“Tongue-Tied” by Maxine Hong Kingston is a personal essay that revolves around the detailed examples of experiences which portray the difficulties Chinese children in America like her face in their journey of learning English. The author starts with the exposition of a historical occasion when her mother cut her tongue to prevent it from being confined in only one language. Kingston doesn’t remember details of the event – a fact that is supported by a background story that displays her confusion and curiosity due to lack of evidence of her tongue being cut. Focusing on the background story, she catches the readers’ absorption into the main theme of the essay.

“Sometimes silence is better.” Kingston briefly writes about difficult moments rooting from being tongue-tied starting from her days in Kindergarten. She used to speak in an almost inaudible voice that eventually gave way to thick silence for years in American school. Through recalling several anecdotes of unpleasant, provocative, and confusing experiences resulting from her weakness in spoken English and her silence, she provides a contrast between her former curiosity and subsequent contempt towards her cut tongue. She assumes that her silence has to do with being Chinese. She blames her tongue for her delayed English learning. Kingston also broaches up the segregation she and her Chinese peers were subjected to in American school. She supports it through recalling her activities that display her miserable demeanor resulting from the troubles of adjusting to a new culture.

Until starting going to a Chinese school, Kingston kept struggling with her low self-confidence when it came to speaking English properly. The final two paragraphs of the essay focus on, first, the blissful and empowering atmosphere of Chinese school that bolstered the confidence of almost all the Chinese students there, and then, a moment of speaking English that shows that not all of them found voice there. Kingston may implicitly be trying to broach up the the realization that low self-confidence is to be blamed more than their tied tongue for their slowed English learning.

The readers can notice the tone of the essay shifting as Kingston separately describes the environment of a Chinese school following the contradictory drawbacks of American school – mirrored in the self-esteem the Chinese children acquired while working together in a linguistic minority after years of staying silent.

The purpose of the essay is to expose, persuade, and motivate. Tongue-tied children may receive some inspiration to bring betterment in their spoken English through building their self-confidence. Readers will have insight to the problems immigrants from myriad of backgrounds face when it comes to language and may be compelled towards being more understanding and considerate towards them.

 

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Works Cited

Kingston, Maxine Hong. “Tongue-Tied.” The Norton Reader. Ed. Linda
Peterson and John Brereton. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. 513-516 Print.