Mother tongue author(s) amy tan source the threepenn

Mother Tongue
Author(s): Amy Tan
Source: The Threepenny Review , Autumn, 1990, No. 43
(Autumn, 1990), pp. 7-8
Published by: Threepenny Review
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Mother Tongue
Amy Tan
IAM NOT a scholar of English or lit-
erature. I cannot give you much more
than personal opinions on the English
language and its variations in this coun-
try or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition,
I am someone who has always loved
language. I am fascinated by language
in daily life. I spend a great deal of my
time thinking about the power of lan-
guage-the way it can evoke an emo-
tion, 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.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of
the different Englishes I do use. I was
giving a talk to a large group of people,
the same talk I had already given to half
a dozen other groups. The nature of the
talk was about my writing, my life, and
my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk
was going along well enough, until I
remembered one major difference that
made the whole talk sound wrong. My
mother was in the room. And it was

perhaps the first time she had heard me
give a lengthy speech-using the kind of
English I have never used with her. I was
saying things like, "The intersection of
memory upon imagination" and "There
is an aspect of my fiction that relates to
thus-and-thus"-a speech filled with
carefully wrought grammatical phrases,
|burdened, it suddenly seemed to me,
with nominalized forms, past perfect
tenses, conditional phrases-all the
forms of standard English that I had
learned in school and through books,
the forms of English I did not use at
home with my mother.
Just last week, I was walking down
the street with my mother, and I again
found myself conscious of the English I
was using, the English I do use with her.
We were talking about the price of new
and used furniture and I heard myself
saying this: "Not waste money that
way." My husband was with us as well,
and he didn't notice any switch in my
English. And then I realized why. It's
because over the twenty years we've
been together I've often used that same
kind of English with him, and sometimes
he even uses it with me. It has become
our language of intimacy, a different
sort of English that relates to family
talk, the language I grew up with.

So you'll have some idea of what this
family talk I heard sounds like, I'll quote
what my mother said during a recent
conversation which I videotaped and
then transcribed. During this conversa-
tion, my mother was talking about a
political gangster in Shanghai who had
the same last name as her family's, Du,
and how the gangster in his early years
wanted to be adopted by her family
which was rich by comparison. Later,
the gangster became more powerful, far
richer than my mother's family, and one
This talk was originally delivered as part of
a panel entitled "Englishes: Whose English
Is It Anyway?" during the 1989 State of the
Language Symposium in San Francisco.
day showed up at my mother's wedding
to pay his respects. Here's what she said
in part:
"Du Yusong having business like fruit
stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du
like Du Zong-but not Tsung-ming
Island people. The local people call
putong, the river east side, he belong to
that side local people. That man want
to ask Du Zong father take him in like
become own family. Du Zong father
wasn't look down on him, but didn't
take seriously, until that man big like
become a mafia. Now important per-
son, very hard to inviting him. Chinese

way, came only to show respect, don't
stay for dinner. Respect for making big
celebration, he shows up. Mean gives
lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese
social life that way. If too important
won't have to stay too long. He come to
my wedding. I didn't see, I heard it. I
gone to boy's side, they have YMCA
dinner. Chinese age I was 19."
You should know that my mother's
expressive command of English belies
how much she actually understands.
She reads the Forbes report, listens to
Wall Street Week, converses daily with
her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley
MacLaine's books with ease-all kinds
of things I can't begin to understand.
Yet some of my friends tell me they
understand fifty percent of what my
mother says. Some say they understand
eighty to ninety percent. Some say they
understand none of it, as if she were
speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my
mother's English is perfectly clear, per-
fectly 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.
ATELY, I've been giving more
Lthought to the kind of English my

mother speaks. Like others, I have
described it to people as "broken" or
"fractured" English. But I wince when I
say that. It has always bothered me that
I can think of no way to describe it
other than "broken," as if it were dam-
aged and needed to be fixed, as if it
lacked a certain wholeness and sound-
ness. I've heard other terms used, "lim-
ited English," for example. But they
seem just as bad, as if everything is
limited, including people's perception
of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I
was growing up, my mother's "limited"
English limited my perception of her. I
was ashamed of her English. I believed
that her English reflected the quality of
what she had to say. That is, because she
expressed them imperfectly her thoughts
were imperfect. And I had plenty of
empirical evidence to support me: the
fact that people in department stores, at
banks, and at restaurants did not take
her seriously, did not give her good ser-
vice, pretended not to understand her,
or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limi-
tations of her English as well. When I
was fifteen, she used to have me call
people on the phone to pretend I was
she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for

information or even to complain and
yell at people who had been rude to her.
One time it was a call to her stockbroker
in New York. She had cashed out her
small portfolio and it just so happened
we were going to go to New York the
next week, our very first trip outside
California. I had to get on the phone
and say in an adolescent voice that was
not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."
And my mother was standing in the
back whispering loudly, "Why he don't
send me check, already two weeks late.
So mad he lie to me, losing me money."
And then I said in perfect English,
"Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You
had agreed to send the check two weeks
ago, but it hasn't arrived."
Then she began to talk more loudly,
"What he want, I come to New York
tell him front of his boss, you cheating
me?" And I was trying to calm her
down, make her be quiet, while telling
the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any
more excuses. If I don't receive the
check immediately, I am going to have
to speak to your manager when I'm in
New York next week." And sure enough,
the following week there we were in
front of this astonished stockbroker,
and I was sitting there red-faced and

quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan,
was shouting at his boss in her impecca-
ble broken English.
We used a similar routine just five
days ago, for a situation that was far less
humorous. My mother had gone to the
hospital for an appointment, to find out
about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan
had revealed a month ago. She said she
had spoken very good English, her best
English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the
hospital did not apologize when they
said they had lost the CAT scan and she
had come for nothing. She said they did
not seem to have any sympathy when she
told them she was anxious to know the
exact diagnosis since her husband and
son had both died of brain tumors. She
said they would not give her any more
information until the next time and she
would have to make another appoint-
ment for that. So she said she would not
leave until the doctor called her daugh-
ter. She wouldn't budge. And when the
doctor finally called her daughter, me,
who spoke in perfect English--lo and
behold we had assurances the CAT
scan would be found, promises that a
conference call oni Monday would be
held, and apologies for any suffering my
mother had gone through for a most

regrettable mistake.
I think my mother's English almost
had an effect on limiting my possibilities
in life as well. Sociologists and linguists
probably will tell you that a person's
developing language skills are more in-
fluenced by peers. But I do think that the
language spoken in the family, especially
in immigrant families which are more
insular, plays a large role in shaping the
language of the child. And I believe that
it affected my results on achievement
tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my
English skills were never judged as poor,
compared to math, English could not be
considered my strong suit. In grade
school, I did moderately well, getting
perhaps Bs, sometimes B + s in English,
and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or
seventieth percentile on achievement
tests. But those scores were not good
enough to override the opinion that my
true abilities lay in math and science,
because in those areas I achieved As and
scored in the ninetieth percentile or
higher.
This was understandable. Math is
precise; there is only one correct answer.
Whereas, for me at least, the answers on
English tests were always a judgment
call, a matter of opinion and personal

experience. Those tests were con-
structed around items like fill-in-the-
blank sentence completion, such as
"Even though Tom was , Mary
thought he was ." And the cor-
rect answer always seemed to be the
most bland combinations of thoughts,
for example, "Even though Tom was
shy, Mary thought he was charming,"
with the grammatical structure "even
though" limiting the correct answer to
some sort of semantic opposites, so you
wouldn't get answers like "Even though
Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was
ridiculous." Well, according to my
mother, there were very few limitations
as to what Tom could have been, and
what Mary might have thought of him.
So I never did well on tests like that.
The same was true with word
analogies, pairs of words, in which you
were supposed to find some sort of logi-
cal, semantic relationship-for exam-
ple, "sunset" is to "nightfall" as
is to ." And here, you would be
presented with a list of four possible
pairs, one of which showed the same
kind of relationship: "red" is to "stop-
light," "bus" is to "arrival," "chills" is
to "fever," "yawn" is to "boring."
Well, I could never think that way. I
knew what the tests were asking, but I
could not block out of my mind the

images already created by the first pair,
"sunset is to nightfall"-and I would
see a burst of colors against a darkening
sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a
curtain of stars. And all the other pairs
of words-red, bus, stoplight, boring-
just threw up a mass of confusing
images, making it impossible for me to
sort out something as logical as saying:
"A sunset precedes nightfall" is the
same as "a chill precedes a fever." The
only way I would have gotten that an-
swer right would have been to imagine
an associative situation, for example,
my being disobedient and staying out
past sunset, catching a chill at night,
which turns into feverish pneumonia as
punishment, which indeed did happen
tome.
I HAVE been thinking about all this
lately, about my mother's English,
about achievement tests. Because lately
I've been asked, as a writer, why there
are not more Asian-Americans repre-
sented in American literature. Why are
there few Asian-Americans enrolled in
creative writing programs? Why do so
many Chinese students go into engi-
neering? Well, these are broad sociolog-
ical questions I can't begin to answer.
But I have noticed in surveys-in fact,
just last week-that Asian students, as a
whole, always do significantly better on

math achievement tests than in English.
And this makes me think that there are
other Asian-American students whose
English spoken in the home might also
be described as "broken" or "limited."
And perhaps they also have teachers
who are steering them away from writ-
ing and into math and science, which is
what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious
in nature, and enjoy the challenge of
disproving assumptions made about
FALL 1990
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stories published in the periodical since its founding contains
104 poems and

15 stories by 93 of America's most respected authors, including
Lee K. Abbott,
Robert Bly, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Richard Hugo,
Bobbie Ann
Mason, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, John Updike, and
James Wright.
In 1990, after polling more than one hundred editors and
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Digest named Crazyhorse one of the fifty most influential
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Praise for Crazyhorse:
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I ARKANSAS
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WANTED!

One (1) FAX machine, new or used.
One (1) small copying machine, new or used.
If you or your employers have any such machines that you
have outgrown, and that you would like to sell or donate to
The Threepenny Review, please contact us immediately. As a
non-profit organization, The Threepenny Review can give
you a tax deduction for the value of your gift. Or, if you prefer
to sell, we can pay you in (a very small amount of) cold, hard
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For further information about this mutually beneficial ar-
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or write to her at The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131,
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mainly ours, and we thank you in advance for your help.
me. I became an English major my first
year in college after being enrolled as
pre-med. I started writing non-fiction as
a freelancer the week after I was told by
my former boss that writing was my
worst skill and I should hone my talents
toward account management.
But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally
began to write fiction. And at first I
wrote using what I thought to be wittily
crafted sentences, sentences that would
finally prove I had mastery over the Eng-
lish language. Here's an example from
the first draft of a story that later made
its way into The Joy Luck Club, but
without this line: "That was my mental

quandary in its nascent state." A terri-
ble line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won't get
into today, I later decided I should envi-
sion a reader for the stories I would
write. And the reader I decided upon was
my mother, because these were stories
about mothers. So with this reader in
mind-and in fact, she did read my early
drafts-I began to write stories using all
the Englishes I grew up with: the English
I spoke to my mother, whichl 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
not either an English or a Chinese struc-
ture. I wanted to capture what language
ability tests can never reveal: her intent,
her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of
her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say
about my writing, I knew I had succeeded
where it counted when my mother
finished reading my book, and gave me
her verdict: "So easy to read." O

Separation Of The Waters
"When God commanded, 'Let the waters be gathered together,
unto one place,
and let the dry land appear,' certain parts refused to obey. They
embraced each
other all the more closely." -Jewish Legend
In his voice I hear the first day
of the waters,
before the spirit moved, brooding,
over the face of them,
before the firmament appearing
in the wake of His Word
divided upper water from lower water,
heaven from earth,
on the second day. Here in his voice
the first day
once again refuses the command
to be the second,
vowel and phoneme all awash, inchoate
in a jubilant babble
I lean over the crib to watch, that goes on
after he sees me,
after I say the name he hears as nonsense
the way the waters heard,

so entangled in the waters, whelmed
in the jubilant eddy
of such complete embracing they couldn't
have known themselves
as water, when the Lord said,
"Let the waters part."
See how, lonely for him, as on the shore
of speech I call and call.
See how the syllables begin to dampen,
blur and dissolve back,
close as they can now, toward the far surf
they were torn from,
from the shore of the sixth day calling
back to the first.
-Alan Shapiro
8THETHR THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
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Contents78Issue Table of ContentsThe Threepenny Review, No.
43 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 1-36Front Matter [pp. 1-2]Table Talk
[pp. 3-4]Farce and Fiction [pp. 5-6]PoemWhat Word Did the
Greeks Have for It? [p. 6]Mother Tongue [pp. 7-
8]PoemSeparation of the Waters [p. 8]BooksReview: A World
of Signs [pp. 9-11]PoemThe Season of Icarus [p.

11]BooksReview: Obstinate Humanity [pp. 12-13]So You Are
Turned [p. 14]PoemTrophy, W.W.I [p. 14]Berlin by Metaphor
[pp. 15-17]PoemThree Tangos [pp. 18-19]Our Correspondence
with the NEA [p. 19]Allegories of Eastern Europe [pp. 20-
23]Interview with Joseph Brodsky [pp. 23-24]FictionDog Days
[pp. 25-28]PoemBedouin Tent [p. 28]BooksIcicles by Cynthia
[pp. 29-30]Chekhov in English [pp. 31-32]PoemThe Deeper [p.
32]FilmHome and the World: Reflections on Satyajit Ray [pp.
33-35]FictionCrayons for Africa [p. 35]Back Matter [p. 36-36]
The Culture
Books
du r ing t he f ir s t se a son of her cr i t i-
cally acclaimed HBO series, Girls, Lena
Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath,
high on opium, tells her parents, “I don’t
want to freak you out, but I think that I
may be the voice of my generation—or
at least a voice of a generation.” The line
made waves as people conflated the fic-
tional character with her creator, perhaps
not wrongly. How dare a young woman
make such a bold claim? All too often our
culture tells young women their voices
don’t matter or deserve to be heard.
In her debut essay collection, Not That
Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You
What She’s “Learned,” Dunham demon-
strates her 28-year-old voice’s admirable
range. While some celebrity essay col-
lections and memoirs are lackluster,

even embarrassing to read, Not That Kind
of Girl suffers few missteps. Dunham’s
cinematic flair translates to the page
with vigor and clarity—not unlike the
late Nora Ephron, to whom she is often
compared and to whom the book is
dedicated (along with Dunham’s family
and her boyfriend Jack Antonoff of the
indie-rock band fun.). Instead of tossing
pithy, pseudo-motivational observations
at the reader, Dunham has crafted warm,
intelligent writing that is both deeply
personal and engaging, clustered in five
topical sections: “Love & Sex,” “Body,”
“Friendship,” “Work” and “Big Picture.”
Each of the 29 pieces—essays mixed
with lists, like “18 Unlikely Things I’ve
Said Flirtatiously”—is confident and
assured, sidestepping self-deprecation
and instead offering intense self-
examination. Dunham’s self-awareness
can almost overwhelm with truthiness,
as in “Barry,” her glancing, tragicomic
account of being raped by a “mustachioed
campus Republican” who, among other
nonconsensual acts, removes his condom
without her permission or knowledge.
“A sexual encounter that no one can
classify properly” sounds precisely like
a voice of her generation, one struggling
to come to terms with rape culture.
(And yet, “I feel like there are fifty ways
it’s my fault . . . But I also know that at no
moment did I consent to being handled

that way” sounds like a voice of every
generation of women.)
Unlike Hannah Horvath, Dunham in
her self-awareness does not come across
as self-obsessed. When she is absurd,
she acknowledges that absurdity. “13
Things I’ve Learned Are Not Okay to
Say to Friends” is among the most drolly
enlightened of the lists, made up of osten-
sible real-life Dunham quotes like “No,
please don’t apologize. If I had your moth-
er I’d be a nightmare, too” and “There’s
nothing about you in my book.”
She reveals her vulnerabilities in
a deadpan manner, showing us how she
loves and has been loved, how she has
wronged and been wronged. But it’s not
all laughing around the hard stuff. At
the end of “Barry” comes a teary phone
call with Antonoff, in which she tells
him what happened with the hipster
rapist; here the narrative turns deeply
confidential, allowing the reader into
what you realize is Dunham’s truest
interior life, as fragile and authentic as
yours or anyone’s.
Not That Kind of Girl is evidently what
she has learned thus far, and Dunham is
far from an autocratic memoirist, even
warning us, “I’m an unreliable narrator.
Because I add an invented detail to al-
most every story I tell about my mother.
Because my sister claims every memory

we ‘share’ has been fabricated by me to
impress a crowd.”
Dunham has received a great deal
of criticism from critics, including me,
The Audacity of Voice. Lena Dunham’s new
memoir speaks to—and from—a generation
By Roxane Gay
over the lack of racial diversity on Girls.
That assessment is well but narrowly
placed. The lack of diversity is a fault
of Hollywood more than of Dunham.
Thankfully, this essay collection trans-
lates far beyond the white, urban demo-
graphic of Girls.
Some things, like our humanity, are
universal. We all examine our families’
bonds and oddities. We all experience
the insecurity of becoming an adult
and navigating the world in an imper-
fect, human body. In Dunham’s case,
body image and family are inextricably
linked. She believes her penchant for
exhibitionism and onscreen nudity
came from her mother, the artist Laurie
Simmons, who took nude ur-selfies with
a Nikon back in the day. We all love and
hate and nurture ambitions and nurse
failings. We all worry about death and
cancer—“I’m not scared enough to do
any 10K walks, but I’m pretty scared,”
Dunham jokes in “My Top 10 Health
Concerns” (which include tonsil stones

and infertility). Her privilege is undeni-
able in her television work and even in
these pages, but by revealing so much of
herself in such an intelligent manner,
she allows us to see past that privilege
and into her person.
And what is a voice of a generation,
really? The phrase offers a seductive rhe-
torical flourish that speaks, at its core, to
a yearning. We are forever in search of
someone who will speak not only to us
but for us. In the introduction, Dunham
writes, “There is nothing gutsier to me
than a person announcing that their
story is one that deserves to be told, es-
pecially if that person is a woman.” Not
That Kind of Girl is from that kind of girl:
gutsy, audacious, willing to stand up and
shout. And that is why Dunham is not
only a voice who deserves to be heard but
also one who will inspire other impor-
tant voices to tell their stories too. n
Gay is the author of Bad Feminist, a new
collection of essays
Nearly two years after
her book proposal
fetched a $3.7 million
advance, Dunham’s
debut essay
collection finally hits

shelves Sept. 30
Illustration by James Gulliver Hancock for TIME
The Culture
time October 6, 2014 51
I’VE GOT A
LITTLE LIST
Sprinkled among
the essays in
Dunham’s book
are lists that
give quick
rundowns of
lessons she’s
learned, ranging
from things not
to say to friends
(which includes
telling them they
don’t appear
in the book) to
the best bits
of advice her
parents gave her

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—J U L E S V E R N E
B R I L L I A N T LY C R I S P D I S P L AY • R E M A R K
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use.
C all a n d R esponse— T aking a S tand
By bell hooks
Reading Silas House's speech "Our Secret Places in the Waiting
World,"
I hear him speak our collective pain and lamentation, those of
us who are
exploited, oppressed, dominated. I hear the lamentation of the
privileged
who witness suffering, who long for justice but who feel more
often than
not overwhelmed by powerlessness. Even though Silas
powerfully calls us
to act again and again, to revolt and resist on behalf of freedom
and justice
for all—on behalf of fairness—there are not many who are
answering the

call. Then there are those who have answered, but whose voices
grow weary
from burnout, from encroaching fear and despair that there will
be no change
coming. All too often, when freedom fighters are telling our
stories again and
again, speaking truth to power with no response that brings
about progres-
sive change, we grow weary. We become afraid, and we long to
be silent.
But, Audre Lorde, poet, activist, lesbian, has already told us in
her poem "A
Litany for Survival" that "when we are silent / we are still
afraid / So it is
better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to
survive."
To re-kindle a spirit of home, Silas evokes the emergence of a
"New Ap-
palachia" made up of folk who are outsiders, nomads,
immigrants. House
declares:
We are gathered as a community to talk about a New Ap-
palachia of the rural and the urban, the white and the black,
the Cherokee and the Hispanic, the straight and the gay
and the transgendered, the queer, the Other. We are a new
Appalachia made up of a people who are perpetual immi-
grants, those whom the rest of the nation see as the Other,
no matter how assimilated they may be within this culture.
When I read these words, the speech in its entirety, I affirm the
spirit of
difference and diversity evoked. Yet, I do not see us as
representing a new
Appalachia. What is new is our visibility, our speaking out

without change,
our solidarity. Yet this diverse Appalachia has always been and
will always
Professor, activist, and fem inist bell hooks is the author o f
numerous award-winning works
that seamlessly blend the stu d y o f race, class, gender, culture,
and teaching into a unique
and thought-provoking call to action, hooks, born in
Hopkinsville, Kentucky, received a PhD
from the University o f California, Santa Cruz in 1983. She has
taught English, African
studies, and African American studies at Yale University and
women's studies and American
literature at Oberlin College, and was a distinguished lecturer o
f English literature at the
City College o f New York.
122
R esponses to A S A K eynote A ddress 123
be. A nd w e m ust be careful not to fall into the binary
separations that simply
re-articulate another version of us and them.
I am alm ost tw enty years older than Silas. A nd w hat I rem
em ber m ost
about m y grow ing up life in the Kentucky hills w as the w
idespread belief
that those of us w ho lived in the hills were different because w
e chose to
separate ourselves from the conventional w orld and its laws
and creeds. No

doubt there w as plenty of racism and sexism in those hills, b u
t there w as
alw ays racial integration, the crossing of boundaries, folks
living the life
that they w anted to live in spite of all m anner of prejudices
and obstacles.
Truly shared class positionality w as a unifying factor; everyone
around
u s w as living w ith less, everyone around us was poor and w
orking class,
squatters, renters, a n d a few ow ners. There w as m uch
diversity in that
w orld, and even though m any folks were not educated, they
were radically
open, refusing to judge and condem n others.
I evoke this subculture of Appalachia that has always been
because I
think it is vital that we honor connections to a past where
difference, however
relative, survived and w as at times celebrated. With critical
awareness, we
m ust recognize the spaces of openness and solidarity forged in
the concrete
experience of living in communities that were always present in
radical spaces
in Appalachia both then and now. Rather than speak of a "new
Appalachia,"
I believe it is essential for unity in diversity to gather those
seeds of progres-
sive change and struggle that have long characterized the lives
of some indi-
viduals in rural Kentucky. While Silas says "in Appalachia, w e
have always
been about rem embering," he declares: "I hate the fact that so
m any of us

w ithin this region believe that w e m ust cling to the past w
ithout ever going
forw ard." With insight, he shares that "we m ust find balance
betw een . . .
rem embering and going forward." A fundam ental aspect of that
balance has
to be that those of us w ho are progressive, who are more
critically conscious
and aware, n o t construct hierarchies w herein w e separate
ourselves from
those w ho are still held in bondage by dom inator thinking. For
w e will not
convert or change folks w ithout extending the forgiveness and
compassion
that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.
There is no evil that exists in the larger society that is not
present here
in Kentucky, and in our beloved hills—the hatreds that abound
in the w orld
at large (hatred of queer folk, h atred of colored folks). The
only w ay to
change from dom inator culture to a culture of fairness is to
teach folks to
love justice. A nd th at teaching begins w ith those w ho are m
ost likely to be
the targets of hate-em bodying principles, the revolution of
values that are
the heart of all true m ovem ents for social justice.
We are n o t calling forth a rom antic nostalgia about the A
ppalachian
past w hen w e w ork to reveal and rem em ber the roots of
radicalism, linking
progressive change in the past to the progressive change w e
long for in the

present.
Copyright of Journal of Appalachian Studies is the property of
Appalachian Studies
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Mother tongue author(s) amy tan source the threepenn