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Compare and contrast how authors Bharti Mukherjee essay (two ways to belong in America) and Amy Tan (Mother
Tongue) describe the immigrant-in-America experience. Consider how the tone, descriptions, and unique perspectives
contribute to a reader’s understanding of the broader picture of an immigrant experience
750 words
MLA
works cited page
BHARATI MUKHERJEE
Two Ways to Belong in America
Born in 1940 and raised in Calcutta, India, Bharati Mukherjee immigrated to the United States in 1961 and earned an MFA
and a Ph.D. in literature. Mukherjee is the author of several novels, including Tiger’s Daughter (1972), Jasmine (1989),
Desirable Daughters (2002), and The Tree Bride (2004). She has also written short story collections, such as The
Middleman and Other Stories (1988). She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Two Ways to Belong in America” first appeared in the New York Times. It was written to address a movement in
Congress to take away government benefits from resident aliens. Like her fiction, though, it is about the issues that
confront immigrants in America.
This is a tale of two sisters from Calcutta, Mira and Bharati, who have lived in the United States for some 35 years, but
who find themselves on different sides in the current debate over the status of immigrants. I am an American citizen and
she is not. I am moved that thousands of long-term residents are finally taking the oath of citizenship. She is not.
Mira arrived in Detroit in 1960 to study child psychology and pre-school education. I followed her a year later to study
creative writing at the University of Iowa. When we left India, we were almost identical in appearance and attitude. We
dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love, and marriage in the same Calcutta
convent-school accent. We would endure our two years in America, secure our degrees, then return to India to marry the
grooms of our father’s choosing.
Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962 who was getting his business administration degree at Wayne State
University. They soon acquired the labor certifications necessary for the green card of hassle-free residence and
employment.
Mira still lives in Detroit, works in the Southfield, Mich., school system, and has become nationally recognized for her
contributions in the fields of pre-school education and parent-teacher relationships. After 36 years as a legal immigrant in
this country, she clings passionately to her Indian citizenship and hopes to go home to India when she retires.
In Iowa City in 1963, I married a fellow student, an American of Canadian parentage. Because of the accident of his North
Dakota birth, I bypassed labor-certification requirements and the race-related “quota” system that favored the applicant’s
country of origin over his or her merit. I was prepared for (and even welcomed) the emotional strain that came with
marrying outside my ethnic community. In 33 years of marriage, we have lived in every part of North America. By
choosing a husband who was not my father’s selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T-shirts,
and renouncing 3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, “pure culture” marriage in the Mukherjee family. My books have
often been read as unapologetic (and in some quarters overenthusiastic) texts for cultural and psychological
“mongrelization.” It’s a word I celebrate.
Mira and I have stayed sisterly close by phone. In our regular Sunday morning conversations, we are unguardedly
affectionate. I am her only blood relative on this continent. We expect to see each other through the looming crises of
aging and ill health without being asked. Long before Vice President Gore’s “Citizenship U.S.A.” drive, we’d had our polite
arguments over the ethics of retaining an overseas citizenship while expecting the permanent protection and economic
benefits that come with living and working in America.
Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was really on our minds, but we probably pitied one another. She, for the lack
of structure in my life, the erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying daily core. I, for the narrowness of her
perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with the
scapegoatings of “aliens” (documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of long-term legal immigrants like
Mira for new scrutiny and new self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite discretion.
We were always unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more than ever, sisters.
“I feel used,” Mira raged on the phone the other night. “I feel manipulated and discarded. This is such an unfair way to
treat a person who was invited to stay and work here because of her talent. My employer went to the I.N.S. and petitioned
for the labor certification. For over 30 years, I’ve invested my creativity and professional skills into the improvement of this
country’s pre-school system. I’ve obeyed all the rules, I’ve paid my taxes, I love my work, I love my students, I love the
friends I’ve made. How dare America now change its rules in midstream? If America wants to make new rules curtailing
benefits of legal immigrants, they should apply only to immigrants who arrive after those rules are already in place.”
To my ears, it sounded like the description of a long-enduring, comfortable yet loveless marriage, without risk or
recklessness. Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments
by immigration advocates.) My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially courteous and
gracious, and that’s as far as her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it.
I asked her if she would follow the example of others who have decided to become citizens because of the anti-
immigration bills in Congress. And here, she surprised me. “If America wants to play the manipulative game, I’ll play it,
too,” she snapped. “I’ll become a U.S. citizen for now, then change back to India when I’m ready to go home. I feel some
kind of irrational attachment to India that I don’t to America. Until all this hysteria against legal immigrants, I was totally
happy. Having my green card meant I could visit any place in the world I wanted to and then come back to a job that’s
satisfying and that I do very well.”
In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there could not be a wider divergence of immigrant experience.
America spoke to me — I married it — I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody,
surrendering those thousands of years of “pure culture,” the saris, the delightfully accented English. She retained them all.
Which of us is the freak?
Mira’s voice, I realize, is the voice not just of the immigrant South Asian community but of an immigrant community of the
millions who have stayed rooted in one job, one city, one house, one ancestral culture, one cuisine, for the entirety of their
productive years. She speaks for greater numbers than I possibly can. Only the fluency of her English and the anger, rather
than fear, born of confidence from her education, differentiate her from the seamstresses, the domestics, the technicians,
the shop owners, the millions of hard-working but effectively silenced documented immigrants as well as their less
fortunate “illegal” brothers and sisters.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my husband’s ancestral homeland of Canada, I was always well-employed but
never allowed to feel part of the local Quebec or larger Canadian society. Then, through a Green Paper that invited a
national referendum on the unwanted side effects of “nontraditional” immigration, the government officially turned
against its immigrant communities, particularly those from South Asia.
I felt then the same sense of betrayal that Mira feels now. I will never forget the pain of that sudden turning, and the
casual racist outbursts the Green Paper elicited. That sense of betrayal had its desired effect and drove me, and
thousands like me, from the country.
Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we hope to interact with the country that we have chosen to live in. She is
happier to live in America as expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I need to feel like a part of the community I
have adopted (as I tried to feel in Canada as well). I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can.
The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self transformation.
Amy Tan- 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’ll 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 other 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 very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So
mad he lie to me, losing me money.”
And then I said in perfect English, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago,
but it hasn’t arrived.”
Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I
was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t
receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.” And sure
enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and
quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the
hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she
had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said
they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she
told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She
said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment
for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor
finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be
found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone
through for a most regrettable mistake.
I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists
probably will tell you that a person’s developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the
language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the
language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my
English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade
school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or
seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true
abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on
English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed
around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was , Mary thought he was .” And the
correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was shy,
Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of
semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.”
Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have
thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical,
semantic relationship — for example, “Sunset is to nightfall as is to .” And here you would be presented with a list of four
possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever,
yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my
mind the images already created by the first pair, “sunset is to nightfall” — and I would see a burst of colors against a
darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words — red, bus, stoplight,
boring — just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as
saying: “A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “a chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would have gotten that
answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past
sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been
asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian
Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are
broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys — in fact, just last week — that Asian
students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think
that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” or
“limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science,
which is what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I
became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a
freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents
toward account management.
But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily crafted
sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first
draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its
nascent state.” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And
the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind — and
in fact she did read my early drafts — I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to
my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for which
for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described
as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her
internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted
to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech,
and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother
finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: “So easy to read.”
