5. Write what you understood from the poem Rules of the Game ?
5
Answers
Explanation:
Waverly Jong, the narrator of this section, explains that she was six years old when her mother taught her "the art of invisible strength," a strategy for winning arguments and gaining respect from others in games. Waverly and her two brothers live on Waverly Place in San Francisco's Chinatown. The children delight in the sights, sounds, and smells of Chinatown, the sweetness of the pasty red beans, the pungent smell of the herbs doled out by old Li, and the sight of the blood-slippery fish that the butcher guts with one deft slice.
Waverly's brother Vincent received a chess set at the Baptist Church Christmas party. Waverly took to the game immediately, delighting in its strategy. After her brothers lose interest in the game, Waverly learns complex plays from Lau Po, an old man in the park: She begins to win local tournaments. By her ninth birthday, Waverly is a national chess champion. Her fame spreads; even Life magazine runs an article on her meteoric rise. Waverly is excused from her chores, but there is one task she cannot escape: accompanying her mother to market on Saturdays. Mrs. Jong delights in walking down the busy street, boasting that Waverly is her daughter. One day, mortified by what she perceives as exploitation, Waverly argues with her mother and dashes off. For two hours, she huddles on an upturned plastic pail in an alley. Finally, she slowly walks home.
Taking their lead from Mrs. Jong, the entire family ignores Waverly, so she trudges to her darkened room and lies down on her bed. In her mind, she sees a chess board. Her opponent consists of two angry black slits, marching implacably across the chessboard and sending her white pieces fleeing for cover. As the black pieces get closer, Waverly feels herself getting lighter. She rises above the board and floats over houses. Pushed by the wind, she ascends into the night sky, alone. Waverly closes her eyes and thinks about her next move.
Tan's first short story was "Endgame." It describes a precocious young chess champion who has a stormy relationship with her overprotective Chinese mother. In 1985, Tan used the story to gain admission to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a fiction writer's workshop run by the novelist Oakley Hall. Guided by another novelist and short story writer, Molly Giles, Tan rewrote "Endgame" at the workshop. It was then published in FM magazine and reprinted in Seventeen magazine. Giles sent the story to Sandra Dijkstra, a literary agent in San Francisco, who thought that it was very well written. When Tan learned that an Italian magazine had reprinted "Endgame" without her permission, she asked Dijkstra to be her agent. Dijkstra agreed. She urged Tan to submit other short stories and to turn the series into a book. That book became The Joy Luck Club.
On the surface, "Rules of the Game" applies to the rules of chess, which Waverly masters with astonishing skill. Her success is even more admirable when we realize that she is only eight years old and almost entirely self-taught. Aside from some sessions with old Lau Po in the park, Waverly has taught herself everything that she needs to know about chess in order to become a national champion. She understands the rules of chess. She knows how the game is played, and she knows how to psych-out her opponents.
Look, however, at the title from another perspective. In addition to the game of chess, the title alludes to the "game" of life — knowing the "rules" in order to get what you want. Mrs. Jong calls these rules "the art of invisible strength." Unlike the clear-cut rules of chess, however, the rules of the game of life are ever-changing and brutally difficult to learn.
Waverly and her mother struggle for control. Waverly thinks of her mother as an adversary: "I could see the yellow lights shining from our flat like two tiger's eyes in the night," she says. To Waverly, her mother is like a tiger, waiting to pounce. Predatory, the older woman can destroy with one swipe of her powerful claws. Waverly clearly imagines herself the victim in their struggle. When she reenters the apartment, she sees the "remains of a large fish, its fleshy head still connected to bones swimming upstream in vain escape." Waverly sees herself as the fish, stripped clean by her mother's power, unable to break