How CAN SOMEONE WHO LIVES IN INSANE LUXURY BE A STAR IN TODAY'S WORLD?

Transcription

1 442 ChapterEight/Definition How CAN SOMEONE WHO LIVES IN INSANE LUXURY BE A STAR IN TODAY'S WORLD? Ben Stein Ben Stein (1944- ) graduated from Columbia University with a degree in economicsand from Yale Law School. He has worked as a lawyer and as a law professorfor a number ofyears. In the 1970s he was a speechwriter and lawyer for President Richard Nixon. A columnist and editorial writer for major newspapers and magazines, he is also the author or co-authorof sixteen books.in addition, he has written scriptsand has acted in film, television, and commercials. "How Can Someone" was the final biweekly column in a series titled "Monday Night at Morton)-" published by E!Online, a Webzine devoted to entertainment news and celebrity gossip. Morton)- is a famous chain of steakhouses. The column originally appeared in December 2003 and hasa wide distribution on the Web. On Writing: Stein, a widely published, prolific writer, once indicated to an interviewer that writing is one of the things he likes the least. Although, he added, he does it nevertheless. BEFORE READING Connecting: Are you ever interested in the celebrity gossip? Do you ever read any of the many publications or watch any of the television shows devoted to the lives of Hollywood stars? Anticipating: What are the circumstances that seem to have led Stein to writing this particular column? As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlinefi- NAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. 2 I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believeit would never end. Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to doit maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights. 4 He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

2 Ben Stein/How Can SomeoneBe a Star in Today'sWorld? 443 It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person 5 and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, 6 and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendorin the Grasswas a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will 7 be again. Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Holly- 8 wood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head 9 into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Realstarsare not ridingaround in the backsoflimousinesor in Porsches 10 or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldierof the 4th Infantry Divisionwho poked hishead 11 into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hall of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road 12 north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. 13 soldierin Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in Californiaand a little girl alive in Baghdad. I no longer want to perpetuate poor values by pretending that who is 14 eating at Morton's is a big subject. The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streetsof Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodiesbattered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of$100 million a year on the covers of our 15 magazines.the noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Mghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines andnear the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die. I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor 16 values,and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eatingat Morton's is a big subject.

3 444 ChapterEightlDefinition 17 There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. 18 Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. 19 Now you have my idea of a real hero. 2D Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures. 21 We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could everdo for ourselves. 22 In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. 23 I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way.years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin-or Martin Mull or Fred Willard-or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them. 24 But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came tobe my main task in life. 25 I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms. 26 This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lam life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. Tim is my highest and best use as a human. 27 A5so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. Butl think the best guidance I ever got was &om the inauguration speech of D~ mocratjohn F. Kennedy in January of On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good consciena our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forti... asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, work must surely be our own." 29 Andthen to paraphrasemyfavoritepresident,mybossand mend Richarr Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a

4 I WANT A WIFE Judy Brady Judy Brady/1Wanta Wift 447 Judy Brady was born in 1937 in San Francisco, California, and received a B.RA. in paintingfrom the University of Iowa. As afreelance writer, Brady has written essayson topicssuch as union organizing, abortion, and the role of women in society.currently an activist focusing on issues related to cancer and the environment, she has edited several bookson the subject, including One in Three: Women with Cancer Confront an Epidemic (1991). Brady's most frequently reprinted essay is "1 Want a Wife," which originally appeared in Ms. magazine in After examining the stereotypical male demands in marriage, Brady concludes, "Who wouldn't want a wife?" BEFORE READING Connecting: In a relationship, what separates reasonable needs or desires from unreasonable or selfish ones? Anticipating: What is the effect of the repetition of the phrase "1want a..." in the essay? Ibelong to that classification of people known as wives. 1 am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, 1 am a mother. Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from 2 a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is obviouslylooking for another wife. As 1 thought about him while 1 was ironingone evening, it suddenly occurred to me that 1, too, would like to have a wife.why do 1want a wife? 1would like to go back to school so that 1can become economically independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while 1 am going to school1want a wife to take care of my children. 1want a wife to keep track of the children's doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too.1want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. 1 wanta wife who will wash the children's clothes and keep them mended. 1want a wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers,takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. 1want a wife who takes care of the childrenwhen they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the childrenneed special care, because, of course, 1 cannot miss classes at school. My wifemust arrange to lose time at work, and not lose the job. It may mean a smallcut in my wife's income from time to time, but 1guess 1can tolerate that.

5 448 ChapterEight/Definition Needless to say,my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working. 4 I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wifewho will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the meals, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying. I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school. I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a rest and change of scene. 5 I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife's duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them. 6 I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the babysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about the things that interest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the children are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feel comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed the hors d' oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine glassesare replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they like it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself. 7 I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible. 8 If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Naturally I will expect a fresh, new life; my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free. 9 When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife's duties. 10 My God, who wouldn't want a wife?

6 QUESTIONS ON SUBJECT AND PURPOSE Judy Brady/!want a Wife In what way is this a definition of a wife? Why does Brady avoid a more conventional definition? 2. Is Brady being fair? Is there anything that she leaves out of her definition that you would have included? 3. What purpose might Brady have been trying to achieve? QUESTIONS ON STRATEGY AND AUDIENCE 1. How does Brady structure her essay? What is the order of the development? Could the essay have been arranged in any other way? 2. Why does Brady identify herself by her roles-wife and mother-at the beginning of the essay? Is that information relevant in any way? 3. What assumptions does Brady have about her audience (readers of Ms. magazine in the early 1970s)? How do you know? QUESTIONS ON VOCABUlARY AND STYLE 1. How does Brady use repetition in the essay? Why? Does it work? What effect does it create? 2. How effective is Brady's final rhetorical question? Where else in the essay does she use a rhetorical question? 3. Be able to define the following words: nurturant (paragraph 3), hars d'oeuvres(6), replenished(6), monogamy(7). WRITING SUGGESTIONS 1. For Your Journal. What do you look for in a possible spouse or "significant other"? Make a list of what you expect or want from a relationship with another person. Once you have brainstormed the list, rank each item in order of importance-which is most important, and which is least important? If you are in a relationship right now, try evaluating that relationship in light of your own priorities. 2. For a Paragraph. Using the material that you generated in your journal entry, write a paragraph definition of the kind of person you seek for a committed relationship. Be serious. Do not try to imitate Brady's style. 3. For an Essay. Define a word naming a central human relationship role, such as husband,lover,friend, mother,father, child,sister,brother,or grandparent. Define the term indirectly by showing what such a person does or should do. 4. For Research. What does it mean to be a wife in another culture? Choose at least two other cultures, and research those societies' expectations of a wife. Try to find cultures that show significant differences. Remember that interviews might be a good source of information-even interviews with wives in other cultures.

7 Robin D. G. Kelley/The Peoplein Me 451 THE PEOPLEIN ME Robin D. G. Kelley Robin D. G. Kelley (1962- ) was born in New.YorkCity and raised in Harlem, Seattle, and Pasadena, California. A g;raduate of California State University, Long Beach, Kelley earned his MA. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently a professor of history at Columbia University, Kelley has been called "the preeminent historian of black popular culture writing today. " The author and editor of many books, Kelley)- most recent collectionsof essaysinclude Yo' Mama's Dis- Funktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997) and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002). On Writing: Complimented in an interview on the accessibility of his writing, Kelley replied, "That)- the biggest compliment, because that)- the one thing I try to achieve, only because I can't understand academic writing myself. I'm just not that smart. " BEFORE READING Connecting: Who are the people in you? What do you know about your ancestors? Anticipating: Kelley prefers the word "polycultural" rather than "multicultural." Why? What is the difference? " So, what are you?" I don't know how many times people have asked me that. "Are you Puerto Rican? Dominican? Indian or something? You must be mixed." My stock answer has rarely changed: "My mom is from Jamaica but grewup in New York, and my father was from North Carolina but grew up in Boston. Both black." My family has lived with "the question" for as long as I can remember. 2 We're "exotics," all cursed with "good hair" and strange accents-we don't sound like we from da Souf or the Norwth, and don't have that West Coastby-way-of-Texas Calabama thang going on. The only one with the real West Indian singsong vibe is my grandmother, who looks even more East Indian than mysisters. Whatever Jamaican patois my mom possessed was pummeled out of her by cruel preteens who never had sensitivity seminars in diversity. The result for us was a nondescript way of talking, walking, and being that made us not black enough, not white enough-just a bunch of not-quite-nappy-headed erugmas. My mother never fit the "black momma" media image. A beautiful, demure, light brown woman, she didn't drink, smoke, curse, or say things like "LawdJesus" or "hallelujah," nor did she cook chitlins or gumbo. A vegetarian, sheplayed the harmonium (a foot-pumped miniature organ), spoke softly with

8 452 ChapterEightlDefinition textbook diction, meditated, followed the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, and had wild hair like Chaka Khan. She burned incense in our tiny Harlem apartment, sometimes walked the streets barefoot, and, when she could afford it, cooked foods from the East. 4 To this day, my big sister gets misidentified for Pakistani or Bengali or Ethiopian. (Of course, changing her name from Sheral Anne Kelley to Makani Themba has not helped.) Not long ago, an Oakland cab driver, apparently a Sikh who had immigrated from India, treated my sister like dirt until he discovered that she was not a "scoundrel from Sri Lanka," but a common black American. Talk about ironic. How often are black women spared indignities becausethey are African American? 5 "What are you?" dogged my little brother more than any of us. He came out looking just like his father, who was white. In the black communities of Los Angeles and Pasadena, my baby bro' had to fight his way into blackness, usually winning only when he invited his friends to the house. When he got tired of this, he became what people thought he was-a cool white boy. Today he lives in Tokyo, speaks fluent Japanese, and is happily married to ajapanese woman (who is actually Korean passing asjapanese!) He stands as the perfect example of our mulattoness: a black boy trapped in a white body who speaks English with a slightjapanese accent and has a son who will spend his life confronting "the question." 6 Although folk had trouble naming us, we were never blanks or aliens in a "black world." We were and are "polycultural," and I'm talking about all peoples in the Western world. It is not skin, hair, walk, or talk that renders black people so diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most of them are products of different "cultures"-living cultures, not dead ones. These cultures live in and through us every day, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning. "Polycultural" works better than "multicultural," which implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side-a kind of zoological approach to culture. Such a view obscures power relations, but often reifies race and gender differences. 7 Black people were polycultural from the get-go. Most of our ancestors came to these shores not as Africans, but as lbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Kongo, Barnbara, Mende, Mandingo, and so on. Some of our ancestors came as Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Irish, English, Italian. And more than a few of us, in North America as well as in the Caribbean and Latin America, have Asian and Native American roots. 8 Our lines of biological descent are about as pure as O.J.'s blood sample, and our cultural lines of descent are about as mixed up as a pot of gumbo. What we know as "black culture" has always been fluid and hybrid. In Harlem in the late 1960s and 1970s, Nehru suits were as popular-and as "black"-as dashikis, and martial arts films placed Bruce Lee among a pantheon of black heroes that included Walt Frazier of the New York Knicks and Richard Rountree, who played John Shaft in blaxploitation cinema. How do we understand the zoot suit-or the conk-without the pachuco culture of Mexican American youth, or low riders in black communities without Chicanos? How can we

9 RobinD. G. K.elley/ThePeoplein Me 453 discuss black visual artists in the interwar years without reference to the Mexican muralists, or the radical graphics tradition dating back to the late 19th century, or the Latin American artists influenced by surrealism? Vague notions of "Eastern" religion and philosophy, as well as a variety 9 of Orientalist assumptions, were far more important to the formation of the Lost-Found Nation ofislam than anything coming out of Africa. And Rastafarians drew many of their ideas from South Asians, from vegetarianism to marijuana, which was introduced into Jamaica by Indians. Major black movements like Garveyism and the African Blood Brotherhood are also the products of global developments. We won't understand these movements until we see them as part of a dialogue with Irish nationalists from the Easter Rebellion, Russian and Jewish emigres from the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and Asian socialists like India's M. N. Roy and Japan's Sen Katayama. Indeed, I'm not sure we can even limit ourselves to Earth. How do we 10 make sense of musicians Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Lee "Scratch" Perry or, for that matter, the Nation of Islam, when we consider the fact that space travel and notions of intergalactic exchange constitute a key source of their ideas? So-called "mixed race" children are not the only ones with a claim to mul- 11 tiple heritages. All of us are inheritors of European, African, Native American, and Asian pasts, even if we can't exactly trace our bloodlines to these continents. To some people that's a dangerous concept. Too many Europeans don't 12 want to acknowledge that Africans helped create so-called Western civilization, that they are both indebted to and descendants of those they enslaved. They don't want to see the world as One-a tiny little globe where people and cultures are always on the move, where nothing stays still no matter how many times we name it. To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dynamism is not to give up our black identity. It does mean expanding our definition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the rich diversity within us with new eyes. So next time you see me, don't ask where I'm from or what I am, unless 13 you're ready to sit through a long-ass lecture. As singer/songwriter Abbey Lincoln once put it, "I've got some people in me." QUESTIONS ON SUBJECT AND PURPOSE 1. Why is the question "What are you?" not a simple one? 2. The first section of the essay (through paragraph 5) deals with Kelley's family. What does their story have to do with the rest of the essay? 3. What might be Kelley's purpose in the essay? QUESTIONS ON STRATEGY AND AUDIENCE 1. Does Kelley's opening paragraph catch your attention? Why or why not? 2. How would you characterize the first five paragraphs in Kelley's essay? What is he doing? What organizational strategy does he use?

10 456 ChapterEight/Definition MOTHER TONGUE Amy Tan Born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to Chinese immigrants, Amy Tan graduated from San Jose State University with a double major in English and linguistics and an M.A. in linguistics. Tan did not write fiction until 1985, when she began the stories that would become her first and very successful novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), also a popular film. Tan ~children ~book The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994) is the basisfor the daily animated television series, Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat (PBS). Her most recent novel is Saving Fish From Drowning (2005). On Writing: Asked about her writing, Tan responded: "I welcome criticism when I'm writing my books. I want to become better and better as a writer. I go to a writer~ group every week. we read our work aloud." In another interview she commented, "I still think of myself, in many ways, as a beginning writer. I'm still learning my craft, learning what makes for a good story, what~ an honest voice." BEFORE READING Connecting: How sensitive are you to the language that you use or your family uses? Are you ever conscious of that language? Are you ever embarrassed by it? Are you proud of it? Anticipating: In what ways does the language of Tan and her mother "define" them in the eyes of others? I am not a scholar of Engiish or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. 2 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

11 Amy 'Tan/MotherTongue 457 seemed to me, with nominalized fonns, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the fonns of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the fonns of English I did not use at home with my mother. Just last week, I waswalking down the street with my mother, and I again 4 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'll 5 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 6 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 7 how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbesreport, 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 8 speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has alwaysbothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed

12 458 ChapterEightlDefinition 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. 9 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. 10 My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to 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." 11 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." 12 And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived." 13 Then she began to talk more loudly. "What he want, I come to 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. 14 We used a similarroutine just fivedaysago, for a situation that wasfar 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-Io and behind-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.

13 Amy Tan/Mother Tongue 459 I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possi- 15 bilities 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 & and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher. This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct an- 16 swer. 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 17 supposed to find some sort oflogical, 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,busis to arrival, chillsis tofever,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, "sunsetis 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, 18 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

14 460 ChapterEightlDefinition 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. 19 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. 20 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 TheJoy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce. 21 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 intemallanguage, 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. 22 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." QUESTIONS ON SUBJECT AND PURPOSE 1. What does the title "Mother Tongue" suggest? 2. How many subjects does Tan explore in the essay? 3. How does Tan feel about her mother's "tongue"? QUESTIONS ON STRATEGY AND AUDIENCE 1. In paragraph 6, Tan quotes part of one of her mother's conversations. Why?