jor my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writingnonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss thatwriting was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward accountmanagement.

20 But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at firstI wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences thatwould finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an exam-ple from the first draft of a story that later made its way into TheJoy Luck Club,but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." Aterrible line, which I can barely pronounce.

21 Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I shouldenvision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided uponwas my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this readerin mind-and in fact she did read my early drafts-I began to write stories us-ing all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, whichfor lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she usedwith me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; mytranslation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watereddown"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she couldspeak in perfect English, her intemallanguage, and for that I sought to pre-serve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted tocapture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion,her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

22 Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had suc-ceeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gaveme her verdict: "So easy to read."


1. What does the title "Mother Tongue" suggest?2. How many subjects does Tan explore in the essay?3. How does Tan feel about her mother's "tongue"?


1. In paragraph 6, Tan quotes part of one of her mother's conversations.Why?

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