What is the tone of the conversation between Waverly and her mother regarding Chinese

torture? What does this exchange reveal about each of the two characters?

Answer and explanation:

At the beginning of the short story "Rules of the Game", by author Amy Tan, the main character Waverly is having her hair done by her mother. A Chinese immigrant living in America, Waverly's mother is very set in her ways, working hard to teach her culture and manners to her children. She is trying to transform her daughter into a child prodigy, a Chinese Shirley Temple. However, since the process is tiring and painful, Waverly decides to tease her mother:

One day, as she struggled to weave a hard-toothed comb through my disobedient hair, I had a sly thought.

I asked her, "Ma, what is Chinese torture?" My mother shook her head. A bobby pin was wedged between her lips. She wetted her palm and smoothed the hair above my ear, then pushed the pin in so that it nicked sharply against my scalp.

'Who say this word?" she asked without a trace of knowing how wicked I was being. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture."

"Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture."

The tone of this conversation is teasing and surreptitious. Notice that Waverly calls herself "sly" and "wicked". She is trying to imply that what her mother is doing to her is torture. However, her mother is also furtive in her answer. Instead of acknowledging she has understood her daughter's implications, she turns the conversation around to praise the Chinese while criticizing the American people. That reveals that both characters are sly. Both are intelligent and cunning in their ways to use language, even if the mother uses a "broken English".