Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I... use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen Line other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, (5) 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
(10) 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,
(15) 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 (20) 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
(25) switch in my English.