Plato's sample answer:
Tan’s mother’s imperfect English played a vital role in helping Tan explore and understand the world of language. Tan grew up listening to her mother’s “impeccable broken English,” which helped her discover and comprehend the “different Englishes” and made her ponder the “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.
She also states that not only was her mother’s broken English perfectly coherent to her, but it also played a very significant role in shaping her identity:
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.
Her mother’s English was one of the reasons that she developed a love for language. For Tan, her relationship with her mother caused her to have an intimate relationship with words:
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 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.
