Abstract
This essay explores Betty Quan's 1995 play, Mother Tongue, through the lenses of Deaf Studies, Disability Studies, and Asian North American Studies. I suggest that Mother Tongue, which is written to be performed in English, Cantonese, and American Sign Language, enacts a paradoxical unperformability through its multilinguality, yet also undermines that multilinguality through inconsistent moments of translation or lingual assumptions, such as the stage direction that the son should “speak as a deaf person would.” I also examine how the inclusion of d/Deafness and ASL functions on both symbolic and literal levels to convey Quan's concerns about biculturalism, immigration, and assimilation.
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