Waverly In Amy Tan's Rules Of The Game

Waverly’s mother is a very proud person, and this is unchanged from the beginning to the end of Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game”; but actually, she becomes an antagonist near the end of the story. It is understandable that she, as a mother, is always proud of her daughter’s success, but her excessive pride has triggered a conflict with her daughter Waverly, which reveals that mutual understanding is quite important for a parent-child relationship, especially for adolescents.
She maintains her pride throughout the story. Although her daughter is a Chinese-American, as a Chinese herself, she has been imparting a sense of national pride to Waverly since her daughter was a child: “Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.”(1492) She just does not want herself and her daughter to be looked down upon by Americans. On Christmas day, her son Vincent gets a second-hand chess set. Though she does not express her dislike right away, after they get home, she instructs Vincent to throw it away: “She not want it. We not want it.”(1493) …show more content…
Waverly’s mother have done so many things as stated above for the sake of satisfying her own vanity, especially as her daughter becomes more successful. Waverly initially has tried her best to tolerate them out of respect: “I was annoyed, but I couldn’t say anything.”(1495) However, tolerance has its limits. Every time Waverly does shopping with her on market days, “My mother would proudly walk with me, visiting many shops, buying very little. ‘This is my daughter Wave-ly Jong,’ she said to whoever looked her way.”(1496) It seems that the purpose of shopping is simply to show off her daughter. As Waverly’s need for independence is growing, she cannot even bear her mother’s behavior anymore, so she bursts out