Which line in this excerpt from Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" shows that Tan changes her language depending on the audience? I was g
iving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club, and it 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, forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books…
The line in the above excerpt from Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" that shows that Tan changes her language depending on the audience is:
“The talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club, and it was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room.”
Amy Tan's essay “Mother Tongue” is about the difficulties that a child has to face if it grows in a family in which its parents speak 'limited English.' Amy's mother was among such parent who was unable to speak fluent and proper English. It is through the language that the person is judged by others. Amy was brought up by her mother and because of this, her writing style was much influenced by the language spoken at her home. Her mother taught her that a person's perception of the world is influenced by the language spoken at home.
