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Short stories
- Reading Guide........................................................................................................................
- Short stories...........................................................................................................................
- "My English", by Julia Álvarez............................................................................................
- "The Arrangers of Marriage", by Chimamanda Adichie......................................................
- “Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan..........................................................................................
worry and secrets, the sound of being left out. I could make no sense of this “harder Spanish,” and so I tried by other means to find out what was going on. I knew my mami’s face by heart. When the little lines on the corners of her eyes crinkled, she was amused. When her nostrils flared and she bit her lips, she was trying hard not to laugh. She held her head down, eyes glancing up, when she thought someone was lying. Whenever she spoke that gibberish English, I translated the general content by watching the Spanish expressions on her face. Soon, at the Carol Morgan School, I began to learn more English. That is, when I had stopped gawking. The teacher and some of the American children had the strangest coloration: light hair, light eyes, light skin, as if Ursulina had soaked them in bleach too long, to’deteñío. I did have some blond cousins, but they had deeply tanned skin, and as they grew older, their hair darkened, so their earlier paleness seemed a phase of their acquiring normal color. Just as strange was the little girl in my reader who had a cat and a dog that looked just like un gatito y un perrito. Her mami was Mother and her papi Father. Why have a whole new language for school and for books with a teacher who could speak it teaching you double the amount of words you really needed? Butter, butter, butter, butter. All day, one English word that had particularly struck me would go round and round in my mouth and weave through all the Spanish in my head, until by the end of the day the word did sound like just another Spanish word. And so I would say, “Mami, por favor pásame la butter.” She would scowl and say in English, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. But would you be needing some butter on your bread?” Why my parents didn’t first educate us in our native language by enrolling us in a Dominican school, I don’t know. Part of it was that Mami’s family had a tradition of sending the boys to the States to boarding school and college, and she had been one of the first girls to be allowed to join her brothers. At Abbot Academy, whose school song was our lullaby as babies (“Although Columbus and Cabot never heard of Abbot, it’s quite the place for you and me”), she had become quite Americanized. It was very important, she kept saying, that we learn our English. Always she used the possessive pronoun: your English, an inheritance we had come into and must wisely use. Unfortunately, my English became all mixed up with our Spanish. Mixup, or what’s now called Spanglish, was the language we spoke for several years. There wasn’t a sentence that wasn’t colonized by an English word. At school, a Spanish word would suddenly slide into my English like someone butting into line. Mrs. Buchanan, whose face I was learning to read as minutely as my mother’s, would scowl, but no smile played on her lips. Her pale skin made her strange countenance hard to read, so I often misjudged how much I could get away with. Whenever I made a mistake, Mrs. Buchanan would shake her head slowly, “In English, Jew-LEE AH, there’s no such word as
columpio. Do you mean a swing ?” I would bow my head, embarrassed, humiliated by the smiles and snickers of the American children around me. I grew insecure about Spanish. My native tongue was not quite as good as English, as if words like columpio were illegal immigrants trying to cross a border into another language. But Mrs. Buchanan’s discerning grammar-and-vocabulary-patrol ears could tell and send them back. Soon I was talking up an English storm. “Did you eat an English parrot?” my grandfather asked one Sunday. I had just enlisted yet one more patient servant to listen to my rendition of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers at breakneck pace. “Huh?” I asked impolitely in English, putting him in his place. Cat got your tongue? No big deal , I could quip. So there! Take that! Holy Toledo! (Mrs. Buchanan’s favorite “curse word”). Go jump in the lake! Really dumb. Golly. Gosh. Slang, little tricks, clichés, sayings, hotshot language that our teacher labeled ponderously: idiomatic expressions. Riddles, jokes, puns, conundrums, little exchanges. What is yellow and goes click-click? Why did the chicken cross the road? See you later, Alligator. How wonderful to call someone an alligator and not be scolded for being disrespectful. In fact, they were supposed to say back, In a while, Crocodile. There was also a neat little trick I wanted to try on an English-speaking adult at home. I had learned it from Elizabeth, my smart-alecky friend in fourth grade whom I alternately worshipped and resented. I’d ask her a question that required an explanation, and she’d answer, “Because...” “Elizabeth, how come you didn’t go to Isabel’s birthday party?” “Because...” “Why didn’t you put your name in your reader?” “Because...” I thought that such a cool way to get around having to come up with answers. So I practiced saying it under my breath, planning for the day I could use it on an unsuspecting English-speaking adult. One Sunday at our extended family dinner, my grandfather sat down at the children’s table to chat with us. He was famous, in fact, for the way he could carry on adult conversations with his grandchildren. He always spoke to us in English so that we could practice speaking it out of the classroom. He was a Cornell man, a world traveler, a United Nations representative from our country. He gave speeches in English. Perfect English, my mother’s phrase. That Sunday, he asked me a question. I can’t even remember what it was because I wasn’t really listening but lying in wait for my chance “Because...,” I answered him, the way Elizabeth said it. Papito waited a second for the rest of my sentence and then gave me a thumbnail grammar lesson: “ Because has to be followed by a clause.” “Why’s that?” I asked, nonplussed. “Because,” he winked. “Just because.”
there since a childhood of listening closely to words. Sister Bernadette did not make our class interminably diagram sentences from a workbook or learn a catechism of grammar rules. Instead, she asked us to write little stories imagining we were snowflakes, birds, pianos, a stone in the pavement, a star in the sky. What would it feel like to be a flower with roots in the ground? If the clouds could talk, what would they say? She had an expressive, dreamy look that was accentuated by her face being framed in a wimple. Supposing, just supposing... My mind would take off, soaring into possibilities, a flower with roots, a star in the sky, a cloud full of sad sad tears, a piano crying out each time its back was tapped, music only to our ears. Sister Bernadette stood at the chalkboard. Her chalk was always snapping in two because she wrote with so much energy, her whole habit shaking with the swing of her arm, her hand tap tap tapping on the board. “Here’s a simple sentence: The snow fell .” Sister Bernadette pointed with her chalk, her eyebrows lifted, her wimple poked up. Sometimes I could see little bits of gray hair disclosed by her wobbly habit. “But watch what happens if we put an adverb at the beginning and a prepositional phrase at the end: Gently the snow fell on the bare hills .” I thought about the snow. I saw how it might fall on the hills, tapping lightly on the bare branches of trees. Softly it would fall on the cold cold fields. On toys children had left out in the cold, and on cars and on little birds and on people out late walking on the streets. Sister Bernadette filled the chalkboard with snowy print, on and on, handling and shaping and moving the language, scribbling all over the board until English, those little bricks of meaning, those little fixed units and counters, became a charged, fluid mass that carried me in its great fluent waves, rolling and moving on ward, to deposit me on the shores of the only homeland. I was no longer a foreigner with no ground to stand on. I had landed in language. I had come into my English.
"The Arrangers of Marriage", by Chimamanda
Adichie
Chimamanda Adichie is a feminist fiction and non-fiction writer. You can learn more about her on her website https://www.chimamanda.com/. Enjoy your reading! The Arrangers of Marriage Chimamanda Ngozi ADICHIE (2009). “The Arrangers of Marriage”, The Thing Around Your Neck****. My new husband carried the suitcase out of the taxi and led the way into the brownstone, up a flight of brooding stairs, down an airless hallway with frayed carpeting, and stopped at a door. The number 2B, unevenly fashioned from yellowish metal, was plastered on it. “We’re here,” he said. He had used the word “house” when he told me about our home. I had imagined a smooth driveway snaking between cucumber-colored lawns, a door leading into a hallway, walls with sedate paintings. A house like those of the white newlyweds in the American films that NTA showed on Saturday nights. He turned on the light in the living room, where a beige couch sat alone in the middle, slanted, as though dropped there by accident. The room was hot; old, musty smells hung heavy in the air. “I’ll show you around,” he said. The smaller bedroom had a bare mattress lodged in one corner. The bigger bedroom had a bed and dresser, and a phone on the carpeted floor. Still, both rooms lacked a sense of space, as though the walls had become uncomfortable with each other, with so little between them. “Now that you’re here, we’ll get more furniture. I didn’t need that much when I was alone,” he said. “Okay,” I said. I felt light-headed. The ten-hour flight from Lagos to New York and the interminable wait while the American customs officer raked through my suitcase had left me woozy, stuffed my head full of cotton wool. The officer had examined my foodstuffs as if they were spiders, her gloved fingers poking at the waterproof bags of ground egusi and dried onugbu leaves and uziza seeds, until she seized my uziza seeds. She feared I would grow them on American soil. It didn’t matter that the seeds had been sun-dried for weeks and were as hard as a bicycle helmet.
“Did you get through?” my new husband asked. “It’s engaged,” I said. I looked away so that he would not see the relief on my face. “Busy. Americans say busy, not engaged,” he said. “We’ll try later. Let’s have breakfast.” For breakfast, he defrosted pancakes from a bright-yellow bag. I watched what buttons he pressed on the white microwave, carefully memorizing them. “Boil some water for tea,” he said. “Is there some dried milk?” I asked, taking the kettle to the sink. Rust clung to the sides of the sink like peeling brown paint. “Americans don’t drink their tea with milk and sugar.” “ Ezi okwu? Don’t you drink yours with milk and sugar?” “No, I got used to the way things are done here a long time ago. You will too, baby.” I sat before my limp pancakes—they were so much thinner than the chewy slabs I made at home—and bland tea that I feared would not get past my throat. The doorbell rang and he got up. He walked with his hands swinging to his back; I had not really noticed that before, I had not had time to notice. “I heard you come in last night.” The voice at the door was American, the words flowed fast, ran into each other. Supri-supri, Aunty Ify called it, fast-fast. “When you come back to visit, you will be speaking supri-supri like Americans,” she had said. “Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for keeping my mail,” he said. “Not a problem at all. How did your wedding go? Is your wife here?” “Yes, come and say hello.” A woman with hair the color of metal came into the living room. Her body was wrapped in a pink robe knotted at the waist. Judging from the lines that ran across her face, she could have been anything from six decades to eight decades old; I had not seen enough white people to correctly gauge their ages. “I’m Shirley from 3A. Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had the nasal voice of someone battling a cold. “You are welcome,” I said. Shirley paused, as though surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get back to breakfast,” she said. “I’ll come down and visit with you when you’ve settled in.” Shirley shuffled out. My new husband shut the door. One of the dining table legs was shorter than the rest, and so the table rocked, like a seesaw, when he leaned on it and said, “You should say ‘Hi’ to people here, not ‘You’re welcome.’” “She’s not my age mate.” “It doesn’t work that way here. Everybody says hi.” “ O di mma. Okay.” “I’m not called Ofodile here, by the way. I go by Dave,” he said, looking down at the pile of envelopes Shirley had given him. Many of them had lines of writing on the envelope itself, above the address, as though the sender had remembered to add something only after the envelope was sealed.
“Dave?” I knew he didn’t have an English name. The invitation cards to our wedding had read Ofodile Emeka Udenwa and Chinaza Agatha Okafor. “The last name I use here is different, too. Americans have a hard time with Udenwa, so I changed it.” “What is it?” I was still trying to get used to Udenwa, a name I had known only a few weeks. “It’s Bell.” “Bell!” I had heard about a Waturuocha that changed to Waturu in America, a Chikelugo that took the more American-friendly Chikel, but from Udenwa to Bell? “That’s not even close to Udenwa,” I said. He got up. “You don’t understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside. You have to use your English name here.” “I never have, my English name is just something on my birth certificate. I’ve been Chinaza Okafor my whole life.” “You’ll get used to it, baby,” he said, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You’ll see.” When he filled out a Social Security number application for me the next day, the name he entered in bold letters was AGATHA BELL. Our neighborhood was called Flatbush, my new husband told me, as we walked, hot and sweaty, down a noisy street that smelled of fish left out too long before refrigeration. He wanted to show me how to do the grocery shopping and how to use the bus. “Look around, don’t lower your eyes like that. Look around. You get used to things faster that way,” he said. I turned my head from side to side so he would see that I was following his advice. Dark restaurant windows promised the BEST CARIBBEAN AND AMERICAN FOOD in lopsided print, a car wash across the street advertised $3.50 washes on a chalkboard nestled among Coke cans and bits of paper. The sidewalk was chipped away at the edges, like something nibbled at by mice. Inside the air-conditioned bus, he showed me where to pour in the coins, how to press the tape on the wall to signal my stop. “This is not like Nigeria, where you shout out to the conductor,” he said, sneering, as though he was the one who had invented the superior American system. Inside Key Food, we walked from aisle to aisle slowly. I was wary when he put a beef pack in the cart. I wished I could touch the meat, to examine its redness, as I often did at Ogbete Market, where the butcher held up fresh-cut slabs buzzing with flies. “Can we buy those biscuits?” I asked. The blue packets of Burton’s Rich Tea were familiar; I did not want to eat biscuits but I wanted something familiar in the cart. “Cookies. Americans call them cookies,” he said. I reached out for the biscuits (cookies).
ceiling blinked with tiny ethereal lights. I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people who pushed against us, even the black ones, wore the mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces. “We’ll get pizza first,” he said. “It’s one thing you have to like in America.” We walked up to the pizza stand, to the man wearing a nose ring and a tall white hat. “Two pepperoni and sausage. Is your combo deal better?” my new husband asked. He sounded different when he spoke to Americans: his r was overpronounced and his t was under-pronounced. And he smiled, the eager smile of a person who wanted to be liked. We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.” A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food. Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room. There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food. “Do you like the pizza?” my new husband asked. His paper plate was empty. “The tomatoes are not cooked well.” “We overcook food back home and that is why we lose all the nutrients. Americans cook things right. See how healthy they all look?” I nodded, looking around. At the next table, a black woman with a body as wide as a pillow held sideways smiled at me. I smiled back and took another pizza bite, tightening my stomach so it would not eject anything. We went into Macy’s afterwards. My new husband led the way toward a sliding staircase; its movement was rubbery-smooth and I knew I would fall down the moment I stepped on it. “ Biko , don’t they have a lift instead?” I asked. At least I had once ridden in the creaky one in the local government office, the one that quivered for a full minute before the doors rolled open. “Speak English. There are people behind you,” he whispered, pulling me away, toward a glass counter full of twinkling jewelry. “It’s an elevator, not a lift. Americans say elevator.” “Okay.” He led me to the lift (elevator) and we went up to a section lined with rows of weighty-looking coats. He bought me a coat the color of a gloomy day’s sky, puffy with what felt like foam inside its lining. The coat looked big enough for two of me to snugly fit into it. “Winter is coming,” he said. “It is like being inside a freezer, so you need a warm coat.” “Thank you.” “Always best to shop when there is a sale. Sometimes you get the same thing for less than half the price. It’s one of the wonders of America.” “ Ezi okwu? ” I said, then hastily
added, “Really?” “Let’s take a walk around the mall. There are some other wonders of America here.” We walked, looking at stores that sold clothes and tools and plates and books and phones, until the bottoms of my feet ached. Before we left, he led the way to McDonald’s. The restaurant was nestled near the rear of the mall; a yellow and red M the size of a car stood at its entrance. My husband did not look at the menu board that hovered overhead as he ordered two large Number 2 meals. “We could go home so I can cook,” I said. “Don’t let your husband eat out too much,” Aunty Ada had said, “or it will push him into the arms of a woman who cooks. Always guard your husband like a guinea fowl’s egg.” “I like to eat this once in a while,” he said. He held the hamburger with both hands and chewed with a concentration that furrowed his eyebrows, tightened his jaw, and made him look even more unfamiliar. I made coconut rice on Monday, to make up for the eating out. I wanted to make pepper soup, too, the kind Aunty Ada said softened a man’s heart. But I needed the uziza that the customs officer had seized; pepper soup was just not pepper soup without it. I bought a coconut in the Jamaican store down the street and spent an hour cutting it into tiny bits because there was no grater, and then soaked it in hot water to extract the juice. I had just finished cooking when he came home. He wore what looked like a uniform, a girlish-looking blue top tucked into a pair of blue trousers that was tied at the waist. “ Nno ,” I said. “Did you work well?” “You have to speak English at home, too, baby. So you can get used to it.” He brushed his lips against my cheek just as the doorbell rang. It was Shirley, her body wrapped in the same pink robe. She twirled the belt at her waist. “That smell,” she said, in her phlegm-filled voice. “It’s everywhere, all over the building. What are you cooking?” “Coconut rice,” I said. “A recipe from your country?” “Yes.” “It smells really good. The problem with us here is we have no culture, no culture at all.” She turned to my new husband, as if she wanted him to agree with her, but he simply smiled. “Would you come take a look at my air conditioner, Dave?” She asked. “It’s acting up again and it’s so hot today.” “Sure,” my new husband said. Before they left, Shirley waved at me and said, “Smells really good,” and I wanted to invite her to have some rice. My new husband came back half an hour later and ate the fragrant meal I placed before him, even smacking his lips like Uncle Ike sometimes did to show Aunty Ada how pleased he was with her cooking. But the next day, he came back with a Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook , thick as a Bible. “I don’t want us to be known as the people who fill the building with smells of
mysterious and heavy lidded eyes, her curved hips. She played her music a little too loud, so we had to raise our voices as we spoke. “You know, my sister’s a manager at Macy’s,” she said. “They’re hiring entry-level salespeople in the women’s department, so if you’re interested I can put in a word for you and you’re pretty much hired. She owes me one.” Something leaped inside me at the thought, the sudden and new thought, of earning what would be mine. Mine. “I don’t have my work permit yet,” I said. “But Dave has filed for you?” “Yes.” “It shouldn’t take long; at least you should have it before winter. I have a friend from Haiti who just got hers. So let me know as soon as you do.” “Thank you.” I wanted to hug Nia. “Thank you.” That evening I told my new husband about Nia. His eyes were sunken in with fatigue, after so many hours at work, and he said, “Nia?” as though he did not know who I meant, before he added, “She’s okay, but be careful because she can be a bad influence.” Nia began stopping by to see me after work, drinking from a can of diet soda she brought with her and watching me cook. I turned the air conditioner off and opened the window to let in the hot air, so that she could smoke. She talked about the women at her hair salon and the men she went out with. She sprinkled her everyday conversation with words like the noun “clitoris” and the verb “fuck.” I liked to listen to her. I liked the way she smiled to show a tooth that was chipped neatly a perfect triangle missing at the edge. She always left before my new husband came home. Winter sneaked up on me. One morning I stepped out of the apartment building and gasped. It was as though God was shredding tufts of white tissue and flinging them down. I stood staring at my first snow, at the swirling flakes, for a long, long time before turning to go back into the apartment. I scrubbed the kitchen floor again, cut out more coupons from the Key Food catalog that came in the mail, and then sat by the window, watching God’s shredding become frenzied. Winter had come and I was still unemployed. When my husband came home in the evening, I placed his french fries and fried chicken before him and said, “I thought I would have my work permit by now.” He ate a few pieces of oily-fried potatoes before responding. We spoke only English now; he did not know that I spoke Igbo to myself while I cooked, that I had taught Nia how to say “I’m hungry” and “See you tomorrow” in Igbo. “The American woman I married to get a green card is making trouble,” he said, and slowly tore a piece of chicken in two. The area under his eyes was puffy. “Our divorce was almost final, but not completely, before I married you in Nigeria. Just a minor thing, but she found out about it and now she’s threatening to report me to Immigration. She wants more money.” “You were married before?” I laced my fingers together because they had started to shake.
“Would you pass that, please?” he asked, pointing to the lemonade I had made earlier. “The jug?” “Pitcher. Americans say pitcher, not jug.” I pushed the jug (pitcher) across. The pounding in my head was loud, filling my ears with a fierce liquid. “You were married before?” “It was just on paper. A lot of our people do that here. It’s business, you pay the woman and both of you do paperwork together but sometimes it goes wrong and either she refuses to divorce you or she decides to blackmail you.” I pulled the pile of coupons toward me and started to rip them in two, one after the other. “Ofodile, you should have let me know this before now.” He shrugged. “I was going to tell you.” “I deserved to know before we got married.” I sank down on the chair opposite him, slowly, as if the chair would crack if I didn’t. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. Your uncle and aunt had decided. Were you going to say no to people who have taken care of you since your parents died?” I stared at him in silence, shredding the coupons into smaller and smaller bits; broken up pictures of detergents and meat packs and paper towels fell to the floor. “Besides, with the way things are messed up back home, what would you have done?” he asked. “Aren’t people with master’s degrees roaming the streets, jobless?” His voice was flat. “Why did you marry me?” I asked. “I wanted a Nigerian wife and my mother said you were a good girl, quiet. She said you might even be a virgin.” He smiled. He looked even more tired when he smiled. “I probably should tell her how wrong she was.” I threw more coupons on the floor, clasped my hands together, and dug my nails into my skin. “I was happy when I saw your picture,” he said, smacking his lips. “You were light skinned. I had to think about my children’s looks. Light-skinned blacks fare better in America.” I watched him eat the rest of the batter-covered chicken, and I noticed that he did not finish chewing before he took a sip of water. That evening, while he showered, I put only the clothes he hadn’t bought me, two embroidered boubous and one caftan, all Aunty Ada’s cast offs, in the plastic suitcase I had brought from Nigeria and went to Nia’s apartment. Nia made me tea, with milk and sugar, and sat with me at her round dining table that had three tall stools around it. “If you want to call your family back home, you can call them from here. Stay as long as you want; I’ll get on a payment plan with Bell Atlantic.” “There’s nobody to talk to at home,” I said, staring at the pear-shaped face of the sculpture on the wooden shelf. Its hollow eyes stared back at me. “How about your aunt?” Nia asked.
“Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan
This story was written by Amy Tan, an American author of Chinese heritage. You can learn more about her on her website, Amy Tan. Enjoy the story! “Mother Tongue” 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. 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
