In her stories, "Tan is handing us the key with no price tag and letting us open the brass-bolted door." (Gillespie.365). The focus of "Rules of the Game" was on the culture of the Chinese-Americans but it was weaved into a story to catch the reader's attention. She introduces the readers to the way of like of the Chinese-Americans, "it's like being invited into a dusty room full of castoffs, and being given a chance to re-apprehend them in their former richness" (Gillespie.365).

Tan wrote about her experiences, her relative's experiences, and fellow Chinese-Americans living in America. In the story "Rules of the Game" Tan included experiences she had known from her life. In all of Tan's stories and novels "Tan wrote about what she had seen herself and what she hadn't- her own experience and her mother's" (Fitzgerald.367) including in the short story "Rules of the Game". In "Rules of the Game", sh

e uses her experiences about learning to play chess as the theme of the story. Tan's stories give a "lucidity of vision" (Chang.363), so you are able to imagine exactly what is going on. The entire idea of chess comes into play when Waverly's older brothers get an old, used chessboard with missing pieces from a church Christmas bazaar, while all that Waverly got was a book with twelve packs of Lifesavers. Even though her gift wasn't much, she was still grateful and talked her brothers into letting her play by giving them Lifesavers as substitutes for the missing pieces. The story "Rules of the Game" has "skepticism, same themes and linear structure that allows puzzles to be unraveled and truths to unfurl along the way, and splendidly cinematic scenes" (Gillespie.365). Because of Waverly's persistence in the story, her brothers eventually let her play, and again and again Waverly would defeat them. Waverly's mother was very shocked at how well she did, so she decided to enter her into competitions. Tan keeps the reader thinking of what is going to happen next, especially when Waverly wins all the competitions that she competes in and at the end when Waverly, the star chess player, runs away because of all the attention she receives from winning. In "Rules of the Game", "she defanged all her potential critics, silenci

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Approximate Word count = 896
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)