Adolescence and the transition to adulthood is a very difficult time in itself. Onboarding or integration are pervasive issues that need to be addressed. For children of immigrants, this difficulty is only intensified by language. Amy Tan and Khang Nguyen strategically use narrative anecdotes and employ several rhetorical devices to respectfully illustrate this struggle in their works, “Mother Tongue” and “The Happy Days.” Amy Tan chooses her childhood home as the main setting for her work. This allows him to focus primarily on his conversations and interactions with his mother. However, she also recounts several anecdotes in which her mother's background and inappropriate English affected her negatively, outside of the home. Through her memories of these events, she reveals both her immediate reactions and her thoughts and opinions as an adult. The comparison of settings and changes in point of view help to illustrate Tan's intimate relationship with his mother and his desire to understand her. In contrast, Khang describes his situation solely from the perspective of a young teenager desperate to fit in. He uses three main environments: his house, outside the house and his bathroom. The first two settings allow him to clearly illustrate the differences and lifestyle changes he faces on a daily basis. He speaks one way with his friends in public and another language at home with his parents. When he tries to integrate the two, he finds himself painfully torn between the two worlds. His friends make fun of him when he speaks Vietnamese and his parents harshly criticize him when he tries to use typical teenage slang. The majority of the story is told from Khang's teenage point of view, illustrating his construction. .....huge benefits. Through reflection, Nguyen, like Tan, learned not only to understand but also to appreciate his multicultural background. Their childhood experience as the children of immigrants and their subsequent reflection on the events that followed helped Amy Tan and Khang Nguyen in their personal discovery and understanding of their culture. Tan describes his experiences through several anecdotes, while Nguyen uses the different contexts of school and his home to contrast two cultures. Tan's title "Mother Tongue" encompasses both her initial perception of her mother's English as separate, limited and broken English, and her later feeling that, like her mother, her mother's language is an integral part of 'She. Nguyen's title, "Happy Days Syndrome," compares his initial hatred of his culture and language to a syndrome that he too is able to understand and overcome..