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Waverly In Amy Tan's Rules Of The Game

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“Rules of the Game” is a charming tale about a six-year old Chinese-American turned chess prodigy. At first the story seems a straight forward legend about an extraordinary little girl, but is actually centered more on the people surrounding Waverly whereas Waverly herself is a viewpoint character. Just as well, Waverly is the perfect character to give readers an intimate tour of Amy Tan’s crafted world. Waverly, as a child who regards Chinatown as her favorite play area and who regularly explores the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, gives Tan literary mobility to probe San Francisco’s Chinatown both physically and culturally; her unrestricted liberty exempts Tan from logistic restrictions in creating a creative, yet realistic, story. Additionally, Waverly has the literary fortune of being a child of Chinese immigrants in a story detailing the lives of …show more content…

The more Waverly shows off her world, the more obvious the mutual nescience of culture between Americans and Chinese is. Waverly claims Old Li had once “cured a woman dying of an ancestral curse that had eluded the best of American doctors” (Bausch 1491). American doctors do not hold stock in ancestral curses, only science. But to the Chinese that diagnosis is completely sensible. Conjointly, when she explores the local seafood market “crowded with doomed fish and turtles struggling to gain footing on the slimy green-tiled sides,” she also sees a sign stating, “Within this store, is all for food, not for pet.” When tourists come visit Chinatown, they think they’re in a pet store. Animals like turtles only serve as companions to Americans; it would be strange, and maybe even repulsive to think of companion animals as dinner. However, in Chinese culture animals such as those are meals. What seems evident to one people is completely lost on the

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