I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinion on the English language and its variations in this country 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 language—the way it can bring to mind an emotion, 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 long 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-andthus”—a speech filled with carefully made grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized ③ 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.

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