Through Tan's stunning use of character, however, readers are left to question Waverly's metaphor and her conclusion that her mother is her opposition. One reason for this is Waverly's mother's stunning wisdom. Although she speaks in Asian-flavored broken English, Waverly states that her "mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances" (Tan 1). Furthermore, it is clear that Waverly's mother's words were often filled with wisdom. Indeed, Waverly credits the women with imparting to her the rules of chess, the secret for winning chess when her mother taught her "the art of invisible strength," what was "a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually…chess games" (Tan 1).

Like the ying and the yang, however, Waverly's mother's positive characteristic of wisdom is balanced by a negative characteristic of pride. The woman is fiercely prideful, demanding that her sons give back the charity, second-hand chess set, introducing everyone to her daughter, the chess champion, and demanding that her daughter not loose pieces in addition to winning. Told in the first person in the style of a fictitious memoir, however, Tan's short story emphasizes both the positive characteristics of Waverly's mother -- the wisdom -- and her negative ones -- the pride -- in harmony with one another. Neither...

She is both fiercely wise and fiercely prideful, as can be assessed from the first incident with her in the store -- she does not want her daughter to create a scene, but is mindful of the important lesson she can teach Waverly. Thus, readers are apt to question Waverly's metaphor of her mother and Chinese culture as her opponent because the tone that the piece takes. While this may have been how Waverly felt as a young girl, it is clear that the Waverly who is telling the story has a different idea, and the fact that she presents her mother's shortcomings and positive characteristics in equality is testimony to that.
However, the Waverly telling the story still uses the chessboard as a metaphor. Twice during the story, Waverly recollects that the chessboard has sixty-four squares. Thirty-two are black and thirty-two are white. Again like the ying and the yang, the chessboard is a display of the perfect harmony between positive and negative. Thus, when Waverly looks back on her life as a child, she decides that it, too, was a perfectly balanced existence between American and Chinese culture, positive and negative actions on her part, and the positive and negative characteristics of her mother. Thus, Tan's story "The Rules of the Game" is, indeed, a metaphor of the chessboard, just not the metaphor that Waverly imagines during her youth.