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
Each day for days, Wei sits on a hard bench at the public security bureau, waiting for news of Sheng. His back aches and he feels perpetually cold in Luoyang’s frigid northern climate. Tian keeps him company most of the time, but occasionally he leaves to go on walks. Wei can’t blame him—he, too is tired of waiting—but at this moment, he wishes his friend would return to ease his loneliness. Wei closes his eyes, but his despair and the noisy hallway prevent him from conjuring up Liang. The length of the search worries him—if Sheng were there in Luoyang, Wei wonders, wouldn’t it be easy to find him?
The inhumanity of the Communist Party bureaucracy comes into focus as Wei endures a dayslong wait for news. He doesn’t even know if his son is alive, and the Party clearly doesn’t care about the pain and suffering that causes him—in fact, as Comrade Cheng told Kai Ying earlier in Guangzhou, that secondary suffering is one of the points of the punishment. The whole family suffers for the counterrevolutionary’s supposed crime.
Themes
From Clerk Hu, Wei knows that the process involves locating Sheng then getting permission for him to have a visitor. And he knows there are other people ahead of him in line. After their first encounter, Wei changed tactics; now he’s scrupulously polite to Clerk Hu. Tian teases him about this, but he, like everyone, recognizes the importance of respecting Party authorities. Wei continues to be amazed by how easily he fell into friendship with Tian. He tells Tian an adage about the wise adapting themselves to circumstances like water to a pitcher. He confides that he spent most of his life as the pitcher. Only now, in his old age and these dire circumstances, can he see the wisdom of being the water and molding himself to fit the shape of his circumstances.
At first, Wei tended to treat Clerk Hu as he has treated everyone else in his life—as someone who exists to take care of Wei’s needs. But by leaving the villa, he learns that the world doesn’t revolve around him. And the more he acknowledges that truth, the better he becomes at adjusting himself, and the easier the task—and the waiting—become. In taking this journey in his 70s, Wei makes up decades of lost wisdom and experience that he denied himself when he shut himself off from the world.
Themes
On the morning of the fourth day, Clerk Hu brings Wei the news that his request to see Sheng has been approved. As Wei takes a yellow form from Clerk Hu’s hand, he realizes how much he had come to fear or expect Sheng’s death. He feels relieved just to know that his son lives. For the first time in almost a week, he feels warm. By the time he’s gathered his wits enough to say, “Thank you,” Clerk Hu is halfway back to his desk.
Wei’s journey teaches him about himself, the world, and his place in it. In leaving the villa, he redeems his past mistakes of isolation, selfishness, and pride. It’s a mark of just how far he has come that he feels gratitude—rather than the useless guilt that keeps him trapped in the past—when he receives permission to visit Sheng. Finally, he sees a glimmer of hope for the future.
Themes
