《母语Mother Tongue》By Amy Tan谭恩美(Scopes_New_York_Times_Article)
【8A版】Mother-tongue的全文原文及翻译
MotherTongue(母语)byAmyTanMother Tongue (母语)AmyTan Thelifehistoryoftheindividualisfirstandforemostanaccommodationtothepatternsandstandardst raditionallyhandeddowninhiscommunity.—byRuthBenedict个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特IamnotascholarofEnglishorliterature.IcannotgiveyoumuchmorethanpersonalopinionsontheEn glishlanguageanditsvariationsinthiscountryorothers.我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。
我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
Iamawriter.Andbythatdefinition,Iamsomeonewhohasalwayslovedlanguage.Iamfascinatedbyl anguageindailylife.Ispendagreatdealofmytimethinkingaboutthepoweroflanguage—thewayitc anevokeanemotion,avisualimage,acompleGidea,nguageisthetoolofmytrade .AndIusethemall—alltheEnglishesIgrewupwith.我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。
我着迷于日常生活中的语言。
我花费了很长时间来思考语言的力量—语言是如何唤起情感、视觉景象、复杂思想或简明真理。
语言是我的执业工具。
我应用所有的英语—与我一生相伴的所有英语形式。
Recently,IwasmadekeenlyawareofthedifferentEnglishesIdouse.Iwasgivingatalktoalargegroup ofpeople,thesametalkIhadalreadygiventohalfadozenothergroups.Thenatureofthetalkwasabou tmywriting,mylife,andmybook,TheJoyLuckClub.ThetalkwasgoingalongwellenoughuntilIreme mberedonemajordifferencethatmadethewholetalksoundwrong.Mymotherwasintheroom.Andi twasperhapsthefirsttimeshehadheardmegivealengthyspeech,usingthekindofEnglishIhavenev erusedwithher.Iwassayingthingslike,”Theintersectionofmemoryuponimagination”and“Thereis anaspectofmyfictionthatrelatestothus-and-thus”---aspeechfilledwithcarefullywroughtgramma ticalphrases,burdened,itsuddenlyseemedtome,withnominalizedforms,pastperfecttenses,cond itionalphrases,alltheformsofstandardEnglishthatIhadlearnedinschoolandthroughbooks,thefor msofEnglishIdidnotuseathomewithmymother.最近发生的一些事使我对我所用的不同形式的英语有了更为深刻的认识。
【8A版】Mother-tongue的全文原文及翻译
MotherTongue(母语)byAmyTanMother Tongue (母语)AmyTan Thelifehistoryoftheindividualisfirstandforemostanaccommodationtothepatternsandstandardst raditionallyhandeddowninhiscommunity.—byRuthBenedict个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特IamnotascholarofEnglishorliterature.IcannotgiveyoumuchmorethanpersonalopinionsontheEn glishlanguageanditsvariationsinthiscountryorothers.我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。
我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
Iamawriter.Andbythatdefinition,Iamsomeonewhohasalwayslovedlanguage.Iamfascinatedbyl anguageindailylife.Ispendagreatdealofmytimethinkingaboutthepoweroflanguage—thewayitc anevokeanemotion,avisualimage,acompleGidea,nguageisthetoolofmytrade .AndIusethemall—alltheEnglishesIgrewupwith.我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。
我着迷于日常生活中的语言。
我花费了很长时间来思考语言的力量—语言是如何唤起情感、视觉景象、复杂思想或简明真理。
语言是我的执业工具。
我应用所有的英语—与我一生相伴的所有英语形式。
Recently,IwasmadekeenlyawareofthedifferentEnglishesIdouse.Iwasgivingatalktoalargegroup ofpeople,thesametalkIhadalreadygiventohalfadozenothergroups.Thenatureofthetalkwasabou tmywriting,mylife,andmybook,TheJoyLuckClub.ThetalkwasgoingalongwellenoughuntilIreme mberedonemajordifferencethatmadethewholetalksoundwrong.Mymotherwasintheroom.Andi twasperhapsthefirsttimeshehadheardmegivealengthyspeech,usingthekindofEnglishIhavenev erusedwithher.Iwassayingthingslike,”Theintersectionofmemoryuponimagination”and“Thereis anaspectofmyfictionthatrelatestothus-and-thus”---aspeechfilledwithcarefullywroughtgramma ticalphrases,burdened,itsuddenlyseemedtome,withnominalizedforms,pastperfecttenses,cond itionalphrases,alltheformsofstandardEnglishthatIhadlearnedinschoolandthroughbooks,thefor msofEnglishIdidnotuseathomewithmymother.最近发生的一些事使我对我所用的不同形式的英语有了更为深刻的认识。
amy tan mother tongue读后感
Amy tan mother tongue读后感谭恩美在《母语》一文中，写了一些母亲的轶事，以及母亲有限的英语对她早期发展的影响，表达了她对母语的理解。
这篇文章传达了三个信息，即母语帮助她逐步了解自己的母亲，找到自己的文化根源，并在美国文化和中国文化之间实现平衡，塑造了她的思维。
谭恩美表达的第一个信息是，母语是通往母亲心灵的一扇门，它帮助她改变了对母亲的看法。
在这篇文章中，谭恩美不喜欢她母亲的英语，并为她的英语感到羞愧：“我知道这是事实，因为在我成长的过程中，我母亲的“有限”英语限制了我对她的看法。
对她的英语感到羞愧。
但是随着她慢慢长大，习惯了这种有限的英语，她开始理解妈妈，虽然她的英语有限，但她把它视为亲密的象征：“它已经成为我们亲密的语言，一种与家庭对话有关的不同类型的英语，我成长的语言。
”因此，很明显，母语帮助她理解她的母亲。
文章传达的第二个信息是母语帮助谭恩美找到了自己的文化根源，并在美国文化和中国文化之间取得了平衡。
谭恩美的母语分析中国文化。
谭恩美是第二代华裔移民。
如果不是她母亲的影响，她可能会成为一个纯正的美国人。
是她妈妈把汉语的词根传给了她。
谭恩美（ Amy Tan ）在写母亲的故事时，把母亲想象成她的读者，她的母亲使用的两种英语是两种文化的体现。
由于两种文化完美地结合在一起，她的书被来自两种文化的人所接受。
谭恩美的第三个信息是，母语塑造了她的思维体系。
当她做词语类比时，她的想法会和别人不一样，因为她倾向于插入自己的经历，这当然是受她母亲的影响。
此外，她的性格在一定程度上也受到母亲的影响。
从这篇文章中可以看出，谭恩美的母亲性格坚毅。
尽管她的英语很好，但她非常聪明，决不允许别人对她不公正。
这种不屈的性格被谭恩美继承了下来，她说：“我恰好是个叛逆的人，喜欢挑战别人对我的假设。
”所以很明显，母语帮助塑造了她看待事物、表达事物和理解世界的方式。
总之，一门语言永远不可能仅仅是一种语言，它的背后总有隐藏的财富。
Mother Tongue
Mother Tongueby Amy TanI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations（变种）in the country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke（vt.唤起）an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “the intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus”—a speech filled with carefully wrought（adj.做成的, 形成的, 精炼的）grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized（v.使转变为名词, 使名词化）forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as well, 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 that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy（n.亲密, 隐私）, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’ll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed(v.转录). During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’s what she said in part:“Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong—but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia（n. 黑手党）. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. IF too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it. I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA（Young Men's Christian Association, 基督教青年会）dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.”You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies（v.掩饰）how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes（<<财富(福布斯)>>杂志）report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease—all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my frie nds tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly 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 that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the k ind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured（断裂的）” English. But I wince （v.退缩）when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it wer e damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical（adj.完全根据经验的, 经验主义的）evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.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 pretend I was she. In this guise（[gaiz] n.外观, 姿态, 装束, 伪装v.伪装）, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio（n.公文包）and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.”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.”Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immed iately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable（adj.没有缺点的）broken English.We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign（adj. (病)良性的, (气候)良好的, 仁慈的, 和蔼的）brain tumor（瘤）a CAT scan（[计] 计算机X射线轴向分层造影扫描图）had revealed（v.显示）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 theysaid they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English—lo and behold（n.你瞧(表示惊讶的感叹词)）—we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference all on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular（adj.孤立的, 超然物外的）, 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 the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile（n.百分点）on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override （vt.不考虑, 践踏）the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was _______, Mary thought he was ________.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland（adj.柔和的）combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary 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 supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship—for example, “Sunset is to nightfall a ______ is to ________.” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn（v. n.打呵欠）is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, “sunset is to nightfall”—and I would see a burst of color against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something logical as saying: “A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill pr ecedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, by being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night which turns into feverish pneumonia（[医] 肺炎）as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all of this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americansrepresented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week—that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoke in the home might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering（n.掌舵）them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious（反叛的）in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med（医学院预科）. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer（n.自由作家）the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone（vt.用磨刀石磨）my talents toward account management.But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily（机敏地）crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the En glish language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary（窘境）in its nascent state（新生态）.” A terrible line, which I can hardly pronounce.Fortuna tely, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should envision（vt.想象）a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind—and in fact she did read my early drafts—I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might b e described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down（搀水, 加水冲淡）”; and what I imagine to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict（判决, 结论）: “So easy to read.”。
14Mothertongue,byAmyTan
14Mothertongue,byAmyTanMother tongue, by Amy TanI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life.I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, ―The intersection of memory upon imagination‖ and ―There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus‘–a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, theEnglish I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: ―Not waste money that way.‖ My husband was with us as well, 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 that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you‘ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I‘11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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‘s wedding to pay his respects. Here‘s what she said in part: ―Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong — but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn‘t look down on him, but didn‘t take seriously, until that man big like become 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 celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom.Chinese social life that way. If too important won‘t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding.I didn‘t see, I heard it. I gone to boy‘s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.‖You should know that my mother‘s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine‘s books with ease–all kinds of things I can‘t be gin to understand. Yet some 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 of it, 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 that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.Lately, I‘ve be en giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as ?broken‖ or ―fractured‖ English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of 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 other terms used, ―limited English,‖ for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people‘s perceptions of the limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother‘s ―limited‖ English limited my perceptio n of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plentyof empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.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 pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, ―This is Mrs. Tan.‖And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, ―Why he don‘t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.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.‖Then she began to talk more loudly. ―What he want, I come to New York tel l him front of his boss, you cheating me?‖ And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, ―I can‘t tolerate any more excuses. If I don‘t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situationthat was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find 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 the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor cal led her daughter. She wouldn‘t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother‘s English almost had an effect on limiti ng my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person‘s developing langua ge skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which 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, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B‘s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override theopinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A‘s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, ―Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was –.‖ And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, ―Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:‘ with the grammatical structure ―even though‖ limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn‘t get answers like, ―Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:‘ Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like thatThe same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship —for example, ―Sunset is to nightfall as is to .‖ And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, ―sunset is to nightfall‖–and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something as logical as saying: ―A sunset precedes nightfall‖ is the same as ―a chill precedes a fever.‖ The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother‘s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I‘ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week — that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as ―broken‖ or ―limited.‖ And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.But it wasn‘t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery overthe English language. Here‘s an example from the fir st draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: ―That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.‖ A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.Fortunately, for reasons I won‘t get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts–I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as ―simple‖; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as ―broken‖; my translation of her Chinese, which cou ld certainly be describ ed as ―watered down‖; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: ―So easy to read.‖This entry was posted in In English, reading by RuiGuo. Bookmark the permalink.。
Mother-tongue的全文-分段-原文及翻译
Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy TanMother Tongue (母语)Amy TanThe life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.—by Ruth Benedict个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特I am not a scholar of English or literature .I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。
我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。
Mother tongue的原文及翻译
Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy TanMother Tongue (母语)Amy Tan[1] I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.[2] Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her—a speech filled with carefully constructed grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.[3] Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years that we have been together I've often used the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.[4] You should know that my mother's expressive command of English doesn't reflect how much she actually understands[N]. She reads financial reports, listens to Wall Street Week (a TV financial news program), converses daily with her stockbroker, and reads many types of books with ease. Yet some of my friends tell me they only understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly 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 that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.[5] Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to other people as "broken" English. But I shrink with pain when I say that. It always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English", for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the "limited" English speaker. [6] I know this for a fact[N], because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.[7] My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to ask me to call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small stock portfolio[N] and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."[8] And my mother was standing in the back whispering, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."[9] 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."[10] Then she began to talk more loudly, "what he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week."[11] Why were there not more Asian Americans represented[N] in American literature? Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on mathachievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited". And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me. Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me[N]. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as a pre-med. (1079 words) 我是个作家。
Mother_tongue的全文 分段 原文及翻译
Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy TanMother Tongue (母语)Amy TanThe life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.—by Ruth Benedict个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特I am not a scholar of English or literature .I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。
我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with. 我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。
14Mother tongue, by Amy Tan
Mother tongue, by Amy TanI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus’–a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as well, 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 that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’s what she said in part: “Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong — but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become 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 celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it. I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.”You should know that m y mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease–all kinds of things I can’t b egin to understand. Yet some 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 of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s English is pe rfectly 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 that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.Lately, I’ve b een giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as ‘broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of 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 other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of th e limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.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 pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.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.”Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York te ll him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find 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 the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor ca lled her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing langu age skills aremore influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which 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, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was –.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:’ with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:’ Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like thatThe same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship —for example, “Sunset is to nightfall as is to .” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, “sunset is to nightfall”–and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something as logical as saying: “A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week — that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” o r “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” A t errible line, which I can barely pronounce.Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts–I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used wi th me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”This entry was posted in In English, reading by Rui Guo. Bookmark the permalink.。
MotherTongue（AmyTan）的翻译
MotherTongue（AmyTan）的翻译我是个作家。
顾名思义，我是那种一直喜爱语言的人。
我对日常生活中的语言着迷。
我用大量的时间来思考语言的力量——它是如何唤起情感、描绘视觉图像、阐述复杂的观点或者展示简单的事实的。
语言是我的谋生工具。
我使用所有的英语——在我成长过程中接触过的各种英语。
最近，（有件事）使我强烈地意识到我确实在使用各种各样的英语。
当时，我正在给一大群人演说，该演说我已给其他听众作过六次。
演说的中心内容是关于我的创作、我的生活、以及我的书《喜福会》。
演说进行得很顺利，直到我想起了这次演说与以往的演说有一个极大的不同，这使得整个演说听起来不对劲。
我母亲在演说厅里。
这也许是她第一次听我长篇大论，用的是我从未在她面前用过的那种英语——演讲中满是精心构造的、合乎语法的词组，大量名词化结构，过去完成时，条件短语（这些我似乎是突然发现的）。
所有这些我在学校和书本中学到的标准语言结构，都不是我在家里和母亲交谈时使用的英语形式。
就在上个星期，我和我母亲一起走在街上，我发现自己又一次注意到了我所用的英语，也就是我和母亲交谈时所说的英语。
我们当时正在谈论新旧家具的价格，我听见自己在说：“不那样浪费钱。
（Not waste money that way.）”我丈夫也和我们在一起，他并没有注意到我英语的变化。
随即我就想到了这是为什么。
这是因为在我们朝夕相处的20年里，我经常在他面前说这种英语，有时候甚至他也用这种英语和我交谈。
这已经成了我们的私人语言，一种只和家人交谈时使用的特殊英语，一种伴随我成长的语言。
要知道，我母亲的英语表达能力并不能反映她实际上对英语的理解能力。
她看财务报告，听“华尔街周”（一个有关金融新闻的电视节目），每天和她的股票经纪人谈话，而且能轻松地阅读多种书籍。
可是我有些朋友跟我说他们只能听懂我母亲50%的话。
有些说他们能懂80%到90%。
有些说他们一点儿也听不懂，就好像她讲的是纯粹的中文。
Amy_Tan
During this period, Amy learned about her mother's former marriage to an abusive man in China, and of their four children, including three daughters and a son who died as a toddler. In 1987 Amy traveled with Daisy to China. There, Amy met her three half-sisters. She resides in Sausalito, （索萨利托） California, with her husband, Louis DeMattei, a tax attorney（律师） whom she met on a blind date and married in 1974.
Thank You!
Personal life
Tan was born in Oakland（奥克兰）, California. She is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants Daisy, who was forced to leave her three daughters from a previous marriage behind in Shanghai, and John Tan, an electrical engineer and Baptist minister. This incident provided the basis for Tan‘s first novel, 1989 New York Times bestseller The Joy luck Club. When Tan was 15 years old, her older brother Peter and father both died of brain tumors（脑瘤） within a year of each other. Daisy moved Amy and her younger brother John Jr. to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school.
Mother tongue
文章结构及大意
第一部分（1）：点题。“我”是一名作家，语言是“我” 写作的工具，而且“我”是用伴随“我”成长的各种英语来写作。 第二部分（2—5）：作者通过recently，just last week， lately贯穿文章的第二部分，写了“我”开始注意到母亲那破碎 （broken）的语言以及“我”的理解。 第三部分（6—10）：通过过去的一些经历反映出母亲破碎 的，残缺的英语带来的问题和尴尬处境。 第四部分（11）：提出亚裔美国人没有在美国文学领域中涌 现而是去学习工科的问题并提出自己的看法。以自己为例解释自 己的看法。
assumed 假定的，假装的。 assumed name 化名 assuming 假设…为真，假如…. Assuming that he was still alive, how old would he be now ?
empirical
从观察或经验中得来的 empirical evidence 实验性证据 empirically 反：theoretical 理论的，推想的，假设的
2.转换，转变，改变；对调，交换。 switch over （使）交换位置； （使）变换，转换 switch off 关闭； （使）没兴趣； 使停止谈话； 切断 Let‘s switch over to Channel 4.换到 4 频道吧 。 Switch that fellow off ! 别再让那个家伙讲下去！
Mother Tongue
—Amy Tan
assumption
1.假定，假设，臆断。 on the assumption that…. make assumption about… 2.承担，担任，…的获得。 assumption of an obligation 承担一项义务 the assumption of power\control 掌权 His assumption of power was welcomed by everyone. 他掌权为大家所欢迎。 assume 1.假定，假设，认为。 It is reasonable to assume that……认为….是有道理的 It is generally assumed that….普遍认为 2.承担（责任），就职，取得（权力） assume responsibility 3.呈现（外观、样子），显露（特征） This mater has assumed considerable importance.这件事看来相当重要。 4.装出，假装。 He assumed an air of concern.他装出关心的样子。
Mother Tongue
Mother Tongue (母语)Amy Tan[1] I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life.I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.[2] Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different EnglishesI do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her—a speech filled with carefully constructed grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, allthe forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.[3] Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years that we have been together I've often used the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.[4] You should know that my mother's expressive command of English doesn't reflect how much she actually understands[N]. She reads financial reports, listens to Wall Street Week (a TV financial news program), converses daily with her stockbroker, and reads many types of books with ease. Yet some of my friends tell me they only understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it,as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly 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 that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.[5] Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to other people as "broken" English. But I shrink with pain when I say that. It always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English", for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the "limited" English speaker.[6] I know this for a fact[N], because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressedthem imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.[7] My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to ask me to call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small stock portfolio[N] and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."[8] And my mother was standing in the back whispering, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."[9] 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."[10] Then she began to talk more loudly, "what he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week."[11] Why were there not more Asian Americans represented[N] in American literature? Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited". And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me[N]. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as a pre-med. (1079 words)。
Mother_tongue的全文 分段 原文及翻译
Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy TanMother Tongue (母语)Amy TanThe life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.—by Ruth Benedict个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特I am not a scholar of English or literature .I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。
我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with. 我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。
MOTHERTONGUE-AmyTan.doc-KathyStefanides
MOTHER TONGUEby AMY TANI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language.I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, 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 the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part:"Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong--but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for makingbig celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week,converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some 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 of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly 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 that helped 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 speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of 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 other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.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 pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."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."Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken EnglishWe used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find 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 the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter.She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English--lo and behold--we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which 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 the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, "Even though Tom was _____ Mary thought he was _____." And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming," with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary 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 supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship--for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as______ is to ______." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall"--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week--that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken"or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind--and in fact she did read my early drafts--I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be describedas "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."。
MotherTongue,byAmyTan
Mother Tongue, by Amy TanI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus'--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, 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 that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become 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 celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some 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 of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly 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 that helped 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 speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as 'broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of 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 other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.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 pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.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."Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find 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 the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English -- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which 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, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile onachievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher. This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, "Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was --." And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming:' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous:' Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like thatThe same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship -- for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as is to ." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall"--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce. Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts--I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve 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.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."。
MOTHERTONGUEyAmyTan.doc-UMdrive
MOTHER TONGUEby AMY TANI am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time 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 my trade. 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. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, 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 sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, 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 the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'll quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a 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 family, 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's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part:"Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong--but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become 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 celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease--all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some 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 of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly 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 that helped 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 speaks. Like others, Ihave described it to people as "broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has alwaysbothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged andneeded to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people'sperceptions of the limited English speaker.I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited myperception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of whatshe had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I hadplenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she usedto have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check,already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send thecheck two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to New York tell him front of hisboss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak 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, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken EnglishWe used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. Mymother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scanhad 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 the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English--lo and behold--we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well.Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are moreinfluenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrantfamilies which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe thatit affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. 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 moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me atleast, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personalexperience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as,"Even though Tom was _____ Mary thought he was _____." And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he wascharming," with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary 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 supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship--for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as ______ is to ______." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall"--and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering 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 me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests.Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented inAmerican literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many 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, just last week--that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what Ithought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the Englishlanguage. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club,but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for thestories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories aboutmothers. So with this reader in mind--and in fact she did read my early drafts--I began to write storiesusing all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better termmight be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it countedwhen my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."。
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Read the full text of The Times article or News SummariesDaily Lesson PlanConversationRELATED HEADLINE Both Sides Speed Procedure for Scopes Appeal;Defense Cost $25,000, With Lawyers Serving Free OTHERHEADLINES Bonaparte Gives Property to Wife:Great-Grandnephew of the Emperor Signs Away All But $5,000a Year: Agreement Ends Her Suit:Referee Files Report and Recommends That Leon Jacobs,Lawyer, Get $5,000Fee G.G. Haven a Suicide, Due to Ill Health: Banker and Opera Patron Shoots Himself After Vain Struggle to Recover:Friend Discovers Body: Dr. E. Eliot Finds Him Dead in His Room While Wife Is Away Shopping Hylan Refuses Bait to Go on Bench and Quit Mayor's Race:Foes Realize Need for Keeping Him on Ticket to Block His Evidence Is Expunged Differences Forgotten in the End as All Concerned Exchange Felicitations Special to The New York Times Dayton, Tenn., July 21 -- The trial of John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee, which Clarence Darrow characterized today as "the first case of its kind since we stopped trying people for witchcraft,"is over. Mr. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, and his counsel will appeal to the Supreme Court of Tennessee for reversal of the verdict. The scene will then be shifted from Dayton to Knoxville, where the case will probably come up on the first Monday in September.But the end of the trial did not end the battle on evolution, for not long after its conclusion William Jennings Bryan opened fire on Clarence Darrow with a strong statement and a list of nine questions on the basic principles of the Christian religion. To these Mr. Darrow replied and added a statement explaining Mr.Bryan's "rabies." Dudley Field Malone also contributed a statement predicting ultimate victory for evolution and repeating that Mr.Bryan ran away from the fight.The end of the trial came as unexpectedly as everything else in this trial, in which nothing has happened according to schedule except the opening of court each morning with prayer. It was reached practically by agreement between counsel in an effort to end the case which showed signs of going on forever, although all the testimony offered before the jury took only two hours.Young Scopes, in his shirt sleeves, his collar open at the neck, his carrot- colored hair brushed back, stood up before the bar with a [text unreadable] policeman beside him, and Judge Raulston had pronounced sentence before his counsel could suggest that Mr.Scopes might have something to say."Oh," exclaimed Judge Raulston, "Have you anything to say, Mr. Scopes, as to why the Court should not impose punishment on you?"Third-Party Plan:McCooey Calls Leaders: Brooklyn Chief Confers With Olvany, but Both Refuse to Tell What Was Said: Hearst Emissary Active:Meeting of Borough Leaders on Mayoralty Situation Is Put Off Until Next Week Coal Strike Threat Is Wired to Hoover:Miners' Official Warns of General Tie-Up Over West Virginia Wage Fight:Seeks Rockefeller Aid: Charges Assaults by Armed Guards --Anthracite Conferees Make Little Headway All Police Below 14th St. Join Hunt for a Missing Body:Comb East Side Tenements Aided by Forty Detectives for Robert Perles:Abandon Drowning Theory: Marine Division Fails to Find Clue in River -- Lad Seen by Man at 5P.M. on Sunday:Little Girl Also Saw Him: Says She Played With Him but Can Tell No More --Sewers and Intakes to Be Searched Today Mob Clubs Deputy,Foe of the Fascisti:Giovanni Amendola,Leader of Aventine Opposition, Is Attacked on Country Road: Booed Out of Montecatini: Assault Scopes Calls Statute Unjust Mr. Scopes, who is hardly more than a boy and whose pleasant demeanor and modest bearing have won him many friends since this case started, was nervous. His voice trembled a little as he folded his arms and said:"Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose the law in any way that I can. Any other action would be in violation of by idea of academic freedom, that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust."No one had expected such a quick ending. Mr.Darrow came into court full of pleasant anticipation of another "go" at Mr. Bryan,whom he questioned to the delight of hundreds the day before. But the court had no sooner opened than Judge Raulston decided that there would be no further questioning, and then ordered Mr. Bryan's testimony expunged from the records.Mr. Bryan, who had contented himself with the thought that he would have an opportunity to put Mr. Darrow on the stand and tear into him was somewhat chagrined at this turn of the case, and announced that he would have to appeal to the fairness of the press to give prominence to the questions, which he would have asked Mr. Darrow."I had not reached the point where I could give my statement to answer the charges and made by the counsel for the defenses as to my ignorance and bigotry," he said, bitterly.Sparrow Poses as Dove of Peace But before the day's session was over a dove of peace hovered over the court room in the form of a frightened sparrow, which had strayed in through an open window, and everybody exchanged felicitations except Mr. Bryan and Mr. Darrow. Judge John Raulston declared that the Word of God "given to man that man may use it as a waybill to the other world," was an indestructible thing, and prayed God that he had declared right the questions raised in the trial. A minister pronounced a benediction andFollows Sierge of Hotel, Peace Truce and Flight From Town of Water Cures Long Step to Peace Is Seen by Britain in Germany's Reply:Chamberlain to Consider With Briand Chances of a Parley in August: Wants Compact Pressed:Meanwhile the French Think There Are Traps in the Berlin Note: Germans Looking to Us: They Want Americans Made Members of the Arbitration Tribune Search All London for Wisconsin Professor; He Had $3,000 and Family Suspects Foul Play Girl, Saved by Dog,Shoots Her Assailant; Negro Again Shot by Posse Before Capture the court adjourned.The general gratification of the people at the end of a good show was shown by their applause whenever any member of either side or the visiting spectators, rose to thank Dayton for its hospitality and kindness. And there was a further manifestation of the remarkable change in sentiment which has taken place since this trial began.The defense faced a unitedly, hostile audience when they started. There were clamors against Clarence Darrow, the agnostic, and resentment that outsiders should come in and tell Tennessee how to run its schools.The tide turned when Dudley Field Malone made his first speech and won the hearts of Dayton, for Tennesseanslove a fiery speaker,and rounded, eloquent periods delight them.Mr. Darrow ended by winning their respect by his courage in the face of hostility, and when today both sides spoke briefly their appreciation of courtesies and Mr. Bryan defended his position. It was a repudiation of Mr. Bryan's charges by Mr. Malone and the denunciation of bigotry by Mr. Darrow that won the most fervent applause.That does not mean that the majority was with them. It was not. But they had caught the fancy of the crowd, which has learned a lot about evolution from the scattered fragments presented to them. Many people of the State crowded around Mr. Darrow after court was over to thank him for his defense of Mr. Scopes and to say that they were ashamed of the Anti-Evolution law.There was no doubt that the ruling of the Court against further examination of counsel on either side was as much a disappointment to Mr. Bryan as it was to Mr. Darrow. Mr. Bryan as it was to Mr. Darrow.Mr. Bryan was obviously full of wrath at the position in which he had been placed, with no opportunity of justifying himself on the court record, and Mr. Darrow had come into court with the pleasant anticipation of learning what else Mr. Bryan knew about the Bible.There was a council of war by the forces of the State last night, and whatever desire Mr. Bryan had of going on with his examination so that he could rip into Mr. Darrow and his colleagues, and brand them as agnostics or infidels, was suppressed by Attorney General Stewart, who has maintained an indignant, though dignified, opposition to the events of the last few days. He was anticipated, however, by the Court."Since the beginning of this trial the Judge of this court has had some big problems to pass upon," said Judge Raulston as soon as court opened. "Of course, there is no way for me to know whether I have decided these questions correctly or not until the courts of last resort speak. If I have made a mistake, it was a mistake of the head and not the heart."There are two things that may lead a Judge into error. One is prejudice and passion, and another is an over-zeal to be absolutely fair to all parties. I fear that I may have committed error on yesterday in myover-zeal to ascertain if there was anything in the proof that was offered that might aid the higher courts in determining whether or not I had committed error in my former decrees. I have no disposition to protect any decree that I make from being reversed by a higher court, because, if I am in error, I hope to God that somebody will correct my mistake."I feel that the testimony of Mr. Bryan can shed no light upon any issues that will be pending before the higher courts. The issue now is whether or not Mr. Scopes taught that man descended from a lower order of animals. It isn't a question of whether God created man as all complete at once, or it isn't a question as to whether God created man by the process of development and growth. Those questions have been eliminated by this Court, and the only question we have right now is whether or not this defendant taught that man descended from a lower order of animals."As I see it, after due deliberation, I feel that Mr. Bryan's testimony cannot aid the higher court in determining that question. If the question before the higher court involved the issue as to what evolution is, or as to how God created man, or created the earth, or created the universe, this testimony might be relevant, but those questions are not before the Court, and so, taking this view of it, I am pleased to expunge this testimony given by Mr. Bryan yesterday from the records of this court, and it will not be further considered."Of course I am not at all sure that Mr. Bryan's testimony would aid the Supreme Court or any other human being," said Mr. Darrow, "but he testified by the hour there and I haven't got through with him yet." General Stewart objected to an argument, and Mr. Darrow took an exception from the court's ruling, announcing that he would try to get from the Supreme Court a writ certifying the testimony. Then Mr. Darrow threw up his hands and ended the case."We have all been here quite a while, and I say it in perfectly good faith we have no witnesses to offer, no proof to offer in the issues that the Court has laid down here," he said, "that Mr. Scopes did teach what the children said Scopes did teach what the children said he taught, that man descended from a lower order of animals. We do not mean to contradict that and I think to save time we will ask the Court to bring in the jury and instruct the jury to find the defendant guilty. We make no objection to that and it will save a lot of time and I think it should be done." Hays Again Offers ProofArthur Garfield Hays then made again his offer of proof for the record. "We offer to prove by Mr. Bryan that the Bible was not to be taken literally," he said, "that the earth was a million years old, and we had hoped to prove by him further that nothing in the Bible said what the processes were of man's creation. We feel that the statement that the earth was a million years old, and nothing said about the processes of man's creation, that it was perfectly clear what Scopes taught would not violate the first part of the act."All Mr. Haye's arguments brought nothing but exceptions, and then Mr. Bryan rose to his feet, a great weariness in his voice and with the look of a tired and disappointed man."At the conclusion of your decision to expunge from the testimony the testimony given by me upon the record, I didn't have time to ask you a question," he said. I fully agree with the Court that the testimony taken yesterday was not legitimate or proper. I simply wanted the Court to understand that I was not in position to raise an objection at that time myself, nor was I willing to have it raised for me without asserting my willingness to be cross-examined. Now the testimony has ended and I assume that you expunge the questions as well as the answers." "Yes, sir," said Judge Raulston."That it isn't a reflection upon the answers any more than it is upon the questions," continued Mr. Bryan in his dispirited voice."I expunge the whole proceedings," said the Court."Now, I hadn't reached the point where I could make a statement to answer the charges made by the counsel for the defense as to 'my ignorance and bigotry," said Mr. Bryan, turning to glare at Mr. Darrow, who hunched up his shoulders and said:"I object, your honor! Now what's this all about?""Why do you want to make this, Colonel Bryan?" asked the Court."I just want to finish my sentence.""Why can't he go outside on the lawn?" growled Mr. Darrow.Judge Raulston said he would hear what he had to say, and Mr. Bryan continued:"I shall have to trust to the justice of the press which reported what was said yesterday to report what I will say, not to the Court, but to the press, in an answer to that charge scattered broadcast over the world, and I shall also avail myself of the opportunity to give, to the press, not to the Court, the questions that I would have asked had I been permitted to call the attorneys on the other side.""I think it would be better, Mr. Bryan," said Mr. Darrow, "for you to take us out also with the press and ask us the questions, and then the presswill have both the questions and the answers.""The gentleman, who represents the defense not only differs from me," continued Mr. Bryan, "but he differed from the Court very often in the matter of procedure. I simply want to make that statement, and say that I shall have to avail myself of the press without having the dignity of its being represented in this court, but I think it is hardly fair"- his voice rose as he lifted his clenched hand- "to bring into the limelight my views on religion and stand behind a dark lantern that throws light on other people but conceals themselves. I think it is only fair that the country should know the religious attitude of the people who come down here to deprive the people of Tennessee of the right to run their own schools." "If your Honor please," interrupted Mr. Malone, who manages to get into every argument, "I wish to make a statement if statements are in order." If your Honor please," added Mr. Malone, who has taken joy in standing up for the religious principles of all those on the side of the defense, "the attorneys for the defense are hiding behind no screen of any kind. They will be happy at any time in any forum to answer any questions which Mr. Bryan can ask along the lines that were asked him yesterday." Attorney General Stewart, whose Fundamentalism has been the cause of much embarrassment to him all during the case, stopped fidgeting and suggested that the jury be brought in and the case ended. Mr. Darrow and Mr. Stewart, with Judge Raulston, then agreed that the jury be brought in and instructed by both sides to bring in a verdict of guilty. When the jury were present Judge Raulston charged them that all they had to do was to determine whether or not Mr. Scopes taught that a man descended from a lower form of animals and that if they so found beyond a reasonable doubt they should bring a verdict of guilty." "May I say a few words to the jury," said Mr. Darrow. He stood before them as plain a looking person as any one among them, his suspenders standing out against his shirt, his arms folded so that he grasped his shoulders, and smiled benignantly at them."We are sorry we have not had a chance to say anything to you. We will do it some other time," he said. "Now we came down here to offer evidence in this case and the Court has held under the law that the evidence we had is not admissible, so all we can do is take and exception and carry it to a higher court to see whether the evidence is admissible or not. As far as this case stands before this jury, the Court has told you very plainly that if you think my client taught that man descended from a lower order of animals you find him guilty, and you heard the testimony of the boys on that question and heard read the books, and there is no dispute about the facts."Scopes did not go on the stand, because he could not deny the statements made by the boys. I do not know how you may feel. I am not especially interested in it, but this case and this law will never be decided until it gets to a higher court, and it cannot get to a higher court very well unless you bring in a verdict. I do not want any of you to think we are going to find any fault with you as to your verdict."We cannot explain to you that we think you should return a verdict of not guilty. We don not see how you could. We do not ask it.""What Mr. Darrow wanted to say to you was that he wanted you to find his client guilty" said Mr. Stewart to the Judge, "but did not want to be in the position of pleading guilty because it would destroy the rights in the Appelate Court."Bryan's Speech Is UndeliveredAnd that's all there was to that. Mr. Bryan did not get his chance to make the summing up he had been working on so long the speech that was to rival his "Cross of Gold" speech of many years ago, which made him a candidate for the Presidency. He knew he would not get this into the records soon after court opened, and it was one of his great disappointments. He is said to have been writing it for three months. He never would have gotten a chance to make it even if the verdict of guilty had not been found by agreement, because the defense had planned to let the State open the summing up, and then refuse to argue, which would have shut off anything except the verbal onslaught of Sue Hicks, who was scheduled to talk first for the prosecution.After Mr. Scopes had been found guilty and fined, Judge Raulston set bail in $500, which was furnished by The Baltimore Sun. The case will come up before the State Supreme Court in September, and Judge Raulston allowed thirty days for preparation of the appeal.Then followed the felicitations, started by Mr. Malone, who said:"Your Honor, may I at this time say on behalf of my colleagues that we wish to thank the people of the State of Tennessee, not only for their hospitality, but for the opportunity of trying out these great issues here."He was applauded liberally by the crowd. One of the visiting spectators got up to thank Dayton for its hospitality. Gordon McKensie of the prosecution, thanked the defense for bringing into Tennessee new ideas. "We have learned to take a broader view of life since you came," he said. "While much has been said and much written about the narrow-minded people of Tennessee, we do not feel hard toward you for having said that, because that is your idea. But we people here want to be more broad-minded than some have given us credit for, and we appreciate your coming and we have been greatly elevated, edified, and educated by your presence, and should the time ever come when you are back near the garden spot of the world we hope that you will stop off and stay a while with us here in order that we may chat about the days of the past when the Scopes trial was tried in Dayton."Dr. John R. Neal of the defense spoke, and then Mr. Bryan rose again and said the people would decide this issue."I don't know that there is any special reason why I should add to what has been said, and yet the subject has been presented from so many viewpoints that I hope the Court will pardon me if I mention a viewpointthat has not been referred to," he said. "Dayton is the centre and seat of this trial largely by circumstance. We are told that more words have been sent across the ocean by cable to Europe and Australia about this trial than has ever been sent by cable in regard to anything else doing in the United States. That isn't because the trial is held in Dayton. It isn't because a school teacher has been subjected to the danger of a fine of from $100 to $500, but I think it illustrates how people can be drawn into prominence by attaching themselves to a great cause."Causes stir the world, and this cause has stirred the world. It is because it goes deep. It is because it extends wide and because it reaches into the future beyond the power of man to see. Here has been fought out a little case of little consequence as a case, but the world is interested because it raises an issue, and that issue will some day be settled right, whether it is settled on our side or the other side. It is going to be settled right. There can be no settlement of a great cause without discussion, and people will not discuss a cause until their attention is drawn to it, and the value of this trial is not in any incident of the trial, it is not because of anybody who is attached to it, either in any official way or as counsel on either side."Human beings are mighty small, your Honor. We are apt to minify the personal element and we sometimes become inflated with our importance, but the world little cares for man as an individual. He is born, he works, he dies, but causes go on forever, and we who have participated in this case may congratulate ourselves that we have attached ourselves to a mighty issue."Now, if I were to attempt to define that issue I might find objection from the other side. Their definition of the issue might not be as mine is, and therefore, I will not take advantage of the privilege the Court gives me this morning to make a statement that might be controversial, and nothing that I would say would determine it."I have no power to define this issue finally and authoritatively. None of the counsel on our side has this power, and none of the consul on the other side has this power. Even this honorable Court has no such power. The people will determine this issue. They will take sides upon this issue, they will state the questions involved in this issue, they will examine the information -- not so much that which has been brought out here, but this case will stimulate investigation an divestigation will bring out information, and the facts will be known, and upon the facts as ascertained the decision will be rendered, and I think my friends and your Honor, that if we are actuated by the spirit that should actuate every one of us, no matter what our views may be, we ought not only desire but pray that that which is right will prevail, whether it be our way or somebody else's."Darrow Makes Final RetortHis words brought a last retort from Mr. Darrow. He thanked Dayton for its hospitality and courtesy and liberality and thanked the Court for not sending him to jail, which aroused laughter."Of course there is much that Mr. Bryan has said that is true," he continued. "And nature- nature. I refer to- does not choose any special setting for mere events. I fancy that the place where the Magna Charta was wrested from the barons in England was a very small place, probably not as big as Dayton. But events come along as they come along."I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here"- and he thundered out the last words- "we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon the modern world of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum. That is all I care to say."Judge Raulston was moved to join the proceedings."I recently read somewhere what I think was a definition of a great man, and that was this: That he possess a passionate love for the truth and has the courage to declare it in the face of all opposition. It is easy enough, my friends, to have a passion to find a truth, or to find a fact, rather, what coincides with our preconceived notions and ideas, but it sometimes takes courage to search diligently for a truth that may destroy our preconceived notions and ideas."The man that only has a passion to find the truth is not a complete and great man; but he must also have the courage to declare it in the face of all opposition. It does not take any great courage for a man to stand for a principle that meets with the approval of public sentiment around him, but it sometimes takes courage to declare a truth or stand for a fact that is in contravention to the public sentiment."Now, my friends, the man - I am not speaking in regard to the issues in this case, but I am speaking in general terms- that a man who is big enough to search for the truth and find it, and declare it in the face of all opposition, is a big man."Dayton has been referred to, that the law- that something big could not come out of Dayton. Why, my friends, the greatest Man that has ever walked on the face of the earth, the Man that left the portals of Heaven to earth that man might live, was born in a little town, and he lived and spent his life among a simple, unpretentious people."Now, my friends, the people in America are a great people. We are great in the South, and they are great in the North. We are great because we are willing to lay down our differences when we fight the battle out and be friends. And, let me tell you, there are two things in this world that are indestructible, that man cannot destroy, or no force in the world can destroy."One is the truth. You may crush it to the earth, but it will rise again. It is indestructible, and the causes of the law of God."Another thing indestructible in America and in Europe and everywhere else, is the Word of God, that He has given to man, that man may use itScopes Guilty, Fined $100, Scores Law; Benediction Ends Trial.../learning/general/onthisday/big/0721.h...11 of 112/26/12 10:49 PM。