How does Tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? Tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. Tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. Tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. Tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard English limits a person’s ability to communicate.

The main themes of the play are: fate and free will with the inevitability of oracular predictions is a theme that often occurs in greek tragedies the conflict between the individual and the state similar to that in sophocles’ “antigone” and   people’s willingness to ignore painful truths both oedipus and jocasta clutch at unlikely details in order to avoiding facing up to the inceasingly apparent truth and sight and blindness the irony that the blind seer tiresius can actually “see” more clearly than the supposedly clear-eyed oedipus, who is in reality blind to the truth about his origins and his inadvertent crimes.