【年终征文】母女关系# LeisureTime - 读书听歌看电影
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Amy Tan曾经在Joy Luck Club一书里曾经提到她母亲和她的一段对话，她母亲对她
说：“I never expect, just hope.”。每一对母女都有一种特殊的关系，无论是一种
根的延续，还是一种性格的撞击，都只有她们自己才能体会。这种关系会在时间和空间
的变化中越拉扯越紧密。当然，每段关系都有一段特殊的背景，当当事人分享自己的故
事的时候，旁观者当然也只有把自己放到当事人的背景下去理解才会有更深的体会。
就喜福会里提到的四对华裔母女，她们的关系也在美国的环境下改变着。那些母亲
有着不同的过去，她们中有人逃婚，有人被强奸，有人在逃难中遗失了自己的孩子，有
人看着自己母亲自杀，不论她们曾经的命运在她们的性格中留下了怎样的痕迹，她们被
改变后的性格也都在自己的女儿身上得到了延续。在新的环境下，女儿们带着自己的个
性依然经历着那些看似与父辈们不同却同样折磨人的生活，女儿们能否在母女关系的成
长中找到真实的自己从而去获得真正的幸福呢。故事里的母亲最终都赋予女儿更强的生
命力去面对未来。
真正的爱是有伤害的，爱得越深伤害也可能越深，哪怕是母女之间，因为爱，我们
需要互相肯定，因为爱，我们怕带来失望，可正是这些纠结，让我们紧紧相连，甚至连
幸福和不幸都相连。有时我会想，我将来会怎样处理我作为母亲的母女关系，有一点我
很清楚的知道，我对她会有希望，希望她开心地成长，希望她拥有任何时候都能开心起
来的能力。那就是我想要的母女关系。
分享一段Amy Tan的文字，Mother Tongue。
Mother Tongue
by Amy Tan
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more
than personal opinions 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 evoke 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 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’
11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped
and then transcribed. During this conversation, 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 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 person, 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 nineteen.”
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 50 percent of
what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 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, perfectly 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.
Lately, I’ve been giving more thought 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 damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and
soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example.
But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s
perceptions 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 service, pretended not to understand her,
or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations 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 impeccable 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 appointment for that. So she said she would not leave
until the doctor called her daughter. 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 on 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 influenced 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, I.Q. 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 B’s,
sometimes B-pluses, 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 A’s 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
constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such
as, “Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was –.” And the correct 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 logical, semantic relationship — for example,
“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 stoplight, 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 answer 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 to me.
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 represented in American literature. Why
are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do
so many Chinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad
sociological 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 writing 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 me. I became an English major my first
year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing
nonfiction 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 English 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 terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should
envision 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, which 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
neither an English nor a Chinese structure. 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.”
说：“I never expect, just hope.”。每一对母女都有一种特殊的关系，无论是一种
根的延续，还是一种性格的撞击，都只有她们自己才能体会。这种关系会在时间和空间
的变化中越拉扯越紧密。当然，每段关系都有一段特殊的背景，当当事人分享自己的故
事的时候，旁观者当然也只有把自己放到当事人的背景下去理解才会有更深的体会。
就喜福会里提到的四对华裔母女，她们的关系也在美国的环境下改变着。那些母亲
有着不同的过去，她们中有人逃婚，有人被强奸，有人在逃难中遗失了自己的孩子，有
人看着自己母亲自杀，不论她们曾经的命运在她们的性格中留下了怎样的痕迹，她们被
改变后的性格也都在自己的女儿身上得到了延续。在新的环境下，女儿们带着自己的个
性依然经历着那些看似与父辈们不同却同样折磨人的生活，女儿们能否在母女关系的成
长中找到真实的自己从而去获得真正的幸福呢。故事里的母亲最终都赋予女儿更强的生
命力去面对未来。
真正的爱是有伤害的，爱得越深伤害也可能越深，哪怕是母女之间，因为爱，我们
需要互相肯定，因为爱，我们怕带来失望，可正是这些纠结，让我们紧紧相连，甚至连
幸福和不幸都相连。有时我会想，我将来会怎样处理我作为母亲的母女关系，有一点我
很清楚的知道，我对她会有希望，希望她开心地成长，希望她拥有任何时候都能开心起
来的能力。那就是我想要的母女关系。
分享一段Amy Tan的文字，Mother Tongue。
Mother Tongue
by Amy Tan
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more
than personal opinions 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 evoke 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 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’
11 quote what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped
and then transcribed. During this conversation, 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 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 person, 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 nineteen.”
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 50 percent of
what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 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, perfectly 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.
Lately, I’ve been giving more thought 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 damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and
soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example.
But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s
perceptions 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 service, pretended not to understand her,
or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations 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 impeccable 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 appointment for that. So she said she would not leave
until the doctor called her daughter. 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 on 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 influenced 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, I.Q. 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 B’s,
sometimes B-pluses, 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 A’s 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
constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such
as, “Even though Tom was, Mary thought he was –.” And the correct 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 logical, semantic relationship — for example,
“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 stoplight, 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 answer 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 to me.
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 represented in American literature. Why
are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do
so many Chinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad
sociological 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 writing 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 me. I became an English major my first
year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing
nonfiction 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 English 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 terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should
envision 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, which 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
neither an English nor a Chinese structure. 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.”
