In both of their essays both Tan and Staples they both shared their very own experiences with unpleasant people who were linking their personalities and behavior to their languages and identities. In the essay “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan, shows her readers how hard it is to be raised by a parent who speaks a small amount of English. And in Brent Staples essay he shows his readers how in the mid-1970s he discovered how much prejudgment black men faced for simply being present in public. There are many kinds of dangers when it comes to linking personality and behavior to language and identity because linking those together can only promote negative ideas such as racism, sexism, or other biased thoughts or actions.
Tan’s mother was an important part of her childhood, she motivated Tan to explore her interest in writing. In ‘Mother Tongue’, Tan began to talk about learning English and how it is used in different types of ‘tongues’ because her mother is Chinese. Her mother spoke English in a different way than most Americans but she was still able to get Tan to understand her. And Tan uses pathos when tells stories of the times in her mother’s life when she struggled to get respect from people around her just because of how different her English skills were than most Americans. For example Tan talks about two situations where her mother had gotten into is talking to a doctor at the hospital about a misplaced CAT scan and the stockbroker about her check that she was supposed to receive but because of her limited English she had Tan talk to the person on the phone during both situations. Even though her mother spoke English, Tan still needed to her her mother’s translator. Tan was in between two different lives with one with her work as a writer and one where she is a daughter to her Chinese mother. So in other words, if you speak in broken English, they automatically think of you as if you aren’t as smart as the people who speak fluent English.
Staples wrote this essay demonstrating his understandings of the fearful discrimination
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through his own experiences. Staples wrote his essay the way it is written to point out the problems he faced. When he was describing the way people acted whenever he was near them, he pointed out how women “seemed to have their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps across their chests bandolier style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled.” Because of that experience, Staples was able to paint us a picture of the fear people showed when they saw him. In spite of that, Staples does “understand, or course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination.” He says that because back then there was a large amount of young black men that were involved in gang related activities. But he believed that how the small amount of black men that actually harmed people walking or getting into their cars ruined the image for all black men because of their actions.
In conclusion both essays showed some kind of sign that there could be dangers when
people link personality and behavior to language and identity, because in ‘Mother Tongue’ Amy Tan talks mainly about how her she had to deal with the limitations of her mother’s imperfect English and what it can cause in society. Tan then talks more about studying her mother’s language, the way she uses the English language and the way society reacts to other people’s use of English. And in ‘A Black Man Ponders’, Staples talks about how different stereotypes affect how each different individual affects each person. For example Staples talks about how in order to change they way people saw him he decided that the only way to make people not see him as the stereotype of him as black man he needed to change his ‘identity’. He changed his ‘identity’ by “ …moving with care… whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi…” He also paid close attention to how closely he is to people and makes it obvious that he isn’t following them. So this shows what happens when people try saying something or doing something innocent or positive which could be turned into a negative thought or action.
