Anker Susan. Real Essays with Readings with 2009 MLA Update

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

READINGS

Chapter 47 • Classiﬁ cation 797

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.

4 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 lan-

guage I grew up with.

5 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 re-

spects. Here’s what she said in part:

6 “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 maﬁ a. Now important per-

son, 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.”

7 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

PAUSE: Summarize

Tan’s main point in

paragraph 4.

Shanghai: a major city in eastern China

Forbes report: a ﬁ nancial publication geared toward investors

Shirley MacLaine: actress whose works of autobiography have often referred to

her past lives

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 797ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 797 10/29/08 10:29:15 AM10/29/08 10:29:15 AM

READINGS

798 Part Eight • Readings for Writers

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 speak-

ing 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.

8 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 other way to describe it other than “broken,” as

if it were damaged and needed to be ﬁ xed, as if it lacked a certain whole-

ness 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 reﬂ ected 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 ﬁ fteen, 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 ﬁ rst 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 con-

cerned. 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

empirical: based on direct experience or observation

PAUSE: In para-

graphs 9–14, what

evidence does Tan

use to support her

claim that others

believed that her

mother’s English

showed a lack of

intelligence?

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 798ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 798 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

Chapter 47 • Classiﬁ cation 799

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 immedi-

ately, 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 similar routine just ﬁ ve days ago, for a situation that

was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an ap-

pointment, to ﬁ nd 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 noth-

ing. 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

ﬁ nally 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.

15 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 inﬂ uenced 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 shap-

ing 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.

16 This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one cor-

rect answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests

were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experi-

ence. Those tests were constructed around items like ﬁ ll-in-the-blank

sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was

, Mary

PAUSE: Have you

or anyone you

know not been

taken seriously

because of lan-

guage, age, race,

or some other

trait?

CAT scan: a form of X-ray used to produce internal images of the body

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 799ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 799 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

800 Part Eight • Readings for Writers

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.

17 The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you

were supposed to ﬁ nd 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 ar-

rival, 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 ﬁ rst pair, “sunset is to night-

fall ” — 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 confus-

ing 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.

18 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 lit-

erature. 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 signiﬁ cantly 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 teach-

ers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science,

which is what happened to me.

PAUSE: How do

you think Tan

might answer the

questions she poses

in paragraph 18?

semantic: related to the meaning of words

PAUSE: What has

been your experi-

ence with the kinds

of English tests that

Tan writes about in

paragraphs 16–17?

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 800ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 800 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

Chapter 47 • Classiﬁ cation 801

19 Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the chal-

lenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English

major my ﬁ rst year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started

writing nonﬁ ction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my for-

mer 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 ﬁ nally began to write ﬁ ction. And at

ﬁ rst I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sen-

tences that would ﬁ nally prove I had mastery over the English language.

Here’s an example from the ﬁ rst 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 pro-

nounce.

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 internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but

neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what lan-

guage 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 ﬁ nished reading my

book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”

quandary: a state of uncertainty

nascent: developing; beginning to come into existence

SUMMARIZE AND RESPOND

In your reading journal or elsewhere, summarize the main point of “Mother

Tongue.” Then, go back and check off support for this main idea. Next, write

a brief summary (three to ﬁ ve sentences) of the essay. Finally, jot down your

initial response to the reading. What do you think of Tan’s relationship with

her mother? Do you think that Tan’s mother’s “limited” English has affected

their relationship for the better, for the worse, or in some more complex way?

What impression do you have of Tan herself?

PAUSE: How do

you respond when

people make

assumptions about

you?

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 801ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 801 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

802 Part Eight • Readings for Writers

CHECK YOUR COMPREHENSION

1. Which of the following would be the best alternative title for this essay?

a. “The Englishes I Grew Up With”

b. “My Mother’s Difﬁ culties Communicating in English”

c. “How to Communicate with an Immigrant Parent”

d. “A Writer’s Fascination with the English Language”

2. The main idea of this essay is that

a. children of immigrant parents have difﬁ culties communicating in

English because of their parents’ “limited” command of the language.

b. there is no single, proper way to speak English because different people

communicate in different ways.

c. teachers believe that Asian American students necessarily do better in

math and science than they do in English and writing.

d. the kind of English one uses may change in different contexts.

3. Tan concludes that

a. to become a successful writer, she had to work harder than would

someone who grew up in a home where English was the native lan-

guage.

b. her mother found her book easy to read because her mother grew up

speaking Chinese.

c. in ﬁ nding her voice as a writer, she called on the memory of her

mother and their communication with each other.

d. to prove her mastery of the English language, she had to write in a

way that her mother would ﬁ nd impossible to understand.

4. If you are unfamiliar with the following words, use a dictionary to check

their meanings: evoke (para. 2); keenly, wrought, burdened (3); intimacy

(4); belies (7); fractured (8); guise (10); impeccable (13); benign (14); lin-

guists, insular (15); associative (17); freelancer, hone (19); wittily (20).

READ CRITICALLY

1. Why, when speaking with her husband, does Tan sometimes switch to the

kind of English her mother speaks? What does this tell you of her feelings

about her mother’s way of speaking?

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 802ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 802 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

Chapter 47 • Classiﬁ cation 803

2. Why does Tan dislike using labels such as “broken” or “limited” in refer-

ring to the English her mother speaks?

3. In what ways does Tan say that the language spoken within immigrant

families can limit the possibilities of the children in such families? Do you

agree with her?

4. What, exactly, does Tan classify in this essay? What are the speciﬁ c clas-

siﬁ cations she writes about?

5. Tan divides her essay into three sections, indicated by the spaces between

paragraphs 7 and 8 and paragraphs 17 and 18. What is the focus of each

of these sections? Why do you suppose she chose to organize her essay in

this way?

WRITE AN ESSAY

Write an essay classifying your use of language in different situations — at

home with family members, with friends outside of home, at school, in your

workplace, and elsewhere that your language may change because of the cir-

cumstances in which you ﬁ nd yourself. For each situation, give examples of

the kind of language you use that differ from the language you use in other

situations.

Classiﬁ cation: Linked Readings

STEREOTYPES

Each of the following readings focuses on stereotypes.

Scott Russell Sanders, “The Men We Carry in Our Minds” (this

chapter, p. 788)

Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue” (this chapter, p. 796)

Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple” (Chapter 48, p. 805)

Brent Staples, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space”

(Chapter 50, p. 834)

Read the selections, and draw from at least one in addition to “Mother

Tongue” to write an essay titled “Stereotypes and Their Effects.”

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 803ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 803 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

READINGS

804 Part Eight • Readings for Writers

CONCEPTIONS OF GENDER

Each of the following readings focuses on various aspects of the effects of

gender on people’s behaviors and lives.

Scott Russell Sanders, “The Men We Carry in Our Minds” (this

chapter, p. 788)

Daniel Goleman, “For Man and Beast, Language of Love Shares Many

Traits” (Chapter 46, p. 781)

Dave Barry, “The Ugly Truth about Beauty” (Chapter 49, p. 817)

Amy L. Beck, “Struggling for Perfection” (Chapter 50, p. 829)

Read the selections, and draw from at least one in addition to “The Men We

Carry in Our Minds” to write an essay titled “How Gender Affects Behavior.”

You can refer to your own experience, but make sure to use material from

the essays as well.

ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 804ANK_47574_48_ch47_pp788-804 r3 ko.indd 804 10/29/08 10:29:16 AM10/29/08 10:29:16 AM

805

Deﬁ nition

Each essay in this chapter uses deﬁ nition to get its main point across. As

you read these essays, consider how they achieve the four basics of good

deﬁ nition that are listed below and discussed in Chapter 15 of this book.

FOUR BASICS OF GOOD DEFINITION

It tells readers what term is being deﬁ ned.

2. It gives a clear basic deﬁ nition.

3. It uses examples to show what the writer means.

4. It gives details about the examples that readers will understand.

■ IDEA JOURNAL

What labels do people

use to try to deﬁ ne

you?

Nancy Mairs

On Being a Cripple

In her essays, memoirs, and poetry, Nancy Mairs (b. 1943) often writes

about multiple sclerosis and her experience, since 1993, of life in a wheel-

chair. Mairs attended Wheaton College and earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D.

from the University of Arizona. Her essay collections include Waist High

in the World: A Life among the Nondisabled (1996) and A Troubled Guest

(2002).

This essay, from the collection Plaintext (1986), addresses the words we

use to talk about people with disabilities. Mairs makes a case for honesty in

language and explains what she means when she calls herself a cripple.

ANK_47574_49_ch48_pp805-816 r3 ko.indd 805ANK_47574_49_ch48_pp805-816 r3 ko.indd 805 10/29/08 10:29:39 AM10/29/08 10:29:39 AM

READINGS

806 Part Eight • Readings for Writers

GUIDING QUESTION

How would you describe Mairs’s attitude toward her disability?

To escape is nothing. Not to escape is nothing. — LOUISE BOGAN

The other day I was thinking of writing an essay on being a cripple. I

was thinking hard in one of the stalls of the women’s room in my ofﬁ ce

building, as I was shoving my shirt into my jeans and tugging up my

zipper. Preoccupied, I ﬂ ushed, picked up my book bag, took my cane

down from the hook, and unlatched the door. So many movements

unbalanced me, and as I pulled the door open I fell over backward,

landing fully clothed on the toilet seat with my legs splayed in front of

me: the old beetle-on-its-back routine. Saturday afternoon, the building

deserted, I was free to laugh aloud as I wriggled back to my feet, my

voice bouncing off the yellowish tiles from all directions. Had anyone

been there with me, I’d have been still and faint and hot with chagrin. I

decided that it was high time to write the essay.

2 First, the matter of semantics.

I am a cripple. I choose this word to

name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common

of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the choice a number

of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even

now, I’m not sure what those motives are, but I recognize that they are

complex and not entirely ﬂ attering. People — crippled or not — wince at

the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Per-

haps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer,

one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face

the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.

3 But, to be fair to myself, a certain amount of honesty underlies my

choice. “Cripple” seems to me a clean word, straightforward and pre-

cise. It has an honorable history, having made its ﬁ rst appearance in the

Lindisfarne Gospel in the tenth century. As a lover of words, I like the

accuracy with which it describes my condition: I have lost the full use of

my limbs. “Disabled,” by contrast, suggests any incapacity, physical or

mental. And I certainly don’t like “handicapped,” which implies that I

have deliberately been put at a disadvantage, by whom I can’t imagine

(my God is not a Handicapper General), in order to equalize chances in

the great race of life. These words seem to me to be moving away from

my condition, to be widening the gap between word and reality. Most

remote is the recently coined euphemism

“differently abled,” which par-

takes of the same semantic hopefulness that transformed countries from

semantics: in general, the study of words; here, the choice of particular words

euphemism: a word that puts a pleasant cover over an unpleasant condition

PAUSE: Why might

this incident in the

women’s room

have prompted

Mairs to write her

essay?

ANK_47574_49_ch48_pp805-816 r3 ko.indd 806ANK_47574_49_ch48_pp805-816 r3 ko.indd 806 10/29/08 10:29:40 AM10/29/08 10:29:40 AM