Lu Xun Runs out of the Hospital to Keep Su Xiangwan from Leaving

Lu Xun Runs out of the Hospital to Keep Su Xiangwan from Leaving is a decisive pursuit-and-reconciliation action in the relationship between Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. Its immediate cause is Su Xiangwan’s discovery that Song Yun'er is clinging to Lu Xun’s hospital-bedside presence and confessing that she once believed they might have been happy together. Rather than remain in the ward and allow the misunderstanding to harden into another separation, Lu Xun follows Su Xiangwan into the hospital corridor, turns physical pain into proof of emotional urgency, and secures her return through a promise that changes the terms of Song Yun’er’s presence.

Causes and Emotional Background

The action begins with Su Xiangwan deliberately pausing outside Lu Xun’s ward. Through the glass, she sees Song Yun'er tugging at Lu Xun’s sleeve and crying while asking whether he had become angry because he had rescued her and then spent the night with Chu Fei. Song Yun'er’s distress is not merely a request for reassurance: she embraces Lu Xun together with the blanket and admits that, had she understood his earlier implications instead of obsessively pursuing Lin Yanche, the two of them might have been happy. Lu Xun responds by caressing her hair with a calm expression, but his uncertainty about how to comfort her intensifies the scene’s ambiguity for anyone watching from outside.

Su Xiangwan chooses not to stay for the rest of the exchange. She hangs the daily necessities she has brought on the door lock and leaves, a small practical gesture that carries the force of withdrawal. The act suggests that she is still willing to care for Lu Xun, but not willing to enter a ward where Song Yun'er appears emotionally central. Her departure therefore turns a private jealousy into a physical separation: the distance between the glass door and the corridor becomes the visible shape of her refusal to compete for a place that she believes should already be hers.

The Pursuit Through the Hospital

Lu Xun realizes that Su Xiangwan has been there when he hears her voice and notices what she has left hanging on the door. Song Yun'er warns him that he is injured and still receiving an intravenous infusion, but he has already run out after Su Xiangwan. The scene makes the cost of pursuit explicit: he is severely hurt, barefoot, and moving despite the pain. His decision is not presented as a calculated medical choice but as an immediate response to the possibility that Su Xiangwan will leave without hearing his explanation.

He catches her, pulls her up, and presses her against the wall, with his injured body collapsing helplessly against hers. The physical imbalance matters. Lu Xun retains enough force to stop her, yet his injuries prevent the encounter from becoming a display of effortless dominance. He must endure the pain while asking where she is going, and the sight of his thick bandages weakens Su Xiangwan’s resolve to push him away. Her hesitation is part of the action’s emotional mechanism: anger remains present, but concern interrupts its momentum.

The pursuit culminates in Lu Xun’s plea that he needs her and wants her to stay with him. Su Xiangwan answers that Song Yun'er is already available to accompany him and that Song Yun'er would probably be more comfortable with him. She also points out that Lu Xun was not injured for her sake, making clear that she does not accept care as an automatic obligation. Her response separates love from unpaid nursing labor: she refuses to let the fact of his injury compel her to erase her own hurt.

Negotiating Who Gets to Stay

Lu Xun does not answer Su Xiangwan’s resentment with a denial that Song Yun'er is present. Instead, he argues that if Su Xiangwan does not stay, he will have no reason to ask Song Yun'er to leave. The appeal is deliberately intimate and faintly pleading, and its effect is to make Su Xiangwan’s presence the condition around which the ward’s emotional order will be arranged. She tests the promise by asking what would happen if she stayed with Song Yun'er still there.

Lu Xun answers that he will drive Song Yun'er away. The distinction is important to Su Xiangwan, who immediately insists that he must send Song Yun'er away rather than coax her away. In that correction, the scene moves from romantic reassurance to a precise demand for action. Su Xiangwan is not satisfied with a mood, a kiss, or a temporary softening; she wants Lu Xun to make a visible choice and accept responsibility for the boundary he has failed to maintain.

Lu Xun solemnly confirms the bargain, and his repeated assurance functions as a promise rather than a vague expression of affection. He kisses Su Xiangwan again, even though they are outside and other people may be watching. She scolds him for taking advantage of her in public, but her smile reveals that the emotional value of the confrontation has shifted. What began as abandonment and suspicion becomes renewed intimacy, not because the original wound is disproved, but because Lu Xun offers a concrete response to it.

Consequences and Relationship Significance

After hearing Lu Xun’s solemn promise, Su Xiangwan obediently follows him back to the ward. The ending reverses the direction of the scene: she had been walking out carrying the emotional consequences of what she saw, while Lu Xun had been confined by injury; by the close, he has crossed the ward’s boundary for her and she has crossed it again for him. The hospital thus becomes both a site of physical vulnerability and a stage on which their marriage is renegotiated.

The action also establishes the recurring pattern of their attachment: Su Xiangwan withdraws when Lu Xun’s behavior appears to threaten her security, and Lu Xun responds with pursuit, bodily closeness, and an insistence that she remain. His words reveal dependence rather than detached authority, while her return preserves both her anger and her ability to set conditions. Their reconciliation is therefore conditional and procedural. Lu Xun must not merely comfort her; he must remove the rival presence that made her feel displaced.

The scene’s emotional force is sharpened by the broader history carried into it. Su Xiangwan has remembered that her mother, believing she had a terminal illness and did not want to implicate the family, walked onto a balcony after Su Xiangwan drew a picture of her parents holding her hand. Lu Xun has separately disclosed that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve, drugged by the kidnappers, and nearly lost his life before becoming resistant to drugs. These histories are not the immediate subject of the hospital pursuit, but they explain why separation, helplessness, bodily danger, and the need for someone to remain present carry unusual intensity for both characters.

Care is likewise shown as an unstable form of intimacy. Shen Hui advises Su Xiangwan to recuperate with Chinese medicine and tells Lu Shengxun to do the same; Mo Beiyu feeds Su Xiangwan warm water when fever has left her too weak to sit up; and Lu Xun later insists on applying ointment to her despite her protest that she can do it herself. Against that pattern of compulsory or protective care, the hospital pursuit asks whether Su Xiangwan will provide care voluntarily. Lu Xun’s answer is to make his need explicit, while her answer is to require emotional fidelity before she resumes the role of companion and caretaker.

The Action’s Narrative Function

As a romance beat, the episode is a grand gesture compressed into a corridor: Lu Xun’s injured body supplies the spectacle, but the true turning point is the promise concerning Song Yun'er. The value at stake changes from emotional exclusion to chosen partnership. Su Xiangwan sees evidence that seems to confirm her displacement, leaves, and then receives a public pursuit that reasserts her importance; Lu Xun, meanwhile, moves from passive bedside uncertainty to an active declaration that he needs her and will reorganize the situation to keep her.

The action also contrasts Lu Xun’s conduct with Chu Fei’s stated philosophy of pursuit. Chu Fei says that he will not force a woman and prefers the process of chasing her, especially when it lasts longer. Lu Xun’s pursuit is similarly physical and urgent, but its stated aim is not indefinite conquest. He wants Su Xiangwan to stay, and the scene gives her a condition under which staying becomes acceptable. The contrast keeps the action within the novel’s larger tension between pursuit and possession: Lu Xun’s intensity can resemble control, yet the scene grants Su Xiangwan the decisive power to define what must happen before she returns.

By the final exchange, Lu Xun’s embrace and promise have restored proximity, but not erased the underlying need for trust. Su Xiangwan returns because he agrees to send Song Yun'er away, and Lu Xun’s insistence that he is sending her away rather than coaxing her away gives the reconciliation its exact shape. The event therefore matters less as a simple rescue of a departing wife than as a compact demonstration of how this marriage survives crises: through pursuit, visible choice, negotiated boundaries, and care that must continually prove it is directed toward the person who has been made to feel replaceable.