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
Kai Ying tries to keep to a regular schedule to give some order to her life in the week of silence she endures after Wei’s first telegram. She spends the best part of these days teaching Suyin about herbal medicine. She never realized how fulfilling teaching can be. On this afternoon, Kai Ying goes upstairs after their lesson and retrieves the bag of tiny pearls she took from Herbalist Chu’s shop. She brings them downstairs and pours them into the palm of her hand, telling Suyin that they represent the time it will take her to learn the basics of herbal work—24 months. She’s willing to teach Suyin if Suyin wants to learn. Suyin closes her hand around one of the pearls and says she does.
Since Sheng’s arrest, Kai Ying has been trying to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed. But she cannot, and trying to avoid dealing with the pain of Sheng’s arrest, Tao’s fall, and the rest only made things harder. Now, however, as she begins to accept the new shape of her life and her family—which now includes Suyin and Meizhen, and which will remain incomplete until Sheng’s release—she finds peace and even a small measure of joy. In this moment, she remembers lessons she learned when she came to Guangzhou to study herbal medicine: life changes constantly, but the person who remains open to those changing realities has a better chance of finding contentment and happiness.
Themes
