The Essay "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan and "A memoir of Bilingual Childhood" by Richard Rodriguez tell personal childhood experiences of both authors. The authors discuss the language they speak at home and the language of the people they migrated to. Because these two authors grew up in immigrant families they had hard times in their lives using different languages at home and in public. Richard Rodriguez struggles to overcome the difference between his family language, Spanish and the American language, English. Amy Tan, on the other hand has problems with different forms of Englishes. The "broken" English of her mother and her excellent English.
In both essays there is the point of private language and public language. Each writer explains in different form in their essays. Amy Tan explains her home language or rather her "private" language as a language of intimacy. "The English I spoke to my mother" (21).This home language is special for her mom and the near relatives. At another instance, Tan expresses that she talked the broken English to her husband and it has become their normal family talk. "It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk. The language I grew up with" (4).Tan and her mother could speak the broken English and understand well one another as an immigrant family language. This "private" language is like a secret language between Tan and her mother. It is the tie that keeps them connected and close. .
Rodriguez sees his Private language from another angle. Rodriguez family exclusively speaks Spanish at home to each other, and that is the way many immigrant families think as a good way to deal with the conflict between family ethnic values and it is assimilation to American culture. Therefore Spanish is the only communication language at home. "Because I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one, I easily noticed the difference between classroom language and the language of home" (4).