Reading: Amy Tan, Excerpt from “Mother Tongue”

• When did you realize that you use language differently for different audiences and purposes?

  Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk . . . 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.

  — Novelist Amy Tan, from “Mother Tongue”