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
Two days after leaving the hospital, Tao wakes up in his bedroom. Everything seems strangely unfamiliar, except the kapok tree, which he can see through the slit of his curtains. In the hospital, he worried that his mother and grandfather might have cut it down, punishing it for his mistake. But it was still standing when Wei carried him through the villa gate. Tao knows Sheng will understand the dream that sent him up the tree, and he can’t wait to tell him. But what Tao will not—cannot—ever tell anyone is how he felt like he was flying while he was falling. He was certain that if he’d just been able to keep going, he would have soared all the way to White Cloud Mountain.
Not only did Tao’s attempt to reclaim the past and find his father fail, but it backfired, making his life even more strange and painful. The injury, like Sheng’s arrest, like everything else that has happened to him, has changed the trajectory of Tao’s life even though he doesn’t yet grasp all the implications. His memory of flying toward White Cloud Mountain—that is, of soaring into an untroubled version of the past—represents what he hoped the climb would achieve, but what it never could.
Themes
Now, Tao feels uncomfortable and confined; he’s bedridden until his leg heals. He listens to Kai Ying and Wei moving in the kitchen. He worries about healing in time to start school—he doesn’t want to lose his standing as second student—and he misses his best friend Little Shan. Tao hears his mother preparing the bitter herbal tea she gives him every day to help his body regain its balance and heal. He misses the magic of watching her work. It’s strange to think of himself as one of her patients. He misses helping her deliver packets of herbs to her patients, especially Auntie Song, whom he admires for her strength and resilience. She’s not unlike the kapok tree in that way, he realizes. He can’t wait to go back to helping her in the garden.
Despite—or perhaps especially because of—how his injury has turned Tao’s life upside down, he redoubles his efforts to keep thinks from changing. Yet, at almost every moment, he faces reminders of his troubles: he lies in bed while his mother and grandfather eat breakfast and his mother works in the kitchen. He’s not Kai Ying’s son and helper anymore; he has become her patient. Still, Tao sees Song and the kapok tree as ideal models of the kind of strength and resilience he wants for himself, models he tries to emulate. And interestingly, they both change (or have changed), even as they seem constant and dependable.
Themes
A gust of breeze outside sends the first leaves from the kapok tree to the ground. Each spring, Kai Ying has Tao collect its fallen flower petals, which she later turns into a fever-calming tea. The leaves collected in the fall become poultices for injuries. Since his accident, he knows he’ll look at the tree differently, with heightened awareness of its healing properties.
The medicines provided by the kapok tree speak to the variety of accidents that can happen in a life—illnesses and injuries big (like Tao’s fall) and small. But there are ways to help ease a person’s way, such as through the various medicines Kai Wing makes from the kapok tree.
Themes
