Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Hundred Flowers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Redemption
Journeys and Growth
Suffering, Strength, and Resilience
Home and Family
The Promises and Failures of Communism
Summary
Analysis
Once again, Suyin can’t sleep. In the moonlight, she slips silently downstairs, but this time she heads for the living room. It’s where she gave birth, but she didn’t take in the room’s details at the time. Just as she reaches out to touch a silk-upholstered couch, Wei demands to know what she’s doing. In a small voice, she confesses that she is wandering the house because she couldn’t sleep. Wei says he is doing the same thing. When he lights the lamp so she can take a proper look, Suyin sees a once-grand room that’s now threadbare and worn.
Wei confronts Suyin as if she were a burglar even though the things that make the villa truly valuable to him cannot be stolen—he has already lost Sheng and endangered his relationships with Kai Ying and Tao. The house only holds the faintest whispers of its former glory. The villa itself thus becomes a metaphor for the currently broken Lee family and for China itself as the Communist Party steals its culture and beauty.
Themes
Suyin glances at the portrait of Wei’s father above the empty fireplace. Despite their physical similarities, Wei says, they were different in most ways. Most children and parents, he observes, end up feeling that way. Only the lucky find common ground. His evident sadness makes Suyin uncomfortable, and she prepares to go back to her room. But as she climbs the stairs, she reassesses her opinion of Wei. She can imagine a roomful of students held rapt by his calm voice and deep wisdom. She wanted to be a teacher, once. Now she doubts she will ever get to go back to school.
As Wei muses on the way that children differ from their parents, he seems to be thinking about his own failures to honor his obligations to his father and his failure to protect his son from harm. In contrast, Sheng showed honor and responsibility when he accepted the Party’s punishment to keep Wei from harm. But the book also suggests that families aren’t limited to blood relations, and the fact that Wei reminds Suyin of her own buried dreams suggests a similarity between the two that could help them become chosen family members.
Themes
