One of the primary themes in Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is the conflict in identity that Chinese Americans face when growing up with influences from both cultures. In a review in Newsweek, Dorothy Wang writes that Tan’s ‘‘insights into the complexities of being a hyphenated American, connected by blood and bonds to another culture and country, have found a much wider audience than Tan had ever imagined.’’ The other major theme in the novel is the conflict between mothers and daughters. As Denise Chong notes, ‘‘These moving and powerful stories share the irony, pain, and sorrow of the imperfect ways in which mothers and daughters love each other.’’ While each of the stories in The Joy Luck Club reflects these themes to some extent, nowhere is this dual struggle more apparent than in the story, ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ where the game of chess is used to illustrate both conflicts. In the story, Waverly Jong embraces both the Chinese and American ways of life, but it is her complete adoption of the latter that generates the conflict between Waverly and her mother and which renders Waverly powerless by the end of the story.

At the beginning of ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ Waverly Jong is both Chinese and American, although her preferences lean towards her Chinese heritage. Young Waverly believes in magic and mystery, which she finds in everyday items around the house. For example, when speaking about her life at home, she says that she was always fed well. ‘‘My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn’t want to know the names of.’’ Waverly is content to experience the mystery, without trying to solve it.

The same is true for Waverly’s playing. Although she and her brothers live in Chinatown, a couple of blocks away from a playground, they rarely play there. Says Waverly, ‘‘The best playground . . . was the dark alley itself. It was crammed with daily mysteries and adventures.’’ Some of these mysteries concern individual businesses, such as Li’s medicinal herb shop, which Waverly and her brothers ‘‘peer into.’’ As Waverly notes of Li, ‘‘It was said that he once cured a woman dying of an ancestral curse that had eluded the best of American doctors.’’ Finally, at one corner of the alley, the children pass by Hong Sing’s, a Chinese café that they stay away from at certain times of the day. ‘‘My brothers and I believed the bad people emerged from this door at night,’’ says Waverly.

In addition to her mysteries and superstitions, Waverly is also in touch with her Chinese side through the philosophy that her mother imparts to her. ‘‘I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength,’’ says Waverly, describing the strategy that she eventually uses to win her chess games. Waverly’s mother teaches this invisible strength, a collection of Chinese ‘‘daily truths,’’ to her children, in an effort to help them ‘‘rise above our circumstances,’’ as Waverly notes. Waverly cites the first example of invisible strength that her mother teaches her. Waverly is six years old, and cries for a bag of salted plums. Her mother tells her, ‘‘Wise guy, he not go against wind,’’ and the next time they are in the store, Waverly is silent. As a result, ‘‘When my mother finished her shopping, she quietly plucked a small bag of plums from the rack.’’ By keeping her peace, and proving that she is strong enough not to beg for the candy, Waverly earns it in the end.

Waverly’s mother knows that, as Chinese Americans, her children will need to learn the art of invisible strength if they are to survive in American society, which has its own set of rules. Waverly’s mother herself had to employ her invisible strength to make her way to America. As she notes to her children when examining the chess rule book, ‘‘This American rules . . . Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back.’’ Although it is only hinted at with this passage in the story, Waverly’s mother is speaking about her own experience when trying to immigrate to the United States in 1949. Just like her daughter, Waverly, who is confused about the rules of chess and asks her brother ‘‘why’’ they are what they are, Waverly’s mother learns that it’s better not to ask questions. Instead, it’s better to ‘‘find out why yourself.’’

However, even though Waverly is very much in touch with her Chinese side, she is Americanized as well. For starters, there is her symbolically American name. Says Waverly, ‘‘My mother named me after the street that we lived on: Waverly Place Jong, my official name for important American documents.’’ And when she goes to a Christmas party held by some of the local missionary ladies, the Chinese man dressed up as Santa Claus solemnly asks her if she’s been ‘‘a very good girl this year and did I believe in Jesus Christ.’’ As Waverly notes, ‘‘I knew the only answer to that. I nodded back with equal solemnity.’’ In 1950s America, anybody who did not want to be considered an outsider embraced Christianity, and even young Waverly is aware that this is one of the ‘‘rules’’ of the American system. In addition, Waverly and the other Chinese-American children at the Christmas party yearn for American gifts. Waverly notes that her gift, ‘‘a twelve-pack of Life Savers,’’ is a good gift, as is her brother Winston’s ‘‘authentic miniature replica of a World War II submarine.’’

It is the chess set her brother Vincent receives from the Christmas party that has the greatest impact on Waverly. From this point on in the story, the game of chess symbolizes the conflict between Chinese and American cultures, and between mother and daughter. The conflict between cultures starts shortly after Vincent receives the ‘‘obviously used’’ chess set from an old lady. Waverly’s mother is offended that Vincent has gotten the lady’s junk, and tells Vincent to throw it away, saying with pride, ‘‘She not want it. We not want it.’’ However, Vincent ignores her. He and his brother are ‘‘already lining up the chess pieces and reading from the dog-eared instruction book.’’ David Gates notes in his review in Newsweek that this passage illustrates Tan’s ‘‘best device,’’ something that Vladimir Nabokov, ‘‘another chess-obsessed novelist,’’ called a ‘‘‘knight’s move’: an oblique change of direction at the end of a passage that suddenly throws everything before it into ironic context.’’ As Gates says, other writers would simply end the description after saying that Waverly’s mother wanted Vincent to throw the chess set away. Instead, Tan takes it a step further by having Vincent and his brother quietly set up the chess set, an act that shows ‘‘the tragi-comic conflicts of cultures and of generations, and never telling a word.’’

It is through the game of chess that Waverly’s identity struggle—Chinese versus American—becomes most prominent. When Waverly first sees the American chess set, it is more attractive than the Chinese mysteries that she used to be drawn to. Says Waverly, ‘‘The chessboard seemed to hold elaborate secrets waiting to be untangled. The chessmen were more powerful than old Li’s magic herbs that cured ancestral curses.’’ Waverly takes her mother’s advice, reads the rulebook, and further researches the game. ‘‘I found out about all the whys later. . . . I borrowed books from the Chinatown library. I studied each chess piece, trying to absorb the power each contained.’’

Waverly also learns proper chess manners from Lau Po, a Chinese man she meets in the park. It is no mistake that Tan chose a Chinese man to teach Waverly these ‘‘fine points of chess etiquette,’’ such as keeping ‘‘captured men in neat rows,’’ never announcing check ‘‘with vanity, lest someone with an unseen sword slit your throat,’’ and never hurling ‘‘pieces into the sandbox after you have lost a game.’’ In this story, etiquette becomes a very Chinese quality, as when Waverly’s mother comes to her games and sits ‘‘proudly on the bench, telling my admirers with proper Chinese humility, ‘Is luck,’’’ as Waverly wins. The opposite of this, American cockiness, is demonstrated at several points throughout the story, as when Waverly is playing her first match in her first chess tournament, and she sits across from ‘‘a fifteen-year-old boy from Oakland. He looked at me, wrinkling his nose.’’ The boy sees Waverly, an eight-year-old girl, and assumes that he will have no problem beating her.

Waverly is tough to beat in her early games, however, because she has her Chinese invisible strength at her side. Says Waverly, ‘‘As I began to play, the boy disappeared, the color ran out of the room, and I saw only my white pieces and his black ones waiting on the other side.’’ This clearness of mind that Waverly gets from relying on the old Chinese wisdoms her mother has taught her, manifests itself in ‘‘a light wind’’ that she feels ‘‘blowing past my ears,’’ and which whispers ‘‘secrets only I could hear.’’ This ‘‘wind’’ helps Waverly to see ‘‘a clear path, the traps to avoid.’’ As a result, Waverly wins ‘‘all games, in all divisions.’’ It is these American successes that lead to more conflict between Waverly and her mother. Waverly’s mother tries to give her daughter more advice, telling her that the next time she plays, she should concentrate on losing less pieces. Waverly protests, saying that does not always matter when you’re trying to win a chess match. But in her next tournament, Waverly does lose less pieces. Says her mother, ‘‘Lost eight piece this time. Last time was eleven. What I tell you? Better off lose less!’’ Waverly is ‘‘annoyed, but I couldn’t say anything.’’

As Waverly wins more and more chess matches, travels ‘‘farther away from home,’’ and is sponsored by three local businesses in national tournaments, she becomes more Americanized. Waverly notes that by her ninth birthday, she ‘‘was a national chess champion,’’ and that she ‘‘was touted as the Great American Hope.’’ Not everybody is so supportive of Waverly’s success, however. In the story, Bobby Fischer, the real-life boy who was the youngest- ever grand master in chess, says in a magazine quote, ‘‘‘There will never be a woman grand master.’’’ Once again, Americans like Bobby Fischer, an icon in the American chess scene at the time, are shown as cocky. As the story progresses, however, Waverly scraps Lau Po’s Chinese rules of etiquette, and starts to show the signs of her American influence in her own playing. Although she still relies on her invisible strength when playing, she starts to show off more, pausing with her ‘‘chosen piece in midair as if undecided,’’ before she plants it ‘‘in its new threatening place, with a triumphant smile thrown back at my opponent for good measure.’’

This highly American behavior flows over into Waverly’s home life. After she gets sponsored, Waverly’s mother decides that she ‘‘no longer had to do the dishes. Winston and Vincent had to do my chores.’’ In addition, when Waverly asks, her parents overlook other transgressions against their Chinese culture, so that she can practice her chess games. For example, Waverly complains about the noise in her bedroom, which kicks her brothers out, forcing them to sleep ‘‘in a bed in the living room facing the street.’’ And when Waverly tells her parents that ‘‘my head didn’t work right when my stomach was too full,’’ she is allowed to leave dinner ‘‘with half-finished bowls and nobody complained.’’ Gates notes the subtle nature of the transformation that Waverly undergoes, saying that ‘‘Tan is so cagey it takes a while to discern that fetching little Waverly. . . . has become a disagreeable young woman.’’

Up until the end of the story, Waverly’s disagreeable nature is tolerated by her mother. But when Waverly tells her mother off in the street, saying that she wishes her mother would not use her and her chess prowess to show off to others in public, Waverly goes too far. Her American ways of thinking cloud her judgment, and she cannot see her mother’s true intentions. From the moment that Waverly starts playing chess, her mother stays true to her Chinese heritage, showing proper ‘‘Chinese humility’’ when she is in the stands. In private, however, she gives Waverly a good luck charm before her first tournament, showing her support. As Ben Xu noted in Melus, Waverly’s mother gives Waverly her own ‘‘talisman of luck . . . in order to add to the latter’s ‘invisible strength.’’’ Xu sees Waverly’s chess battle as her mother’s battle, as an attempt to try to triumph against the American system that has threatened to repel her before. ‘‘But the worry and concern of her subtle survivalism is not appreciated by her daughter, who accuses her mother of using her to show off and trying to take all the credit,’’ says Xu. Scarlet Cheng agrees in Belles Lettres, writing that when Waverly becomes a chess champion, ‘‘her mother proudly shepherds her around . . . but being modern and increasingly cocky with her success, Waverly resents what she feels to be her mother’s misplaced credit taking.’’

When Waverly tells her mother off, however, she renounces her Chinese heritage totally, because this is something that a traditional Chinese girl would never do. When she makes these accusations, Waverly notices that ‘‘My mother’s eyes turned into dangerous black slits,’’ and soon after, Waverly feels ‘‘the wind rushing around my hot ears.’’ Something big is happening, but Waverly does not understand what. She runs away, and when she comes home, her mother does not want anything to do with her. After going to her room, Waverly sees an imaginary chessboard in her head, upon which she plays her mother. ‘‘Opposite me was my opponent, two angry black slits. She wore a triumphant smile. ‘Strongest wind cannot be seen,’ she said.’’ Her mother, still possessing the Chinese invisible strength, obliterates Waverly’s pieces, which ‘‘screamed as they scurried and fell off the board one by one.’’ At the end of the story, Waverly says she ‘‘was alone.’’

From this point on, Waverly will play like other Americans, without the benefit of her invisible Chinese strength, which she has experienced in the past as a ‘‘wind.’’ When she felt ‘‘the wind rushing around my hot ears,’’ after telling off her mother, this was a sign that her invisible strength was leaving her. This is only hinted at in this story, but in Waverly’s other story in The Joy Luck Club, entitled ‘‘Four Directions’’—which looks back on the days after the fight with her mother—Waverly narrates her dismay, when she plays in her first chess tournament after the fight with her mother, and loses:

I was horrified. I spent many hours every day going over in my mind what I had lost. I knew it was not just the last tournament. I examined every move, every piece, every square. And I could no longer see the secret weapons of each piece, the magic within the intersection of each square. I could see only my mistakes, my weaknesses. It was as though I had lost my magic armor. And everybody could see this, where it was easy to attack me. . . . I had lost the gift and had turned into someone quite ordinary.

If one equates ordinary, or non-magical feelings, with the American experience, and magical feelings with the Chinese experience, then Waverly, when she has the fight with her mother and feels herself lose her ‘‘magic’’ invisible strength— becomes a true American. Walter Shear noted the danger Tan sees in becoming too Americanized, saying of The Joy Luck Club that the author ‘‘seems to place more emphasis on the Chinese identity as the healing factor.’’

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Tan’s title for this short story, ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ is most apt to the themes and ideas central to this story. Tan’s narrator, Waverly Jong, is forced throughout the story to discover exactly what game she is playing, and what rules she must follow in order to succeed. Her chess playing becomes a metaphor for her struggle with her greatest opponent, her own Chinese mother. It is this real game of life that Waverly must truly begin to learn and discover. What evolves as an essential component to Waverly’s learning process is the influential role that silence can play in the success or failure of life’s battles. Through Waverly, Tan shows the various uses of silence, first as a vehicle used in cultures, then as a special practice to hold valuable secrets, and finally as a destructive force that can isolate a mother and daughter.

From the very first line of the story, the reader is introduced to the power of silence, or ‘‘the art of invisible strength.’’ At six, Waverly learns that when she remains silent, and acts as the South wind instead of the North wind, she is rewarded with the salted plums she desires. This silence could be perceived as a very passive act, but her mother teaches her that silence can still be very intentional and in fact enact positive change. ‘‘In other words,’’ Amy Ling clarifies in her book, Between Worlds, ‘‘victory over hostile forces (the North Wind) may be achieved not through direct confrontation but by apparent accommodation and giving in (warm South wind).’’ Because women are usually withheld from visible roles of power, the encouragement of subtle maneuvering is a very feminine perspective of change making. Waverly understands that her ‘‘mother imparted her daily truths so she could help [Waverly’s] older brothers and [Waverly] rise above our circumstances.’’ With this silence and supplication, Waverly becomes a keen observer, paying close attention to the silent secrets held within the Chinatown and American cultures to learn how to bend them to her will.

Both of these communities use secrets to maintain a life with which they are comfortable. These secrets are silent shields that help maintain their understanding of life. Hong Sing’s restaurant has a ‘‘menu printed in only Chinese,’’ thus limiting the clientele to those who can understand the language. When a Caucasian photographer asks Waverly what type of food is served in the restaurant, her answer of ‘‘[g]uts and duck’s feet and octopus gizzards’’ is so extreme it neither reveals nor renounces the secrets that are held inside the walls. When Waverly attends a church Christmas party with her family, her silent observations of those before her help her carefully choose a donated gift. These cheap or hand me down gifts from another church hold secrets to a world outside of Chinatown, the other part of America, and this is when Waverly is introduced to chess. Though both American and Chinese cultures are invited to view aspects of the mysterious other, the rules for appropriate behavior remain hidden behind menus, wrapping paper, and chess rules.

Waverly’s mother encourages her children to embrace American culture—Waverly is even named for the street on which her family lives—while simultaneously maintaining her Chinese perspective. Lindo is keenly aware of the dismissive attitude Americans have towards those born outside of the American system:

Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time.

Waverly’s mother understands that America remains silent and secretive about its cultural framework, and that coming from another culture disadvantages her family. She also recognizes the opportunity her children have in learning these rules. She sees the rules for chess that her son Vincent receives as a key for her children’s survival. Waverly has a difficult time understanding why some of the chess rules exist, but like her mother did with the rules of American culture, Lindo Jong admonishes Waverly about the rules by saying: ‘‘Better you take it, find out why yourself.’’

Waverly thrives in her chess discoveries, carefully studying the motions of the pieces and the ‘‘fine points of chess etiquette.’’ She also gains access to chess secrets that are not known to everyone. When Waverly begins to understand the ‘‘whys’’ behind chess moves, she understands that she holds very powerful secrets, and she will not share her secrets with anyone. Waverly recognizes that she is gifted, in knowing both American chess strategy and her mother’s Chinese strategy of ‘‘invisible strength.’’ This combination allows her to be a strong chess opponent. Chess is something Waverly can see clearly, with a vision that combines some of the secrets of both cultures.

By letting her play chess, Waverly’s mother opens the door for Waverly to move outside of the realm of Chinatown. Waverly’s mother knowingly allows her to enter this world, and gives her ‘‘her chang’’ for luck in this new environment. Chess gives Waverly access to a world dominated primarily by white male Americans, and in this environment her secret Chinese winds speak to her ‘‘Blow from the South, . . . Throw sand from the East,’’ while she remains silent. These winds are loud and strong, while she remains small with ‘‘little puffs, my own breath.’’ As a nine-year-old chess player, Waverly is a success. She is demure in her delicate dresses and patent leather shoes, and a formidable enough player to make fifty-year-old men sweat. Tan shows that Waverly’s silent and careful poise is powerful.

Her chess achievements blur her understanding of family roles and expectations. Her success changes her home dynamics, and she does not have to do chores or finish her meals and gets a room all to herself. However, she must allow her mother careful oversight of practice sessions, which proves difficult for her. Waverly believes her mother simplifies the game to the number of lost pieces, and takes credit for a gift that is not hers. Waverly works hard to ‘‘bite back [her] tongue,’’ part of the strategy her mother taught her at six.

Though Waverly excels at applying her Chinese and American secrets to her chess games, she is unable to recognize their significance in her everyday life. When the actual chessboard is removed, she cannot see the roles and strictures others place on her or how to work them to her own advantage. Though she is national chess champion; she is still only nine. Her young age and national success make her cocky. In addition, she miscalculates the skill level of her most important opponent, her mother, the woman who taught her much of how to incorporate Chinese ideas to this Western game. With this misstep, she does not follow her own chess instructions. When Waverly opens her mouth and talks back to her mother, she begins to see the ultimate game she is playing is really with her mother.

It could be argued that Waverly’s mother begins this game and also contradicts her own instructions of remaining silent by walking her daughter through the market and speaking to everyone of Waverly’s accomplishments. Waverly’s mother takes obvious pride and credit for her daughter, and Waverly sees this boastfulness as undeserved. Waverly sees her mother’s comments as an aggressive claim to her own gift, and she believes her mother does not have this right. This perceived usurping of her hard-earned success causes Waverly to fight back. However, as stated earlier, Waverly is too young to fully grasp the battle she has begun and what is at stake.

As Waverly discovers early on, chess ‘‘is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.’’ Yet, when Waverly asks her mother to stop showing her off, she has, in fact, told. What her mother hears is that Waverly is, as Amy Ling states in her book, Between Worlds ‘‘resentful of [her] mother’s intrusions on [her life] . . . and . . . humiliated and ashamed of [her mother’s] stubborn, superR stitious, out-of-place Old World ways.’’ With her small plea for her mother to stop bragging, Waverly has exposed her own weakness.

Though she thrives on foresight and patience in her chess games because ‘‘all weaknesses and advantages become evident to a strong adversary and obscured to a tiring opponent,’’ she shows herself in the market to be impulsive, impatient, and exhausted. In this moment, she cannot hear her chess secrets, and she moves poorly, first talking back and then running away from her mother. In this real world, Waverly cannot easily plan out her next move, and her chess secrets hide under her anger, ‘‘[m]y breath came out like angry smoke.’’ By changing her previously quiet, calculated winds of breath to visible, burning breaths, Tan shows the shift Waverly experiences through this single experience. Though she is angry, she is also now vocal and, therefore, powerless and defenseless, unable to fully see her mother’s next move.

What she finds when she finally returns home is a family that, at least for this evening, discounts her existence. She is not a chess champion; she is barely their daughter. Again, Waverly’s mother is a fierce opponent and fights Waverly with more than luck—she fights with silence. Waverly’s mother has turned the game, using strategy Waverly herself uses against others. In his article in Critique called ‘‘Generational Differences and the Diaspora,’’ Walter Shear states this clearly. Shear notes that Waverly ‘‘herself is finally a victim of her mother’s more authoritarian deployment of the tactic [of biting back your tongue], as it suddenly takes the form of simply ignoring her.’’

This silent power is new to Waverly, and she becomes increasingly aware of her own vulnerability, especially with respect to her mother. Her mother, with her strict Chinese cultural framework and identity, is a strong and powerful wind that Waverly can literally see pushing her out of her own home, and even out of her own family. The silence, in the form of the imagined wind, becomes so powerful, that she can do nothing. She is floating, immobilized and alone. To her advantage, however, Waverly has become aware of her most dangerous opponent, and has entered a championship game that is more volatile than any other she has encountered.

Perhaps this was her mother’s intention. Perhaps, with this new battle, Waverly is forced to move out of the realm of sixty-four black and white squares to see if any of her secret answers can be applied to real life. According to Ben Xu’s article ‘‘Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s ‘The Joy Luck Club ’’’ in MELUS, what Waverly’s mother has actually done is ‘‘prepare[d] her for dealing with the unpredictable, in which she will constantly find herself faced with unstructured situations and the need to survive on her own.’’ This is what Waverly and the reader are left with, the silent anticipation of what will come next. Waverly’s mother has introduced the idea, albeit forcefully, that rules to the game of life can change and shift quickly, and one must always be prepared.

Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

In her short story ‘‘Rules of the Game’’ Amy Tan takes a risk by using a metaphor that has become so overfamiliar that it comes close to falling into cliché: she compares the rules of a chess game to the rules that lead to success in life. What keeps the comparison fresh and saves it from that worn-out feel that truly dead metaphors have is the ease with which Tan fits it to the situation that she describes in the story. ‘‘Rules of the Game’’ offers readers what Tan does best: it ties the confusion felt by firstgeneration Americans, who are forced to turn from their parents’ customs and find their own paths, to the similar confusion most adolescents feel as they grow up and find their independence.

Most stories about the parallels between life and chess focus too narrowly on the action on the board. They concern themselves with specific moves, while this story uses the fact that there are rules to tie life and chess together. Too much attention to detail can cause a story or novel to miss the social situation that brings the players to the game, and end up making the fiction seem mechanical, something like a game itself. Tan’s familiarity with the culture she is writing about is so strong, though, that it is able to shrink a big obvious symbol like the chess game down to its proper proportion. This is one situation where a story’s sense of reality is so strong that it overpowers the technique that molds it, even though the technique is an old standard.

‘‘Rules of the Game’’ starts out with a powerfully stated generalization that seems to mean more than it really does. It is the sort of grand pronouncement that sounds like it just might hold the key to all of life’s mysteries, while it actually just expresses, in sweeping terms, a little common sense. The narrator, Waverly Place Jong, explains in the first sentence that her mother taught her the ‘‘art’’ of ‘‘invisible strength.’’

Apart from the exotic and poetic way that the mother explains this art, there is no indication that it is actually an art at all. It shows no particular style, and is instead just another way of expressing the time-honored technique of keeping one’s mouth shut, a piece of folk wisdom that has served all cultures of all generations. In this story, ‘‘invisible strength’’ is presented as a magical equation that gives young Waverly the wisdom and grace to rise to national prominence in the chess world within a few short years of first taking up the game.

Although Tan does not say as much outright, the story is arranged to let readers know that silence, even if it is the chosen way of those who have the most influence on Waverly, is not the only way. Silence just happens to be the best advice they have to offer her. The young Waverly does not take to the advice very easily; rather, it is a lesson that has to be reinforced after her mother first teaches it to her. The reader does not learn of the lesson in the present tense, but learns only that Waverly’s mother taught her about the secret of ‘‘invisible strength’’ when Waverly was six years old, presumably before the story’s beginning. Tan does show Waverly learning what amounts to the same lesson from Lau Po, the older man in the park who offers her guidance in how chess is played. The lessons he gives, referred to in the story as ‘‘the fine points of chess etiquette,’’ resemble her mother’s advice that Waverly should practice restraint. Both adults use mysterious, colorful language to advise Waverly to hold in her emotions. Their lesson to her is that success comes from suppressing individuality.

This is a natural lesson for a generation of immigrants to pass on because it is one that newcomers often find useful to remember when surrounded and outnumbered in a strange new culture. The characters in the story who have to realign their Chinese view of the world into an American social order show a common tendency of the socially transplanted, which is to keep their thoughts to themselves. One of the reasons The Joy Luck Club works as well as it does—winning approval of critics and readers alike—is that it makes clear in every line that Tan understands Chinatown culture inside and out: from the perspective of immigrants looking at their new world, as well as from mainstream Americans viewing the closed world of the immigrants.

It is easy to understand why those from other countries tend to cluster in small communities, where their old customs are at least recognized, if not fully dominant, and the Chinatown that Tan describes operates on just such a level. Waverly’s mother speaks freely to other Chinese people in the markets, in the streets or on church. It is only when she is up against the unfamiliar ways of Americans that Waverly would have to call upon her ‘‘invisible strength.’’ For those transplanted to a new culture, social situations are uniquely like board game strategies, requiring thought and detachment. This is why the social reserve that Waverly’s mother has taught her serves her so well when she is playing chess.

To a certain extent, Waverly has learned her lesson a little too well. It is her dominance of whatever she tries to do that causes the story’s conflicts. Few stories concern themselves with success that comes too easily, especially when the main character is a child. Like most stories about success, Waverly’s comes in two stages: first, there is the relatively minor struggle to achieve her goals. Tan does not present Waverly as someone with a psychological compulsion for success. She is not driven by any need to escape from her past, which could be why her success arrives more quickly than she seems to have expected, with much less urgency on her part. After she becomes a national chess master before even reaching puberty, Waverly comes to the unpleasant realization that she has, unavoidably, changed too much to fit into her old relationships.

Waverly’s primary motivation for pursuing her chess career seems to be her family’s economic situation, which is presented so breezily here that readers may be tempted to underestimate its importance. The Jong family’s situation is not one of desperate poverty—as Waverly takes care to point out early on in her narrative, there has never been a scarcity of food—but it is nevertheless an uncomfortable situation. The point is made no more clearly than in the fact that the children receive their Christmas presents from a charity function at the local church. It does not bother the children to know that the family’s first chess set is second hand, but it clearly affects Waverly’s mother, who is outwardly grateful but privately bitter, telling her son to throw it away. As an adult, Waverly makes little about the family’s economic situation, but her mother’s discomfort with charity shows a wish for more prestige, which she tries to suppress to give herself ‘‘invisible strength.’’

The problem comes when the mother, who is trying to keep quiet and unobtrusive, sees her daughter’s success, and starts to bask in it as her own. Awed by the attention that the girl’s career brings, she is compelled to give Waverly preferential treatment over her sons, even at the risk of stirring their resentment. For a family that has fled the Chinese civil war to live in a two-bedroom apartment in a distant city, having a daughter pictured in Life magazine and matched in competition against adult intellectuals is a miracle for which no one could be ready. Assuming that Waverly is the family’s hope for the future, then, it is not at all surprising that her mother would shower her with favoritism, a circumstance that Tan’s narrator admits to exploiting. She finds herself in the dilemma of wishing to be inconspicuous because her mother taught her to be so while her mother breaks her own law, becoming too loud about her feelings, showing the sort of uncontrolled pride that she has always warned about. Waverly, who has become stronger and stronger through her invisibility, sees her mother being too loud and too proud. She understands things that her mother does not.

This, in the end, is a curse that both children of immigrants and all adolescents share: they outgrow their parents. First-generation Americans find themselves better able to function in society than their parents are, owing to the fact that they are in a world they have known most of their lives. Similarly, adolescents are destined to eventually reach the age when they recognize that they are self-sufficient humans, able to survive outside of their parents’ control. The same social dynamic that is at work in both cases would also apply to the case of a famous child like the story’s chess prodigy, whose parents are ordinary people. All three situations lead to frustrated rebellion: unlike the rebellion of children who break away from the hold of dominating parents, rebellion is not satisfying for those who simply outgrow their parents. Part of the reason for this is that such rebellion is just too easy. The fact that Waverly ends this story so abruptly, contemplating her next move like a chess player, seems to be Tan’s admission that she has her character in a situation that has no easy solution, one which may, in fact, have no solution at all. Waverly is bound by love to her mother, but her mother has made her grow up too fast to cope with the social elements that are destined to force her in new directions.

Games are always a reflection of life, with the main difference being that their rules are laid out in advance, instead of being discovered. The distinction is crucial: it is the reason that most comparisons between life and games fail when given serious scrutiny. Of all games, chess is probably the one most often used in literature to symbolize life’s strategies, if for no other reason than that it has existed in cultures around the globe for fifteen centuries. In ‘‘Rules of the Game’’ Waverly Jong, being just a child, takes the relationship between chess and life too seriously, mainly because the rule her mother gave her about ‘‘invisible strength’’ gives her nearly supernatural power in competition. She fails to see the difference between the game and real life, and as a result finds that life is grander but less manageable than she thinks it should be. Her frustration is natural—it comes from being a child, particularly the child of an immigrant family—but it is made all the worse when circumstances force her to grow up too fast. Readers who interpret this story as the tale of Waverly learning life’s rules are missing an important part of it: the point of the story is that there are no rules that cover all of life’s possibilities.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Rules of the Game,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.