“Mother Tongue” & “Cartographies of Myself”

Bao Shengyu
After reading these two articles, I can conclude several

differences and similarities between them, especially the part

related to the emotions. Besides, both the two authors talk about

language, identity, or race.

One of the similarities between “Mother Tongue” and

“Cartographies of Myself” is that Lillian Lu and Amy Tan, the

two Chinese American, both have been in the USA for the most

time of their life. In comparison, their family, or their mothers

and other seniors may experience the process of immigration

and the mixture of cultures and languages. Moreover, they treat

English as the second language with it proficiently mastered,

which elder people may not be so good at. When it comes to

their mother tongue, Chinese, they both have some trouble with

it. The two articles are similar also because that the two authors

want to express that as an immigrant, they want to be their

selves and not be trapped by their original race. Actually, it is a

little struggled for them in some situations due to the language

and culture differences.

There are also quite a few differences between the two

passages. To begin with, “Mother Tongue” mainly focuses on

some experiences of Amy Tan’s mother and herself, especially

some thoughts related to English as a language. However, in

“Cartographies of Myself”, Lu focuses on the experience of

herself and some opinions about the current situation for her as

an Asian girl in America. It is more about the ponder on how to

treat her position. What’s more, Amy Tan, as a writer, has some

deeper understanding to English and she can cover a lot of

things related to English writing. She argues that the language is

combined with one’s thoughts and broken English can make a

lot of trouble in daily life. In that way, to learn and master

English well is very important and not so easy. However, Lillian

Lu thinks that the language is not as vital as what Amy Tan

thinks. Lu seems to assume that the identities, races and some

other things also count. Amy Tan tries to write texts of English

to make it easy to be understood. She is concerned with how

others especially her mother can master English. Lillian Lu, who

is much younger, is interested in the relationship between

language and other elements mentioned above like race, people

and the color of skin.

Then I am going to talk about what the authors say about

language, race and identity. Amy Tan uses a lot of words to

show how struggling the broken English is. In her position, if

you cannot speak a language well enough, it can be very

difficult to transport what do you believe or want to others.

Language is not like mathematics. With no accurate answers, it

needs to be based on one’s personal opinions and experience. It

can even restrict one’s development. Lillian Lu mentions that

actually nowadays there are still a lot of people insist that one’s

color or race plays an important role. In fact, those are

stereotypes and would better be eliminated. She wants to

emphasize that a person ought not to be restricted by what he is

like and what his race is. One only needs to be oneself and that

is enough.