46 pages • 1 hour read
Amy TanRules of the Game
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Chess
There are three concentric circles of chess games in the story: the games Waverly plays with actual opponents, the game she metaphorically plays with her mother, and, at the center, the game she plays with herself. Chess acts as a symbol of strenuous relationships, illustrating Waverly’s challenging connection to the game, her mother, and herself.
Waverly’s opponents dismiss her because of her age and gender. Her brothers do not want to play with her, the man in the park refers to her as a “doll” (Paragraph 34), suggesting she cannot properly play the game, and her first opponent in a chess tournament “[wrinkles] his nose” at her (Paragraph 40). Even to play the game, Waverly must strongarm her way in.
Her mother’s unsolicited advice and intrusive hovering annoy and challenge Waverly. When Waverly at first denies wanting to play in tournaments, her mother insists she play to challenge herself; when Waverly complains about her noisy brothers, her mother banishes them to the living room; when Waverly is interviewed about her status as a national chess champion, her mother gives instructions about how she should pose and dress. Waverly’s frustrations with her mother crescendo into an imagined chess game with her in which Waverly tries to hold her own despite her mother’s “triumphant smile” (Paragraph 77). Their relationship can be traced through their tactical responses to each other, both engaged in this metaphorical game of chess.
Overall, this story symbolizes an intricate game of chess Waverly plays with herself wherein she is her own most formidable adversary. She struggles with voicing her opinions or needs to her oftentimes intimidating mother, so the battle to create a self becomes an internal one—a battle she ultimately claims as her own. In the end, she states: “I closed my eyes and pondered my next move” (Paragraph 79).
Wind
Wind symbolizes the “invisible strength” referenced throughout the story. In the first lines, Waverly associates her strength with her mother’s parable about the wind. The wind is invisible, yet it can carry one effortlessly to a destination. Waverly’s mother twice tells her: “Strongest wind cannot be seen” (Paragraphs 2, 77). The wind also whispers to Waverly during her chess tournaments, and its invisible influence leads her to repeated victories. The strength lies in the wind’s invisibility, which allows it to dispense its innate wisdom for the benefit of Waverly’s growth. The wind also symbolizes Waverly’s mother. While she is obviously not invisible, her ways of helping Waverly are subtle and often go unrecognized by Waverly and the other characters, making her mother’s influence both invisible and strong, just like the wind.
Additionally, at the end of the story, Waverly imagines being carried into the sky by the wind: “Higher and higher, above the alley, over the tops of tiled roofs, where I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and I was alone” (Paragraph 78). Being carried aloft by the wind gives Waverly a new invisible strength in the form of solitude, which allows her to plan her “next move” both in her relationship with her mother and in discovering herself.
Food
The tantalizing and detailed descriptions of food throughout the story function as a motif to examine culture. Typically, food and culture are closely interwoven with one’s identity, so the more readers learn about the food, the more they learn about the setting and the characters who inhabit it.
Waverly admits that she never knew her family was poor because they were always fed so well. From the moment she wakes up in the morning, she is surrounded, she says, by the aroma of “fragrant red beans” and “fried sesame balls and sweet curried chicken crescents” (Paragraph 5). She adds that, in the park, the “old-country people sat cracking roasted watermelon seeds with their golden teeth” (Paragraph 6). The local fish market boasts live produce, such as turtles and fish, and a sign for tourists: “Within this store, is all for food, not for pet” (Paragraph 7). That there are two ways to interpret live animals in a store—as food or as pets—demonstrates the existence of two very different cultures—Chinese and American.
Food not only provides nourishing meals in the story but also ancient healing wisdom. When Waverly and her brothers spy on a local “medicinal herb shop,” she says that they see concoctions of “insect shells, saffron-colored seeds, and pungent leaves” mixed for “ailing customers” (Paragraph 6). For food to represent not only sustenance but also treatment further illuminates a rich and diverse Chinese culture.
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