Thank You Ma Am By Amy Tan

The way a family or person lives can be stereotyped but if one looks hard enough, the true colors and character of a person will show. In the short story “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes, Roger, a teenager, attempts to steal a purse from a woman named Mrs. Jones, to buy himself some blue suede shoes. Instead of calling the cops on the young boy, Mrs. Jones graciously invites him into her house and offers him a second chance. In the short story “Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan, Waverly is a young girl who is a chess prodigy in the making. However, the pressure her mother puts on her to be as good as she desires pushes Waverly to her limits, causing her to run away from home. In the short stories “Thank You Ma’am” and “Rules of the Game,”

Roger's world gets rocked as he meets his mentor, Mrs. Jones, who grants him a second chance. As the text states, “The woman said, ‘You ought to be my son. I would teach you right from wrong. Least I can do right now is wash your face. Are you hungry?’” (Hughes 1). Mrs. Jones treats Roger with tough love, and then offers him food and a place to clean himself up even after he tried to rob her. She felt sympathy for him in the sense that she also felt responsible to clean him up and feed him. Likewise, Lau Po treats Waverly with kindness as he devoted his energy to teaching her everything he knows about chess. The text states, “By the end of the summer, Lau Po had taught me all he knew, and I had become a better chess player” (Tan 5). Waverly was given the chance to spend all summer getting better at chess, thanks to Lau Po’s kindness and patience. Without him, she would not have gotten better at chess since she was on her own. In conclusion, Roger and Waverly are similar because they both had influential mentors involved in their

The two characters share a similar trait, they both had influential mentors in their lives, and the mentors changed each character for the better. The two characters differ however, as Roger is a thief because he does not know any better, and Waverly is a hard worker because it is all she has known. They have different family lives, but their relationships with said family contribute to their actions in the stories. Each character’s setting affected the plot of each story because of the hustle and bustle of city life. Both characters do not live in a particularly safe area, as both characters are poor as well. Even though a person or family can be stereotyped, there is always a chance to look hard enough and see the true character of said person or