Childhood

Childhood is one of the book’s most consequential temporal layers: the past repeatedly returns as a set of wounds that the adult characters have not fully escaped. Lu Xun’s kidnapping and Su Xiangwan’s experience of parental loss give the period two different but structurally related forms of insecurity. For both, childhood becomes the origin of later vigilance and emotional dependence, while the narrative gradually reveals that what looks like adult jealousy, control, or fragility is connected to an earlier fear of disappearance.

Lu Xun’s Kidnapping and Survival

Lu Xun recalls that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve. The kidnappers made him take various medicines, and he nearly lost his life; the experience also left him resistant to drugs. He recounts the episode with an unwavering gaze, describing the pain as though it belonged to someone else. The distance does not erase the injury, but it shows how far the event has been pushed into the past: unforgettable suffering has become something he can narrate without visibly reliving its original intensity.

The memory also includes a girl who was killed alongside him. Lu Xun’s recollection therefore contains more than personal survival. It binds his continued life to the death of another child, leaving childhood marked by both bodily danger and survivor’s memory. The girl’s presence helps explain why his history is not merely a closed adventure from the past; it remains an unspoken pressure beneath his adult need to recognize threats before they mature.

Su Xiangwan’s Solitary Childhood

Su Xiangwan remembers that her grandfather said her mother had a terminal illness and did not want to implicate the family. The explanation concealed the real circumstances from the child, but it could not erase what she remembered. While drawing, she pictured her father and mother holding her hands. After seeing the drawing, her mother walked onto the balcony. The domestic image of a family holding hands thus becomes inseparable from the mother’s disappearance and death, turning an innocent childhood drawing into a witness to catastrophe.

Su Xiangwan later explains that she taught herself zither, chess, calligraphy, and dancing because she believed exceptional achievement might bring her parents back. Each time she expressed that hope, her grandfather allowed her to continue learning, even though she understood that he was also suffering. Her education was therefore not simply cultivation or privilege. It was a child’s bargain with loss: if she became outstanding enough, the broken family might be restored.

This bargain consumed the childhood that other children spent eating, playing, and enjoying ordinary pleasures. Su Xiangwan describes her own childhood as one of solitude. The contrast establishes the emotional cost behind her accomplishments. Her skills are evidence of discipline, but they are also the visible surface of abandonment, sustained by the belief that perfection could reverse an irreversible event.

Family, Adoption, and Misrecognized Intimacy

Childhood also complicates the meaning of kinship. Shen Yi Yun is identified as the adopted child of Lu Xun’s uncle and therefore as Lu Xun’s cousin in family terms, while Su Xiangwan’s conversation with Lu Xun places childhood affection beside adult romantic suspicion. She jokes that her sister had loved him from a very young age and might even have flirted with him before. The remark causes the image of the little girl from Lu Xun’s past and Su Qingrou to converge in his mind, showing how childhood figures can be carried into adult relationships through resemblance, memory, and mistaken association.

The book repeatedly distinguishes blood relationship from names and social labels. Lu Xun argues that a relative without blood ties is still, in practical terms, a man or woman rather than an unquestionable familial boundary. Chu Fei likewise describes a woman who wore the clothing of a close relative but was not actually related to him, adding that he liked her intensely. These adult disputes give childhood kinship categories an unstable afterlife: words such as cousin, sister, and relative can protect boundaries, disguise desire, or expose how easily those boundaries fail.

Childhood Wounds in Adult Behavior

The past returns through bodily and emotional reactions rather than through memory alone. When Su Xiangwan becomes dangerously feverish, she reaches the elevator but faints before pressing the button. Later, frightened and in tears, she tells Lu Xun that she is scared; he holds her and reassures her that he has been there all along. The scene transforms childhood deprivation into an adult attachment scene. Her fear is met by physical presence, while his response takes the form of constant guardianship.

That protection is not entirely separate from control. Lu Xun’s own childhood kidnapping and Su Xiangwan’s parental loss make intimacy a defense against disappearance, yet the defense can become possessive. His insistence on presence answers the terror of being abandoned, while her dependence on reassurance reflects the solitude in which she was formed. Childhood therefore explains the intensity of their marriage without reducing it to a simple origin story: the same injuries that make comfort necessary can also make separation feel intolerable.

Narrative Significance

As a temporal structure, childhood functions as delayed revelation. The adult plot first presents relationships, illness, jealousy, and protection in their immediate form, then allows earlier losses to clarify why small gestures carry disproportionate force. Lu Xun’s account of the kidnapping, Su Xiangwan’s memory of the balcony, her self-imposed education, and her later collapse all connect childhood vulnerability to adult patterns of fear and care.

The period also supplies the book with a recurring contrast between the family imagined by a child and the family that actually exists. Su Xiangwan’s drawing depicts parents holding her hands, yet the image precedes her mother’s departure; her achievements are intended to restore family unity, yet they instead testify to prolonged solitude. Childhood is consequently both a lost refuge and an active presence. It survives in the characters’ reactions, in the names assigned to relationships, and in their repeated attempts to make love strong enough to prevent another disappearance.