Question

Refer to Explorations in Literature for a complete version of this narrative.

Answer 1

The statement which best expresses the central idea of “Mother Tongue”by Amy Tan is :  

One's facility with language should not be misunderstood as an indicator of intelligence or capability.

The central idea is the difficulty immigrants encounter in the use of a new language . But although the writer’s mother was not fluent in English             ( people could not understand her when she spoke English), this did not mean that she was stupid. On the contrary, she was very fluent in written English, how to arrange her finances and could tell very vivid stories and life lessons in her native language.  When the writer (Amy Tan) spoke with her mother she used  broken English because she could understand clearly everything that her mother meant so it was no obstacle for her. Her mother had to learn English as an adult, which is more difficult.