When I was reading Tan’s “Mother Tongue” I immediately thought of my mother’s “broken” English and how embarrassed I was of it when I was growing up. My mother mainly spoke Spanish when we were at home but when we would go out shopping she would try her best to speak in English and she was often misunderstood and she would get frustrated easily. Whenever she had to call customer service for anything she would tell them to hold on while she got her daughter on the phone and she would beg me to talk to them because she knew they weren’t going to understand her accent. I’ve always understood her Spanglish but a lot of my friends that have met my mother find it hard to understand her unless they grew up with a Spanish mother who somewhat spoke English as well. Reading about Tan’s experience reminded about the times where I wouldn’t want my mother to attend parent-teacher conferences at my school because I was afraid the other students would hear her accent or my teachers wouldn’t be able to understand her. I never understood what difference there was between my mother’s English and “proper” English until I noticed that the other kids’ mothers spoke just like my English teachers. There were no misunderstandings, no looking at their child for a complete translation and their meetings were brief. In the few times my mother attended my parent teacher conferences the meetings would always last about fifteen to twenty minutes because she would need me to translate what the teacher said or tell the teacher what she was trying to say. I was always annoyed by the end of the meetings and she would be frustrated because she would try to communicate with my teachers herself but they would never understand her.