Month: June 2020

“Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan is a short story that portrays a Chinese – American girl named Waverly. One day, her brother receives a chess set for Christmas, and she starts to learn how to play. She quickly starts to become extremely good and is able to beat many people at chess tournaments. Later, her mom brags about Waverly’s success at a mall, and she becomes upset because she does not like that her mom is showing her off. Instead of listening to Waverly and stopping, she also becomes angry at her daughter. 

I believe that her mom should respect that Waverly does not want her mother to brag about her. She tells her mother, “‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, telling everybody I’m your daughter”’ (Tan). Her mother misunderstands and thinks that Waverly is ashamed to be her daughter, but in reality, Waverly just does not like all of the attention. When she is finally able to clarify what she means, her mother is shocked and becomes even angrier. Although her mother just wants everyone to know Waverly, she does not understand why her daughter would not like all the recognition from others. This represents how many parents treat their children because the parents do not understand them. For example, a mother may think something is really exciting, such as watching a video about fish, but her child just does not want to. Although this story seems like a simple short story about a young girl who likes chess, it actually holds many other important messages, like how someone shouldn’t treat another rudely because they don’t like the same things as them.

Waverly Place Jong is a chess prodigy living in San Francisco’s Chinatown with her Chinese immigrant parents. She is named after “Waverly Place,” her family’s address and, therefore, their claim to the United States. Waverly is nicknamed as “妹妹” (Chinese for “little sister”), whereas her two brothers have normal, American names—Winston and Vincent.

Waverly and her mother have an ongoing mental battle, each surreptitiously trying to gain the upper hand. Although Waverly was born in the United States, her mother has tried to keep many of her Chinese rules of conduct. One important rule is that one must remain silent to win. The story’s opening focuses on silence and on how controlling one’s emotions endows one with a secret strength like the wind.

Once when shopping with her mother, the six-year-old Waverly longs for some salted plums. Because she fusses for them, her mother refuses to buy them. The next time, Waverly keeps her wants silent, and her mother rewards her with plums.

Later, Waverly sets a psychological ambush for her mother. As her hair is being combed painfully by her mother, Waverly asks her what Chinese torture is. She knows that Waverly is challenging her pride in Chinese culture. She deflects her daughter’s question about the possibility of Chinese inhumanity, pointing out that Chinese people are good at business, medicine, and painting. Then her patriotism overcomes her, and she says, “We do torture. Best torture.”

At a church Christmas party, the three children receive gifts, among which is a used chess set. At church, Waverly’s mom thanks the ladies, but at home, she sniffs proudly that they do not want it. Thus she socializes her children to exercise silence and power over their true feelings; even unwanted gifts must be acknowledged as exceeding what one deserves.

Watching her brothers play chess, Waverly becomes intrigued by the rules of the game. She does not understand these American rules, but she researches them in the library, learning the moves and the powers of each piece, and then easily defeats her brothers. When she stumbles on some old Chinese men playing chess in the park, she invites one, Lau Po, to play. He teaches her more rules and tactics. Waverly soon wins neighborhood exhibition games, and her mother begins to take pride in her, although she still claims that her daughter’s wins are merely luck, to encourage her to keep going. This is a sign of silent want because she wants her daughter to continue, so she uses reverse psychology.

When someone suggests that Waverly play at local chess tournaments, she is eager to participate, but keeping wants silent doesn’t allow her to do so. Her mother soon relents and lets Waverly play and win repeatedly. Now it is her mother who wears a triumphant grin.

With Waverly’s victories, her mom changes the rules in the household., Waverly no longer does chores. She gives the chores to the sons because she wants Waverly to spend her time on chess . At nine years of age, Waverly becomes a national chess champion. Waverly’s mom is extremely excited as the cover of Life magazine features her daughter challenging Bobby Fischer’s quote: “There will never be a girl grandmaster”

Later, when the day is Saturday, they go shopping. Waverly’s mom proudly claims that Waverly is her daughter everywhere they go. Soon enough, Waverly can’t take it anymore and under her breath she told her mother:

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, telling everybody I’m your
daughter.”

They get in an argument and Waverly accidentally knocking over an old woman’s groceries. She was so mad, she didn’t even help the old lady and ran down an empty alleyway. Two hours later, she returned and Vincent told her: “About time you got home, Boy, are you in trouble.”

When she went in the house, there was a half eaten platter of fish.

TO BE CONTINUED…

This story is about how a girl called Waverly grew up in San Francisco, Chinatown and how she suddenly became a chess prodigy.

One day, during a Christmas gift opening, Waverly’s family received a chess set and when Waverly started to play, she began to be really interested in chess. She started to practice and learn about the strategies and rules of chess, and soon she was able to beat her brothers. One day, when she challenged a guy from the park to a match of chess and the guy easily wins. However the guy offered to teach Waverly chess strategies and before you know it, she became really really good at chess. She became so good at chess that she didn’t really have to do chores, but to practice chess and also even attend tournaments for chess. She ended up becoming a national chess champion and her mother was really proud of her. However her luck changed when her mother started to brag how she was the mom of this amazing national chess champion. Waverly began to get mad and soon storms off. When she returns home, her mother was really mad at her and soon when in her bead she drifts off to sleep. Dreaming a chessboard, and how her mother’s pieces sweeps her pieces off the chessboard.

Sometimes people overdo things. Maybe it’s over-preparing a presentation, or spending a week on a really easy homework assignment. Most of the time, it’s not harmful. Although many people aren’t willing to over do something and would rather favor some sleep. Sleep is known as a great cure, a cure for difficulties, lack of energy. But it’s actually more harmful to oversleep than it is to over achieve. Although many people would complain that overachieving is just a waste of time, and staying in bed would better spend the time, oversleeping can cause many health effects, statistics have shown that people who sleep more than the recommended amount can increase the risk of diabetes, strokes and death. Yet it’s also important to balence the amount of sleep you get with the work done, people who over achieve might find themselves staying until two in the morning, trying to polish up their shining presentation. When we just continue to drive ourselves, our work fall behind, as well as a higher chance of obesity, heart disease and high blood pressures. People who were originally doing amazing might find themselves falling back, even after staying up that late, because they were staying up that late. It’s important to balance your sleep with the appropriate amount of sleep for your age.

Our brains affect us in a lot of different ways. Some ways the brain affects us are in memory, control, feelings, and behavior.
Neurotransmitters in our brain affect us by sending signals to other parts of the brain. Unfortunately, these neurotransmitters can get damaged causing ADHD or autism.
The brain also affects our memories. There are short term and long term memory. Short term memory is something that you don’t hold in your brain for a long time. (eg. A phone number) Long term memory is the stuff that you hold in your brain forever. I think memory is VERY important because, without it, We would fail EVERY SINGLE TEST AT SCHOOL!!!
Another thing the brain affects is control. Control is when you want something and you can resist the thing. (eg. the cookie jar is right there, but your mom tells you not top eat the cookies.) Or it’s decision-making. The brain will get the facts, and decide which choice is better. Without control, it would be chaos and the world would fall apart.
The third thing the brain controls is your feelings. It will control whether you’re happy, or sad, or scared, or enraged. There always is something that stimulates the brain to show feelings. (eg.getting a present makes you happy)If there weren’t any feelings, the world would be boring

In conclusion the brain is important.

Curtis Zhang

6/2/20

The Lottery

The Lottery is a short story in which all the townspeople gather together for a lottery. As the Story progresses, however, the story takes a dark turn, as winning the lottery is not a good thing and is instead a death sentence by stoning. This story shows lots of irony in the story that you don’t know that is a form of irony until you get to the big plot twist.

The story first shows a very obvious irony as the name “The Lottery” implied that the villagers gathering up and the people getting picked were going to get lucky and earn some money or some kind of prize, but the Author presents a sort of irony as it was not for a prize but a death sentence. The Author does this in a very subtle way, giving subtle hints to the fact of the matter. On page 1, it even tells you that the boys of the village “-eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.” This is alluding to the fact that they are going to be stoned, but it is very hard to make that connection if you do not know what is going to happen. There are many other subtle hints that the lottery is bad and you are going to die if you get chosen, including the fact that the town continued to come to one individual for the lottery, which would not really make too much sense because the family could just share the benefit, but you would not make the connection if you did not know what was going to happen. 

There are many forms of irony in the story such as the fact that some other towns nearby had gotten rid of the lottery and they laughed at the other towns for getting rid of the lottery, which sounds reasonable until you learn what the lottery really is about. “Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”” Tessie is also perfectly fine with the lottery, as it is with most if not all of the other townspeople, until she is chosen, at which point she says that it is not fair that she has to die. One more form of irony the story is the fact that the lottery is so old that the second lottery box was put into use even before the oldest man in the town, Old Man Warner, was even born. Even so, they still choose to follow the long standing tradition of stoning a person to death every year. 

The last form of Irony that I found in the short story was the fact that even though Tessie showed concern for herself and her family after her family was chosen for the second part of the ceremony, her own children even participated in the stoning of their own mom, which is a very chilling thought. That means that the Lottery must be very influential within the town, since the townspeople were willing to sacrifice their own friend/mom to appease a heavenly deity or something of that sort that might not even be real.

The Lottery is a very ironic story because the story seems like a regular story at first, but as the end of the story, lots of irony shows up at parts that you would least expect to. There are very dark pieces of irony like the fact that the Lottery was for a death sentence, and less dark pieces of irony such as Old Man Warner laughing at people doing the morally correct thing. 

How does our brain affect our daily activities? Our brain affects our daily activities in many ways. Some ways are that our brain affects our mood, state of mind, self control, and memory. Brain chemicals, or neurotransmitters affect our mood or state of being that we are in. There are many types of neurotransmitters in our brain, and new ones are still being discovered. Some sever illnesses to the brain can affect your impulses and impulsive behavior.

Our brain also affects our self control. Some people can’t control what they want to and not want to do. This shows a lack on self control. Some examples of not being able to control yourselves are eating sweets in a diet. Another example is not being able to resist temptations. Having self control is an important part of our everyday lives.

The third thing that our brain affects is out memory. In my opinion, our memory is the most important thing in our daily lives. Some people have short term memory and some have long term memory. If you have short term memory, you forget more things easier. If you have long term memory, you remember more things. If you suffer from short term memory loss, you can forget things you just did, which affects you a lot because then you won’t be able to remember important events that you are supposed to remember.

The lottery is a short story which takes place in a small town where every once a year they draw a “lottery”. On the day of the lottery children was sent out to collect stones and were told to bring them back to the center.

While the children was collecting stones, men and woman was picking their “lottery” tickets. This annual lottery is not your everyday power-ball, who ever wins the lottery will be stoned to death as a sacrifice, as the whole village would throw rocks at you until your dead. As Mr.Summers call out all the names of each and every villagers. The main character Tessie wins The lottery she declares that is not fair that she won

Sorry I know it’s not long enough but I’m not really good at writing I’ll try harder next time

This is my opinion about the lottery. I really liked the lottery because it was really tense were everyone was hoping that they didn’t get “winner” ticket. What I could understand was that the person that won the lottery was killed and that everyone had to do it like everyone like all the kids and old people and the people who couldn’t come their family members had a bigger chance of getting it. and I think its a religion because in a history class I read about sacrificing someone to please their god so maybe it was a religion.

So on to the book, in the book Mr.Summer which I think is unfair that he doesn’t have to draw it, gets the bag and a person named Tessie gets it and dies. THE END