A peasant girl named Karen is adopted by a rich old lady after her mother's death. She grows up vain. She tricks her adoptive mother into buying her a pair of red shoes and repeatedly wears them to church, without paying attention to the service. Her adoptive mother becomes ill, but Karen deserts her, preferring to attend a party in her red shoes. Once she begins dancing, she can't stop. The shoes take over. She cannot control them and they are stuck to her feet. The shoes continue to dance, through fields and meadows, rain or shine, night and day. She can't even attend her adoptive mother's funeral. An angel appears to her, condemning her to dance even after she dies, as a warning to vain children everywhere. Karen finds an executioner and asks him to chop off …show more content…
Lindo lets Waverly play and win repeatedly. Now it is Lindo who wears a triumphant grin.
With Waverly’s victories, Lindo changes the rules in the household. Contrary to Chinese gender roles, Waverly no longer does dishes. Proclaiming “Is new American rules,” Lindo relegates such chores to her sons so that Waverly can expend her energies on chess. At nine years of age, Waverly becomes a national chess champion. Lindo is thrilled as the cover of Life magazine features her daughter, both challenging traditional male hegemony over chess and testifying that Chinese people can do anything better.
Sauntering through Chinatown, Lindo announces to everyone that her daughter is “Wave-ly Jong,” the chess prodigy. To Lindo’s Chinese thinking, Waverly’s success is their family’s success. To Waverly’s more American view, her success is her individual accomplishment, and she resents Lindo’s appropriating it. Miscommunication between mother and daughter ensues, with Lindo concluding from Waverly’s reticence that she is ashamed of her mother, her family, and her