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
At dusk, Suyin leaves the hospital and walks back towards Dongshan Park. She’s 15 years old and seven months pregnant. She knows she can’t take care of her baby, so she plans to leave it at the hospital, hoping that the doctors and nurses there will find it a good home. She wishes it could have a devoted mother like the woman whom she overheard fretting over an injured son in the hospital that morning (Kai Ying).
Kai Ying and Wei can only see their own (and Tao’s) suffering, but others, like Suyin, suffer too. Suyin’s resolve that her baby will have a better life than she has shows that her own sufferings have not destroyed her ability to have hope. And her wish contains the idea that a person can forge a family beyond the bounds of marriage and blood relations.
Themes
Suyin’s own mother worked hard to support her three children after her husband abandoned her. But eventually she married Suyin’s despised stepfather. Suyin left her family and her neighborhood in Old Guangzhou when her pregnancy began to show, to avoid gossip and shame. Now, she lives on the streets and misses the tiny apartment. A few weeks earlier, she realized that she could sit unnoticed in the hospital waiting room when she wanted to get off the street during the day. As Suyin approaches the park, her hunger emboldens her to ask a man directly for some money, something she usually avoids; she prefers to silently beg at the park gates. He refuses. Tears threaten to fall from her eyes, and she thinks again about the woman in the waiting room (Kai Ying), the first person in months to look at her as if she were a human being.
The book strongly suggests that Suyin’s own mother abandoned her (or would have, if Suyin had stayed) as punishment for her pregnancy. In contrast, Kai Ying’s gaze at the hospital reminded Suyin of her inherent human dignity. She clings to this when the man in the park treats her like human refuse. This foreshadows the important role Kai Ying will play as a surrogate mother to Suyin. And it suggests that the idea of “family” involves mutual love, support, and forgiveness—things Suyin could not find with her mother and stepfather.
Themes
