Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng's marital · romantic relationship

The relationship between Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng is the emotional and structural center of a marriage that begins under contractual and economic terms but develops into an intense, unstable bond. Lu Xun treats Su Xiangcheng as his wife in both public status and private possessiveness, while Su Xiangcheng moves between resistance, jealousy, obedience, and confident claims to her marital position. Their intimacy is repeatedly threatened by rivals, concealed histories, relatives whose status is not defined by blood, and the unequal power created by Lu Xun’s wealth and authority.

Marriage as Contract and Claim

Their marriage is first articulated through material exchange. When Su Xiangcheng asks for a divorce, she refuses Lu Xun’s property and alimony and proposes converting his five hundred million in capital into shares so that it can be returned with interest. Her attempt to settle the relationship financially shows that she understands the marriage as a debt that can be calculated and repaid. Lu Xun answers by mocking the idea that physical intimacy could be valued at five hundred million, exposing the conflict beneath the transaction: Su Xiangcheng wants to separate economic obligation from emotional and bodily history, while Lu Xun rejects the possibility that their relationship can be cleanly liquidated.

The marriage also gives Su Xiangcheng a position from which she can speak with certainty. When her sister warns that Song Yun'er could defeat her, Su Xiangcheng responds that she is Mrs. Lu. The title is not merely a romantic reassurance; it is a claim to legitimacy within a competitive social order. Yet the confidence is immediately complicated when she learns that Lu Xun and Lin Yanche had deliberately acted to prevent Song Yun'er from winning. Her status is secure, but her understanding of how that security was achieved is not. The relationship therefore depends on both the marital name and the hidden alliances that protect it.

Proximity, Separation, and Pursuit

Lu Xun’s attitude toward separation reveals how strongly he associates marriage with physical presence. When Su Xiangcheng is permitted to return to the Su Clan’s ancestral home for several days because her sister is ill, he agrees only after warning that he will check on her frequently and that he cannot sleep alone. The concession is therefore also a restriction: he allows distance while making clear that the marriage still claims her time and availability. The following morning, Su Xiangcheng packs her luggage and moves back to the ancestral home, turning a temporary permission into a visible change in their domestic arrangement.

The separation does not dissolve their closeness. Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng later walk hand in hand along the river bank in late autumn, and the walk becomes an occasion for him to tell her stories about his past. Their casual conversation creates a softer form of intimacy than the possessive exchanges surrounding the marriage contract. Lu Xun, who had seemed controlled and severe, is revealed as someone who had been steady when young but sometimes playful. The relationship gains depth through this disclosure: companionship is not only shared residence or physical desire, but also the gradual release of personal history.

Their reunion is expressed through teasing and unfinished physical intimacy. Lu Xun tells Su Xiangcheng that he has missed her and moves toward her lips without immediately deepening the kiss, leaving her awake and anxiously waiting. The delay turns desire into a test of attention, with both partners aware of the other’s expectations. In another scene, when Lu Xun asks what their relationship is, Su Xiangcheng pulls off his shirt and answers that he is her husband. Her reply transforms a question about recognition into a declaration of possession and mutual identity: despite confusion and rivalry around them, she still names the bond as marriage.

Jealousy and the Policing of Kinship

The couple’s trust is repeatedly strained by relationships that occupy an uncertain space between family and romance. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is the child his uncle adopted and therefore his cousin, adding that he arranged for her to stay near the theater when she came to Cloud City to perform. Su Xiangcheng sees the failure to tell her this information as another version of the concealment that had surrounded Song Yun'er. Her anger is not directed only at Shen Yiyun; it arises from the pattern in which Lu Xun acts first and explains later, leaving his wife to discover the boundaries of his relationships after suspicion has already formed.

Lu Xun’s own language makes the ambiguity sharper. He argues that a relative connected only by name and not by blood is still a man and a woman, and that he has no blood-related cousin. This distinction turns kinship into a contested boundary rather than a stable protection. Adoption, cousin-like titles, and marriage all become categories that the characters use to regulate access and desire. Su Xiangcheng’s position as wife is strengthened by this logic, but it is also made vulnerable, because the same reasoning allows her to question every supposedly harmless female relative around Lu Xun.

Chu Fei intensifies the threat by openly admitting that Su Xiangcheng is an eyesore to him because Chu Fei likes her. He compares the situation to a woman who had worn the clothes of a close relative even though no blood relationship existed, then insists that he prefers the process of pursuit and will not force a woman. His interest is therefore presented as a long chase rather than an immediate seizure, but it still places pressure on Lu Xun’s marriage. Lu Xun must confront not merely a rival’s desire, but a rival who treats emotional pursuit as a deliberate strategy.

Care, Fear, and Emotional Dependence

The relationship becomes most vulnerable when Su Xiangcheng is physically overwhelmed. After walking out under the gaze of others, she reaches the elevator, burning with fever, weak in the legs, and increasingly losing consciousness. Before her fingers can press the button, she faints. The collapse exposes the bodily cost of the tensions surrounding her and shifts Lu Xun’s response from anger and command to urgent protection. His order to contact Hua Shuo is still expressed through ruthless authority, but the scene places that authority beside his fear of losing control over her condition.

Lu Xun also becomes a source of immediate emotional safety when Su Xiangcheng is frightened. He brings her hot milk and finds her staring blankly; she tells him that she is scared, and he holds her while reassuring her that he has been there all along. The reassurance is significant because it answers fear with continued presence rather than argument. His care is intimate, but it also reflects the relationship’s recurring pattern: protection becomes proof of love, while dependence on his presence makes separation more difficult.

Their private bond is shadowed by older wounds. Su Xiangcheng recalls that her mother had a terminal illness and left the family because she did not want to implicate them. As a child, Su Xiangcheng drew an image of her parents holding her hand; after her mother saw the drawing, she walked onto the balcony. The memory links family love with abandonment and guilt, and Lu Xun responds by wiping away her tears with visible pain. Lu Xun carries a different trauma: at twelve, he was kidnapped, drugged by the kidnappers, and nearly lost his life; afterward, he became resistant to various drugs. His past is narrated with controlled distance, but it remains an underlying explanation for his guardedness and his need to control danger.

Change and Narrative Significance

The relationship changes through repeated reversals between withdrawal and return. Su Xiangcheng can propose divorce and refuse every material benefit, yet she later insists on the title of Mrs. Lu. Lu Xun can permit her to return to her family home, yet he immediately attaches conditions of frequent checking and his inability to sleep alone. They can quarrel over Shen Yiyun and Song Yun'er, yet still walk hand in hand, trade stories, tease one another, and seek physical reassurance. These contradictions do not cancel one another; they are the relationship’s operating form.

The couple’s language gradually moves from accounting to attachment. Su Xiangcheng begins by calculating capital, shares, interest, and alimony, while Lu Xun frames intimacy as something money cannot measure. Later, his promise that he will be fine if she remains beside him makes her presence the decisive condition of his emotional stability. The exchange has become reciprocal in feeling even when it remains unequal in power: she demands recognition and truth, while he offers protection, pursuit, and dependence.

The relationship therefore embodies the novel’s broader concern with the unstable border between marriage as institution and love as lived experience. Marital status gives Su Xiangcheng authority against rivals, but it does not automatically give her trust. Lu Xun’s care can soothe her fear, but his secrecy and possessiveness can also produce it. Their bond survives not because conflict disappears, but because separation repeatedly reveals how much each has come to rely on the other. In that sense, Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng are joined by a marriage that is at once negotiated like a contract, defended like territory, and experienced as an increasingly intimate emotional necessity.