Central Idea Tracking
• Select 2 details from each section of the text (section 2-4) that
supports one of the central ideas of the text: identity, expectations,
and power/ authority. Be sure to provide a brief analysis that
connects the detail to one the central ideas.
• Section 1 has been completed for you.
Topic Objective: To identify the central ideas and to trace their development throughout “Rules of the Game.”
Essential Questions: How does Amy Tan introduce, develop, and/or refine ideas in “Rules of the Game”?
Questions:
Notes:
Paragraph #
Central Ideas
Notes and Connections
1-3
Waverly’s mother uses Chinese expressions
to teach her daughter “the art of invisible
strength,” suggesting that Chinese culture is
important to Waverly and her family.
4
The community of “San Francisco’s
Chinatown” shapes Waverly’s identity. She
feels she is like “most of the other Chinese
children who played in the back alleys of
restaurants and curio shops.”
Identity
Identity
Paragraph #
5
6
Central Ideas
Notes and Connections
identity
Waverly feels positively about her Chinese identity. She describes the smell
of the “fragrant red beans as they were cooked down to pasty sweetness”
and the “odor of fried sesame balls and sweet curried chicken crescents”
coming from the bakery beneath her apartment.
Identity
Waverly feels positively about her Chinese identity. She describes the local
park as a safe place, “bordered by wood-slat benches where old-country
people sat … scattering the husks to an impatient gathering of gurgling
pigeons.” She is proud of the pharmacist, old Li, who “once cured a woman
dying of an ancestral curse that had eluded the best of American doctors.”