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
Despite her attempt to beat the crowds, the market swarms with people when Kai Ying arrives. She decides to go to the herb shop and Mr. Lam’s sweetshop first. As she walks, the smell of roasting chestnuts reminds her of the day she arrived in the city. At first, the incessant noise and bustle of the city made her intensely homesick for her rural village, and she rarely left Herbalist Chu’s shop.
As the narration returns to Kai Ying on her errands, it continues to explore the theme of growth and movement. The longer she walks, the more she remembers her past. And in remembering her past, she can see how much she has grown and changed in response. This offers hope that she will survive these new challenges, too, and come out stronger for it.
Themes
The shop still looks the same as when Kai Ying first arrived; she suspects it hasn’t changed in generations. As she steps inside, she remembers worrying that she would never learn the thousands or herbs and all their countless combinations. She wonders if Herbalist Chu hid the rarest and most precious ingredients away before the Communist Party took over the government. Certainly, none of them are on display any longer. When she started her apprenticeship, her favorite ingredient was pearl; she loved holding the tiny, delicate spheres in her hand. Each week she took one and hid it in a little sack, a way to count the weeks until she went home. But of course, she never went home.
Kai Ying has done hard things before, even if they were different than the trials she faces at this moment with Sheng’s arrest and Tao’s injury. But her apprenticeship shows that she has resilience and intelligence, two key traits that will help her navigate whatever trials life throws at her. Being in the shop provides another reminder of how much has changed since the Communist takeover; expensive medicines made from precious ingredients like pearls have become a sign of the elite decadence the Party despises. But Kai Ying knows that things of beauty have value beyond their monetary value; to her, the pearls she once held in her hand represented, above all else, hope for the future.
Themes
When Kai Ying returns to the market; it’s even busier than before. She buys ingredients quickly, impatient to go home, but she finds herself waylaid by an important—and insistent—client. She can’t afford to lose business, not with Sheng gone and everything from vegetables to meat becoming scarcer and more expensive. As she leaves the market, out of the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse the girl from the hospital waiting room (Suyin).
Although the Communist Party claims to seek the freedom and wellbeing of all Chinese people, the increasing expense and dwindling supply of even staples like vegetables—not to mention luxuries like meat—show its failures to live up to its ideals. On a historical note, this book takes place on the eve of the Great Chinese Famine, and the agricultural policies which precipitated that event were already in place by 1958; the scarcity Kai Ying notices may point to that event.
Themes
