Personal response to “Mother Tongue”

I originally chose this essay because it is shorter than the other one. However, when I found that the author was an ABC from China, I felt curious about what she was going to say in this essay. While reading, I was really attracted by what she talked about. Some of her experiences reminded me of some of mine. I have thought of language in families before, actually. At home, I talk with my mother in a dialect and with my father in another; at school, I speak quite accurate mandarin with my peers. Same as the author, I felt embarrassed because of my mother’s language some times. When hearing her talking to my teachers in a funny kind of mandarin with dialect’s pronunciations, I had to keep myself hard from bursting out laughing. When I grew up, I began to appreciate my parents’ dialects, and I even began to feel like home only when hearing their a little bit rube words.

Except language in a family, I also felt quite interested in another topic in her essay, which is about Chinese students. “Why are there few Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering?” Actually, I have found that most of my Chinese friends studying abroad chose finance and accounting as their majors. That’s not just a coincidence. Even some girls who is not good at and, most important, not interested in mathematics related things, chose to study accounting. They said that it would be easier to achieve the degree, because math thing is much easier than the others. Does that mean that Chinese students are born smarter than Western countries’ students in math? I don’t think so. The math taught in American college seems easier for Chinese students simply because that we have learned those knowledge in high school. The same thing, the American students are not born smarter than us in English writing. They just have been using that language more often than we do. In my opinion, there is a gap between two languages but it is not insurmountable.