Strong Interest With Language. She Holds the

¶ … strong interest with language. She holds the view that language is a powerful tool which can evoke emotion, a complex idea, a visual image or just a simple truth. She noticed keenly of the different English that she uses when giving a talk to a large group of people about her life and book. The talk was going on well until she realized that her mother was in the room. She was using a kind of English which her mother has never heard her use before.

This was a type of English she had never used with her mother before. The main idea of the writer is that she uses different a different kind of English when communicating to her mother and when writing or communicating to other people. She admits that she is always conscious of the type of English she uses with her mother. She always adjusts her English in such a way that her mother can understand.

She tries as much as possible not to use phrases and words that her mother cannot understand. She barely notices when she switches from the "normal English" to the English she uses with her mother because she has been doing that for a very long time. From a transcribed video conversation her mother had it clearly proves her idea that the English her mother speaks it something else. It is a kind of English which someone who is not used to it can barely understand.

It is a kind of English that requires someone to be quite attentive when talking to her so that one cam try and make out something out of the conversation.

The interesting part of all this is the fact that her mother reads Forbes report, she listens to wall street conversations together with her stock broker and reads Shirley McLain's books with a lot of ease yet some people say they understand 50% of what she says, some say they understand 80% while others say they get nothing at all and when they talk to her its like she is purely speaking Chinese. According to the writer, her mother's English is clear, natural and her mother tongue.

She says that her mother's language is what shaped her perception of things, her expression of things and how she made sense of the world. She describes this English as broken or fractured. This description suggests that the language needs to be fixed and it lacked some wholeness. When the writer was growing up her mother's English limiter the perception she had of her, she felt ashamed of her English and believed it was a reflection of a limited quality of whatever she said.

This is evidenced by the fact that people in restaurants, department stores and banks never took her seriously and didn't give her good service under the pretence that they never understood what she was saying. Her mother had come to the realization that her English limited her and therefore on many occasions she made the writer pretend she was her especially in telephone conversations. This kind of broken English has made most of the Asian-American students explore less in literature and English. Teachers play.