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
The rain—the first proper monsoon of the year—continues for three days after Suyin gives birth. Kai Ying listens for the baby’s cries at night, recalling her terror during the delivery. Suyin, already weak from months of homelessness and begging, lost a lot of blood. She will take weeks to recover, even with the help of Kai Ying’s most restorative, strengthening soups. The baby starts to fret and Kai Ying hurries down the hall to pick her up. Despite her low weight, she has strong lungs and seems alert. As Kai Ying cradles her, she realizes that Sheng has been gone for nine months—the length of a pregnancy.
Kai Ying has charitable reasons for letting Suyin and the baby stay in the villa. But she also wants to keep them close because they have given her a glimmer of hope. Despite the odds, the baby seems healthy enough to live; Suyin will recover in time, too. And as Kai Ying measures Sheng’s absence in pregnancies, realizing that under different circumstances, the baby in her arms could have been hers and Sheng’s rather than a stranger’s, she betrays how attached she has already become to the infant.
Themes
Kai Ying carries the baby to the kitchen; she must supplement Suyin’s meager milk supply with soymilk. She knows Suyin will need weeks to recover enough strength to take care of herself, much less the baby. In the meantime, the household does its best to welcome the child. Kai Ying usually adheres to the traditions her own mother taught her, like protecting a baby from evil spirits by not using its true name for the first two months of its life. But this little baby survived so much just to be born that Kai Ying trusts her strength. Secretly, she decides to call the child the name she would pick for her own daughter, Meizhen, or beautiful pearl.
When Kai Ying’s own son was born, she followed the traditions her parents taught her. But despite her caution, the Communist Party broke up her family at least as effectively as evil spirits when it spirited Sheng away without a trace. She names the baby after the pearls that she loved at Herbalist Chu’s shop because they represented hope to her then—a hope to return home to Zhaoquing. Her wish was fulfilled in an unexpected way when Guangzhou became her home. In this moment, Meizhen represents a different hope, that her family might one day be whole again.
Themes
On her way downstairs, with Meizhen drowsing in her arms, Kai Ying steps onto the second-floor balcony where she can see the waning moon shining in the sky. She regrets missing it on the night of the Autumn Moon Festival; unlike Huoyi and Chang’e, she knows her reunions with her husband must wait another year.
The storm clears as Kai Ying begins to discover hope again in the promising life of little infant Meizhen. The Moon Festival promises that things will be made right eventually.
Themes
