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
As the train leaves yet another small town, Wei asks Tian if he ever found Ai-li. Tian says that he went to Luoyang after she failed to arrive in Guangzhou, only to discover that she’d already left her boardinghouse. He rented her old room. He reported her missing and asked her Communist Party friends about her. But in two weeks of desperate searching, he never found a trace of her. To this day, he thinks it would have been easier if they had married and then grown to hate each other; her sudden disappearance made it hard for him to find closure. He hopes this trip will help him to say a proper goodbye to that part of his life. Suddenly realizing that Tian might be one of the few people who could understand the ghosts that compel him, too, Wei begins to tell his own story.
Tian’s trip to Luoyang represents yet another failed attempt to return to the past—something he can’t do any more than Wei or Tao or anyone else. Ai-li was long gone in spirit by the time he left Luoyang; her physical disappearance only completed the process. He still wants to revisit and change the past, even as he seems to have realized the impossibility of this wish. Only facing his pain and finding hope for the future can calm his grief. By helping Wei, Tian finds solace in companionship—especially as Wei confirms the intimacy and importance of their new friendship by telling his sad tale.
Themes
