How does the speaker in Rice and Rose Bowl Blues feel when she is washing rice

In "Rice and Rose Bowl Blues," by Diane Mei Lin Mark, the speaker is torn between her interest in football ("Rose Bowl") and her mother's request that she learn to wash rice. The speaker's feelings are not explicitly stated, but they are implied by the title and by a couple of key features of the poem.

The title "Rice and Rose Bowl Blues" obviously indicates that the speaker is feeling "blues" about something, so she is...

In "Rice and Rose Bowl Blues," by Diane Mei Lin Mark, the speaker is torn between her interest in football ("Rose Bowl") and her mother's request that she learn to wash rice. The speaker's feelings are not explicitly stated, but they are implied by the title and by a couple of key features of the poem.

The title "Rice and Rose Bowl Blues" obviously indicates that the speaker is feeling "blues" about something, so she is unhappy. The thing that makes her unhappy in the poem is that she is told by her mother that she needs to learn to wash rice instead of play football with her brother and the neighborhood boys. As her mother gives her directions, she gazes outside the window to watch the football game. In the middle of the poem, the mother's directions are interspersed with some brief commentary from the speaker:

Pour some water

          into the pot,

          she said pleasantly,

          turning on the tap

Rub the rice

          between your hands,

          pour out the clouds,

          Fill it again

          (I secretly traced

          an end run through

          the grains in

          between pourings)   

In these lines, the mother's instructions are italicized. The speaker comments that her mother "pleasantly" tells her the steps; her mother is not forceful or rude, but the speaker is still taken away from an activity in which she has more interest. At the end of this section, she says she "secretly traced" a football play while handling the rice. Her mind is still mostly on the game instead of this household chore. When she thinks she is finished and tries to leave, her mother calls her back in to help some more.

At the end of the poem, when a boy "sneeringly" says he heard she can't join them for football games any more, she laughs it off. The speaker's reaction is ambiguous. She may be acting tough in front of her friend, or she may be planning to openly defy her mother. The poem overall comments on gendered tasks, and the speaker implicitly feels it's unfair that she must work in the kitchen instead of playing football with the boys who are enjoying leisure time instead of working.