JLC: The Twenty-six Malignant Games

Rules of the Game:

A girl named Waverly receives lifesaver for a Christmas present and her brother receives a chess set that has two pieces missing. Waverly convinces her brother to let her play by offering her lifesavers to fill in for the missing pieces and the winner gets to eat them. However her brothers get tired of playing with her because she would always win, so she starts to play with a man named Lau Po, who teaches her all the tricks and eventually turns her into a chess prodigy. Her mother even recognizes her advanced skills, and enters her into competitions where she eventually becomes a national champion.

The Voice from the Wall

A girl named Lena St.Clair lives with her family in an apartment. Her English husband has very limited Chinese, and her mother who is from China has very limited English. The St.Clair's move to San Fransisco, and her mother has a miscarriage. Lena finds joy in her neighbors being more miserable then she is because of their constant fighting.

Half and Half

A character named Rose Hsu is worried about telling her mother about her and her husband's divorce. Rose has a flashback to a scaring childhood memory where her brother was swept out to sea, never to be seen again, when her family went on a trip to the beach and she was in charge of watching him. Her mother makes the point that fate is "shaped half by expectation, half by inattention."

Two Kinds

Jing-Mei reflects back to her childhood when her mother expected her to be a child prodigy, especially at piano.  However Jing-Mei did not share this same want, which was made evident when she messed up at a piano recital and greatly disappointed her mother. Her mother forces her to keep taking piano lessons, but Jing-Mei does so only out of obedience, that is until her mother dies and she begins to play piano just for herself.