Rules of the Game Analysis

Besides being a snazzy tourist destination, San Francisco's Chinatown plays a huge role in the theme of the story. Waverly (a Chinese American girl) and her mother (an immigrant born and raised in...

Waverly tells her story from her point of view, making her the central narrator. That's pretty normal for stories like this; it helps us sympathize with her predicament and feel her pain. There's s...

Killer chess moves aside, "Rules of the Game" is really about a girl and her mother—and all the drama that grows from their relationship. Without such an overbearing mother, there'd be no story,...

As we mention in the "Narrator Point of View" section, the tone suggests that grown-up Waverly is looking back on her less-than-ideal childhood. To this end, she can get kind of cranky with her mom...

It's not that Tan doesn't give her writing over to the odd flights of fancy—"pigeons gurgle" (5), "wind murmurs" (39), and phantom nightmare moms come after our heroine with unstoppable chess-bas...

The title has a double meaning here. Tricky, we know. At first glance, the title refers to chess, the game Waverly learns to play and master over the course of the story. Chess has a lot of rules,...

The ending is pretty open since we don't know if Waverly keeps playing chess and if her relationship with her mother will remain broken. She even turns her mom into a chess opponent straight out of...

Amy Tan doesn't mess around with five-dollar words and is uninterested in burying us beneath her intellect. She lets the heavy symbolic stuff hum under the surface while sticking to the basic story...

Happy Childhood, Draconian MotherTan starts out with the basic set-up, giving us the things we need to know before anything happens. Waverly lives in Chinatown with her family. They are poor but ha...

Amy Tan made a memorable appearance on The Simpsons, shooting down Lisa Simpson's reading of The Joy Luck Club, the book that "Rules of the Game" appears in.(Source)San Francisco's Chinatown, where...

This story is about a young girl and her mother. If you're looking for anything even hinting at sex or romance, you're in the wrong corner of the bookstore. May we suggest some D.H. Lawrence instead?

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