This article argues that in Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” language functions not merely as a means of communication but as a site of symbolic power, social stratification, and identity formation within the framework of ethnic self-narration. The article demonstrates how the ideology of Standard English produces a hierarchy of linguistic legitimacy that systematically marginalizes speakers positioned outside its normative framework. Rather than treating Tan’s narrative as a purely individual memoir, this study reads it as a strategic articulation of collective ethnic experience. In this sense, “Mother Tongue” operates as a political act of self-narration that transforms private memory into a public critique of linguistic discrimination. By foregrounding her mother’s so-called “broken English,” Tan exposes the ideological construction of linguistic competence and the institutional inequalities embedded in the American educational system and public discourse. From this perspective, Tan’s narrative constitutes an aesthetic and political resistance that challenges the authority of standardized linguistic norms. Ultimately, “Mother Tongue” emerges as a counter-hegemonic intervention that reconfigures both individual and collective identity, recenters marginalized voices, and interrogates the symbolic mechanisms of power that operate through language. Existing scholarship has predominantly framed the essay as a narrative of identity reconciliation; this article, by contrast, argues that it stages a structural critique of linguistic authority.