“Rules of the Game” takes place in Chinatown, in San Francisco, California during the early 1960’s. This is the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest Chinese community outside Asia. Since its establishment in 1848, it has been highly important and influential in the history and culture of ethnic Chinese immigrants in North America. Chinatown is an area that continues to retain its own customs, languages, places of worship, social clubs, and identity. Visitors can easily become immersed in this Asian world, filled with herbal shops, temples, pagoda roofs and dragon parades. In addition to being a starting point and home for thousands of Chinese immigrants, it is also a major tourist attraction, drawing more visitors annually than the Golden Gate Bridge.

The long history of San Francisco’s Chinatown has been clouded with racism, hatred, and repression. From the Gold Rush through the 1870s, a large migration of mostly single male laborers came to San Francisco and the American West, as well as to Canada and Peru. With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the nation's first racially restrictive immigration measure, the Chinese American population fell from 26,000 in 1881 to 11,000 in The Act excluded Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers employed in mining" from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. -In 1910 Angel Island Immigration Station opens and operates as a detention and processing center for Chinese immigration. Thousands of Chinese immigrants spend weeks and months detained, undergoing rigorous interrogations by U.S. immigration officials.

Between 1852 and 1882, many predominantly male Chinese laborers and a few merchants and labor brokers came to San Francisco. Floods in China propelled a virtual migration of Cantonese- dialect-speaking people all around the Pacific Basin. It has been estimated that 2.5 million people emigrated from China between 1840 and 1900.

In 1943, during World War II when the United States allied with China against Japan, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by Congress, but a small quota of 105 Chinese a year kept migration minimal. In 1965, the Civil Rights Act was passed and the United States began to break through the barriers of its historic racial hatreds. In the same year, immigration quotas were reconfigured to reflect a multiracial reality and to permit more Asian immigration. From 105 a year, quotas for Chinese grew to 20,000 per year by The main character is named Waverly. She was named after the street they lived on in Chinatown.