Answer:
5. My guess is that Waverly's walk home is a mix of both comfort and being lost or hopeless. This makes her feel at home because she used to play and hang out with her brothers in these alleys, and she knows them well. Then, at the same time, she felt like she had lost her childhood because she did not play with her friends in the alleys anymore and just practiced chess all the time.
Because she knows that she cannot leave because she is still a child, she is hopeless. She has nowhere else to go but home. As she walks home, she can see "the yellow lights shining from our flat like two tiger's eyes in the night." It feels like her mother's eyes are watching her "While she practices, Mom hovers over her and makes loud breathy noises."
6. Their personal and cultural differences make it necessary for Waverly to see her mother on the other side of the chess board because they have 2 hugely different opinions about everything. Waverly sees herself as more of an American than an immigrant, and on the other side, her mother feels like a struggling immigrant who was never given a hand to help her get up in this hard American life. Also, Waverly just wants to feel a strong connection with her mother, while her mother believes that she needs to show tough love to mold kids who will be strong and survive in such a hard world as her mother would say.
Those are, in fact, the main reasons for the differences. In addition, Waverly wants her mother to give her praise and make her feel good. That it is not just "pure luck." She worked hard to get it. She works out every day. A thing that her mother does not understand because she was raised the same way as Waverly. She thinks that if she is mean to Waverly, she will grow up to be mean, which is not true.
