The story is about Waverly Jong, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as she ascends to the highest levels of competitive chess by age nine. It has a number of superficial pleasures, and this was what drew me in initially. I was delighted by Tan’s hilarious, acerbic portraits of the Chinese mother, full of pride and confusion and dislocated old-world values, speaking in her brusque broken English. As she tugs knots from Waverly’s hair, for example, Waverly teases her ruthlessness by asking about Chinese torture. The mother doesn’t understand it’s a joke, of course, and responds: