March 31st, 2025
Earlier this year, I entered my first college writing contest as myself (after many years of writing college papers for other students anonymously). The results came in last night: my personal essay won first place!
For my efforts, I receive a monetary prize, my work will be published by DCTC, I get to sit down for an interview with a member of their staff, and I earn a whole 24 hours where I don’t think I’m a complete imposter and the absolute shittiest writer to ever pick up a pen (being a creative is great, 10/10).
First, a little back story: last semester, I read an essay called “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan (an author best known for The Joy Luck Club) as part of my Composition class. In the piece, she talks about how her mother’s “broken” English had an effect on her perception of her parent. Reading it, I related deeply to her and this idea of not being able to separate language from truth and identity; my mom only spoke American Sign Language and, while on the surface it has similarities to English, it really is its own language and ASL can seem “broken” in comparison.
So I wrote a response essay called Mother Hand. After I submitted it for the course, it got a kind response and my instructor suggested that it would be a strong entry for the DCTC Writing Contest. I didn’t disagree, and now here we are, a blue ribbon winner!
If you’re from around here, you know I write really personal (some would argue too personal) stuff. This still stands out because it’s a topic I haven’t really talked about, it’s uncomfortable for me to unpack, and it’s longer than my typical pieces on the internet.
I hope you enjoy it? All my love from this side of the wires. Hope you’re all hanging in there and have recovered from that Severance finale (I have not, for the record).
Mother Hand
Dennis Vogen
In the essay “Mother Tongue,” author Amy Tan details her relationship with her mother. She describes their mutual love of language, their differences in ability and expression, and admits that, when she was younger, her Chinese mother’s “limited” use of the English language limited Amy’s perception of her. Amy grew to realize how wrong she was.
I related deeply to this piece: my parents are deaf, both used American Sign Language, and my own perception of my mom could be shuttered when she was, in reality, one of the brightest, funniest, and most creative people I have ever known.
I felt like Amy got me from the first sentence. She shares immediately that she is “not a scholar of English or literature,” followed by a declaration: “I am a writer.” I, too, am a writer, someone who thinks about words obsessively and loves the world of language. Amy talks about her many “different Englishes” and how she uses them all; my mom used her hands beautifully to communicate, teaching me how to do the same, giving me one of my Englishes. The way we speak changes depending on who we’re speaking to; Amy realized this while giving a speech she had given many times before, this time with her mother in the room. I had and have a hard time using ASL and speaking simultaneously; they are not the same, and their linguistic overlap creates a cognitive dissonance that’s difficult to reconcile, if not impossible for me.
The examples Amy gives of the “broken English” her mother has used reminded me of my mom’s speech patterns. ASL is not an exact English translation; it sounds broken when you move it from sign to speak. Because of this, I sometimes thought less of what my mom would say, due entirely to my bias that English was somehow a superior language. I think I felt this way towards every language I didn’t understand and my lack of comprehension, ironically, was the source of this disrespect.
Amy refers to her “family talk” as a language of intimacy, and that feels right to me. ASL is a language of my youth and familiarity, and though I don’t speak it as frequently now, I am a different person when I do. Using sign shifts me and my being into a different frequency. Amy uses the phrase “mother tongue” as a term to describe the language that “helped shape the way I saw things, express things, made sense of the world.”
When our mothers used us, it also colored our perspectives. Amy’s mother would have Amy call the bank and pretend to be her; my mom used me as a translator, for everything from my own school conferences to asking the McDonald’s employee if we could have a different Happy Meal toy, because we already had this one at home. These experiences gave weight and value to having a certain set of communication tools.
Amy describes a serious medical situation that paralleled one of my own: her mother’s doctor loses a CAT scan for a brain tumor that requires her to step in to resolve it by using her perfect English. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer, she was assigned a translator that she had trouble understanding. When we asked for a different one, we were told there were no more available. So my sisters and I were left to do what we had to, and I was the one who explained to my mom that her chemotherapy session wasn’t successful and that we had to prepare her for hospice. Often those who wield the many Englishes are responsible for stitching them together.
As Amy did, I eventually learned. Before she left, my mom taught me the importance of every kind of communication, which is more than just the words. Facial expressions, body language, physical gestures, emotional responses, touch and smell and sight and sound. Her love and dedication to animals showed me that every living thing has something to say, and I should be willing to listen, beyond my ears and with my heart. The only limits we have for each other are our personal boundaries of compassion and empathy, which she erased from others with her smile and a hug and her boundless love. My only regret is that I didn’t lose my limits sooner.
The Den 