Learning a whole different language can be a difficult task, especially when it is an absolute requisite for survival in a new culture – rife with distressful experiences, conundrums, and oppressive diffidence. One often falls on a foreboding point in their journey of solving the puzzles of a new language and new culture where they form wrong assumptions about the challenges they face, gets deprecated by their own doubts and low aplomb, and suffers utter silence.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at The University of California, Berkeley. She is an author who writes to share the experiences of Chinese Americans like her. “Tongue-Tied,” her personal essay, was originally published in 2011. It revolves around brief yet detailed anecdotes that portray the difficulties, hurdles, and challenges Chinese children in America like her face in their journey of learning English and adapting to the American culture. What makes the essay the most plausible it can be is Kingston’s honesty about her personal stories and the fact that she wrote it entirely from her own point of view, not someone else’s. Her real emotions in each part of the essay is vivid enough for the readers to picture her struggles in their minds.

Kingston intends to use a complex background for her story in order to introduce ideas, including historical allusions, a background story, and the internal monologue based on her recollection. Provocation – just what she uses at the beginning of the essay to draw the readers in. The first paragraph focuses on a tale of Chinese knot-makers where Kingston compares herself to one. The second paragraph focuses on a painful historical occasion when her mother cut her tongue to prevent it from being confined in only one language. Kingston begins presenting the event of her mother cutting her tongue while connecting the first sentence with the previous paragraph: “Maybe that’s why my mother cut my tongue.” A significant moment of pathos is when she notes in her work, “All during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry” and “At other times I was terrified – the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.” At this point, she is proud, confused, and scared all at the same time. She provides a controversial background story of her inquisition about the event to her mother that states she doesn’t remember details of the event due to lack of evidence. She further supports her confusion and curiosity when she adds, “She didn’t cut the other children’s.” The focus on the personal back-story and the author’s emotions are to intrigue the readers and in order to provide background for the whole essay. Although Kingston uses enough details of personal stories to motivate the audience to read more, the historical occasion and her questioning her mother regarding her cut tongue are her most effective tools because the discussed experiences are painful and provocative.

A striking event like having a tongue cut is indeed a matter of huge curiosity and pain, tending to extend one’s anguish more than someone can expected it to. Kingston briefly writes about difficult moments of speaking English 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. After flunking Kindergarten, she discovered a terrible truth in her eyes: “It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that silence became a misery.” Through recalling several anecdotes of unpleasant, provocative, and confusing experiences in American school 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 had a terrible time speaking, much more than reading. “How could the American “I,” assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?” The quote implies how Kingston was strung in disarray regarding certain aspects of the English language. She also uses the term “mountainous ideographs” to describe the word “here.” She blames her tongue for her delayed English learning – her real emotions come up. Readers can reflect back on the description of the tale of Kingston’s mother cutting her tongue and find her personal stories to be the pillars of the event. On the same note, the author includes in her text, “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.” Her assumption was wrong, of course.

Even before Kindergarten, Kingston had troubles speaking her native language. A moment of irony sparks up when she talks about how she had to speak repeatedly for others to catch what she is saying, because the sole purpose of her mother cutting her tongue was to make her speak any language fluently.

One of the most important features of the essay is the contradiction between American and Chinese worlds.  Because the Chinese children were silent and demure as they were bilingual, Maxine Hong Kingston and her Chinese peers were faced with discrimination and hardships – one other reason their diffidence were even more perpetuated in American school. Even the teachers subjected them to segregation from the American children. The author cleverly includes a comparison between Chinese children and Negro children to state they didn’t have the same right as others – she calls them “Black Ghosts.” Kingston mentions painting black at school to give a hint on how unhappy she was, as well as by saying, “My parents took the pictures home. I spread them out and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas.” The discrimination and her silence had both become psychologically concerning sources of fatigue for her and probably for the other children from different races too.

Chinese school – an embodied blessing for Chinese children from American schools. The blissful and empowering atmosphere may bolster the self-confidence of the children there so they find their voice – to be necessarily equipped to not crumble under the brunt of English language and American society. The tone of the essay notably shifts as Kingston separately describes the environment of a Chinese school following the drawbacks of American school – mirrored in the shift from dejection to gaiety of those children as described in the last two paragraphs of the essay. Here she is comparing the two school systems and trying to bring her discomfort in American school to light. Yet, Kingston was more talkative only in groups. She still had trouble with individual speeches. This made her believe that her tongue throws hurdles in all aspects of her life.

Doubt is a terrible thing one can possess. Overwhelmed by her struggles, Kingston put her blame in the wrong place. Rather than addressing her problems up front, she chose to blame her tongue. She unconsciously puts forward the fact that her low self-confidence and inadequate efforts during her days in American school are to be censured much more than her tongue when she says, “One of us (not me) won every spelling bee, though.” Readers may notice that for a major part of the essay, Kingston mostly emphasizes on her diffidence and weaknesses rather than the efforts she may have made to bring betterment in her spoken English. She probably broached up her efforts that may have followed her struggles in American school, only to end up focusing mostly on the troubles she had during speaking.

Learning a new language and fitting in a new culture are indeed difficult for many, but carving one’s path through the challenges can led to a beautiful outcome. Kingston eventually acquired her dexterity in English and became a writer and a professor of linguistics. From the beginning of the essay, Kingston uses metaphors, similes, and vivid descriptions in order to support her claims. The writer’s tone is in accordance to the subject matter all through the essay. Her attitude is accentuated in her style of expression in regards to the topic of discussion. The solid language skills she used in the essay is an image of her credibility. The purpose of the essay is to expose, persuade, and motivate. The intended audience are all the Americans who are expected to be more considerate, respectful, and helpful towards immigrants from myriad of backgrounds who face difficulties that they seldom reveal, be it with language, communication, or culture. Tongue-tied children, especially Asians, may receive some inspiration to bring betterment in their spoken English through building their self-confidence.

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.