"Rules of the Game" by Amy Tan

Hi, this is Carson Patterson.
I find the language used in dialogue in "Rules of the Game" interesting. All of the dialogue seems to be spoken in English (rather than a translation of something the characters said in Chinese), and unlike many stories written in English about people who speak another language, all of the words other than place and character names are English. This seems a bit unusual, given that the narrator's mother is clearly a non-native speaker; even at home, she prefers to speak to her children in a foreign language she is somewhat uncomfortable with than in her native tongue. It made me wonder whether the children knew how to speak Chinese at all, though it seemed that they would, growing up in an exclusively Chinese neighborhood where restaurants had exclusively Chinese menus and all of the adults were immigrants.
Also, the narrator discusses her mother and brothers in great detail, but no father is ever mentioned. Presumably she has one and he lives with them, since she refers to her parents in the plural, but not one direct reference is made to his existence. This places the focus of the story exclusively on the mother-child relationship.