Thank You Ma Am Character Analysis

14.9% of Californians are Asian, while 25% of New Yorkers are African American, both of which make up 19% of the United States population. Rules of the Game by Amy Tan is about a young chinese girl named Waverly who ends up becoming a national chess champion. Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes is about an African American boy named Roger who tries to steal a woman’s purse, and ends up learning some very important life lessons from her. In Rules of the Game, Waverly’s mother is a recent immigrant from China who still follows all of her previous Chinese traditions. After becoming a national chess champion, Waverly becomes embarrassed of her mother always showing her off, which makes her mother very upset because family is a huge one of her values. …show more content…
In Rules of the Game it says, “I ran until it hurt and I realized I had nowhere to go, that I was not running from anything” (Tan 12). Waverly deals with the problem between her and her mother by running away. Instead of facing her mother in the market place, she ran. Waverly did not want to have anything to do with her mother at the moment, which is why she wanted to be far away from her. In Thank You Ma’am it states, “‘I wanted a pair of blue suede shoes,’ said the boy. ‘Well, you didn’t have to snatch my pocketbook to get some suede shoes,’ said Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. ‘You could have asked me’” (Hughes 2). Because Roger wanted shoes that he could not get, he resorted to stealing. Roger did not try to figure out how to get the money on his own before trying to steal money from people. These quotes show that both characters did not try to face the problems that lay ahead of them. They decided to resort to things that were not necessary. Waverly could have talked things out with her mother, and Roger could have figured out how to make the money on his own. To conclude, both characters are similar because they face their problems in the same kind of