In her essay "Mother Tongue," Amy Tan reveals incidents in which her mother experienced disrespect because of the way she speaks English. Let's look at some of these and think about the assumptions people make with regard to English usage.

Tan reveals that she was once ashamed of her mother's "limited" English that seems "broken" or "fractured." As a young person, Tan believed that because her mother "expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect." In other words, Tan assumed that her mother was stupid in some way, or at least intellectually inferior, because of the way she spoke English.

Other people have also made this assumption many times over the years. People in stores or banks or restaurants, Tan says, "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." A hospital once lost an important CAT scan and did not even bother to apologize to Tan's mother until Tan herself called to deal with the situation.