“Mother tongue” is an essay published in a literary magazine by Asian-American author Amy Tan that explores the relationship between the languages of her immigrant family and the majority of American society; the essay speaks to how this relationship affects the life and the identity of herself and her mother. To understand the importance of Tan’s argument, one must first be aware of the rhetorical situation surrounding the article. In 1990, Tan wrote this piece after the success of her novel The Joy Luck Club, which explores similar themes of Asian-American identity, however, unlike the fictional immigrant family in that novel, the story she describes here is a personal reflection on the struggles throughout her life. The article details her family’s existence in a perfect English-speaking world that looks down upon the foreign literacy of her mother’s language. Tan argues for awareness of this struggle by explaining how her mother’s speech has created challenges for her to succeed in American society. In the essay, Tan utilizes real dialogue between herself and her mother in order to make the story of her mother’s struggle more engaging, charged, and relatable, thus making her argument more effective. Specifically, Tan’s unique dialogue appeals to an audience of immigrants like her mother, who may struggle to grasp boring and complex academic paraphrasing and thus might better be appealed to with dialogue.  

There are many different ways to tell a story, but one of the most important parts of a story is the characters or the people who do things in a story. In Amy Tan’s story, her mother and her are both characters that do several different things. One of the most important things is how they talk to other characters or their conversations. In her essay, Amy Tan shows these conversations in two very different ways. In one way, she explains the conversations her characters are having by summarizing each part of it, for example, Tan writes, “We were talking about the price of new and used furniture” (Tan 1). In this sentence, Amy Tan summarizes the conversations she and her mother are having by simply writing that they talked about furniture, instead of writing down what each character actually said about the furniture, which is the other way of showing a conversation. In a second way, Amy Tan writes down word for word what the characters in her story are saying to each other. For example, in the same sentence, Amy Tan writes down her entire response about their conversation on furniture. She notes, “I heard myself saying this: ‘Don’t waste money that way’” (Tan 1). In this example, Amy Tan records all the words that came out of her mouth at that moment, this is called dialogue. Now which part of the sentence do you think was more interesting to read? Clearly, the second sentence was more interesting because you got to hear the unique way Amy Tan talks to her mother. The author, Amy Tan, uses this dialogue in order to make the character’s conversations more interesting to read. The essay would be quite boring if each sentence was only a summary of two characters’ conversations. You read stories with sentences like that all the time, but you rarely get the chance to hear the unique English of Amy Tan and her mother. The author writes like this on purpose to keep your interest, so you will continue to read and learn about her mother’s challenges. Amy Tan wants to keep the reader’s interest because she writes her stories for people like her mother to read them. Her mother is not very good at reading hard English sentences like the ones you find in the books they make you read in school. Amy Tan makes her stories more interesting with dialogue so people like a mother will keep reading since they usually do not read long books and sentences, and will push past their struggles because they are so interested. So basically, Tan writes down entire conversations in her story instead of summarizing them in order to keep your interest, that way when she gives her a moral of the story at the end, you will still be reading and paying attention to what she has to say.  By then you will have knowledge about why her moral is important and why they caused her mother to have challenges in life. Your attention is important in getting you to understand and believe in Tan’s moral that her mother should not have to go through such challenges in life.

Dialogue ain’t just to keep the reader from putting the essay down, it also works really well for making them passionate about the author’s characters. What would a story be without a little emotion? Tan scribbles countless conversations down for the emotion they provoke in the reader’s naive and suggestible minds. Here is a great example, in the essay Tan talks about how as a kid she would take phone calls for her mom, and converse in her more standardized English speech. Why did she do this? Basically, so people would not discriminate against her mother’s unique way of speaking, but I digress. Right so one day, her mom’s stockbroker decides to withhold her money from their account, so Tan rings the stockbroker and translates each sentence her mom wishes she could say to him. As she is translating her mom begins to become louder and more emotional in her speech. Check this out, Tan declares, “Then she began to talk more loudly, ‘What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?’” (Tan 3). Without a doubt, her mother’s dialogue indicates that she’s upset, with the way she poses that threatening rhetorical question out loud, asking whether she should expose the stockbroker to his boss, and the words she uses like “cheating”, to paint the stockbroker in a negative light. One can feel the anger coming out of the lines of text, and it evokes the same feelings in the reader as this emotion causes them to connect with her mother and feel empathy for her struggle. Tan uses her dialogue to make the reader feel raw pity for her mother’s struggles with English. Once readers are connected and have built an emotional bond with her mother’s struggle they will be more easily persuaded to side with her argument, and more prone to act on the actions she suggests in the message of her argument. If you think about it, Tan’s also kind of a genius because she makes her essay emotional on purpose to appeal to her main audience of immigrants. Immigrants are people who might struggle with English, which means they might struggle to fully grasp the entire argument or logic of an English essay because they struggle with the diction in it. So, Amy Tan uses dialogue that conveys emotion because feelings of pity or anger have no language and can be felt by the reader through dialogue much easier than they can be explained in a complex summary.

Not only does dialogue serve the rhetorical function of making a text more engaging and charged but also helps immerse the reader in the world in which the essay takes place. It remains true that writing is a limiting medium, through only text some writers face the challenge of giving readers a sense of something they have no knowledge of. In the text, Tan faces that problem as the reader does not have the same memories and perspective that she has of her mother. To help connect the reader to her mother, dialogue is given from the conversations Tan has had with her mother. This can be seen at the moment when Tan pretends to be her mother on the phone in order to persuade a stockbroker to assist her mother. Tan writes down her mother’s angry commands as she tells her daughter what to say to the stockbroker. Tan writes, “And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, ‘Why he don’t send me the check, already two weeks late. So mad he lied to me, losing me money’” (Tan 3). The quiet angry words of Tan’s mother highlight how dialogue helps break through the limits of text as the reader becomes immersed in the scene. Through her mother’s dialogue, the reader can hear the sounds of her mother’s speech aloud when they read it, how the short direct structure of her words plays off the tongue. The mother’s speech works to characterize her mother in the reader’s eyes, as they began to be engrossed in the scene to feel as if they were really there hearing Tan’s mother whisper in their ear how upset she is towards the stockbroker. This sensation of being in a story is very powerful in connecting the reader to the story and works in making them feel as if they are living through a memory they never actually had. Similar to the previous paragraph on the dialogue in the essay provoking emotion, Amy Tan utilizes immersive dialogue to help her intended audience of immigrants or groups unfamiliar with academic English understand rather complex topics much easier. Instead of explaining the world, Tan wants to immerse her reader in, which might be difficult to understand for people who struggle with English. Tan opts to immerse the reader through dialogue that is much easier to read and comprehend in English since in our daily lives and in the audience’s daily lives they hear conversations more than they hear people summarize and describe conversations. Only through this connection to the scene and the world of the story does the reader become susceptible to feeling emotions for people they never met.  In conclusion, the conversations between Tan and her mother work in immersing the reader in the story, which illustrates dialogue’s potency as a rhetorical device that makes a reader far more susceptible to side with Tan’s argument.

Whether to keep your interest, make you cry, or immerse you in another person’s life, dialogue stands to be the rhetoric foundation of Amy Tan’s essay. Her genius usage of her and her mother’s conversations is effective in changing the thoughts and perceptions of an otherwise unaware audience. In connection with Amy Tan’s essay, the audience eagerly yearns to fight for something bigger than themselves by examining and reflecting on their own prejudices towards unique and remarkable backgrounds.