Mo Beiyu—Su Xiangcheng

Mo Beiyu—Su Xiangcheng is a relationship of medical care, rescue, and ethical opposition. Its decisive significance lies in the contrast between Mo Beiyu’s practical protection of a feverish, powerless woman and Lu Xun’s possessive marriage, where concern repeatedly exists alongside coercion. Mo Beiyu does not merely appear as a doctor from Su Xiangwan’s past; he becomes the person who restores her immediate bodily safety and publicly names the violence that others might romanticize.

Identity and First Recognition

Mo Beiyu is introduced through professional familiarity. When he encounters Su Xiangwan, his gaze is gentle, and he greets her as Miss Su after a long separation. She answers him politely as Brother Mo, establishing an earlier acquaintance and a respectful asymmetry: he is an older, trusted medical figure, while she recognizes him as someone whose presence carries reassurance. Lu Xun, standing beside her, immediately becomes suspicious and watches rather than acting impulsively, so Mo Beiyu’s entrance also exposes the jealousy surrounding Su Xiangwan’s marriage.

The relationship is complicated by mistaken identity. When Su Xiangwan wakes in an unfamiliar place, she initially mistakes the casually dressed man for Mo Beichen. Mo Beiyu corrects her gently, identifying himself and distinguishing his manner from that of his cousin. The correction is not merely comic clarification. It places Mo Beiyu on the side of explanation and care, while Mo Beichen remains associated with a different and more threatening form of pursuit in the wider relationship network.

Rescue and Medical Care

Mo Beiyu’s protection begins before Su Xiangwan can consent to or organize it. His cousin finds her by the roadside after she has fainted, and she is taken to the cousin’s home, where her clothes are changed and she is cared for. Mo Beiyu happens to be living there, allowing him to assume responsibility for her recovery. The account makes rescue a chain of ordinary acts rather than a single heroic gesture: discovery, removal from danger, changing clothes, supervision, and continued attention over two days.

Her condition is severe enough that she cannot use her own strength to sit up. Mo Beiyu responds by feeding her warm water himself, helping her upright and supporting her against him while bringing the cup to her lips. When she spills the water over him and, embarrassed, says she will not drink, he reminds her that she has been burning with fever for two days and insists that hydration is necessary. His care is firm, but its immediate purpose is to preserve her weakened body rather than to extract obedience for his own benefit.

He also supplies the information she cannot obtain for herself. Before she can sort through her questions, Mo Beiyu explains how she was found and who has been caring for her. This interpretive labor matters because illness has left Su Xiangwan disoriented and dependent: he restores a coherent account of her whereabouts while allowing her worried mind to settle. The relationship therefore joins diagnosis and narration. He treats the body, but he also makes the circumstances of the treatment legible.

Protection Against Marital Violence

The protective relationship becomes openly confrontational when the police arrive to return Su Xiangwan to her family. Liu Xi worries that their good intentions could be misunderstood, but Mo Beiyu does not retreat into polite neutrality. He declares that he cannot tolerate a man who has tortured his woman until she fainted beside the road, calls Lu Xun scum, and challenges what qualifications a rapist has to stand in the sunlight. The language is severe because Mo Beiyu interprets the fever and collapse not as romantic evidence of marital passion but as evidence of harm.

This confrontation gives the relationship its ethical force. Mo Beiyu’s medical authority becomes a basis for judgment: he has seen Su Xiangwan unable to sit up, unable to drink without assistance, and dangerously feverish. Lu Xun’s authority as husband and powerful public figure is therefore opposed by a witness who has encountered the consequences in the patient’s body. The clash turns care into testimony. Mo Beiyu does not claim possession of Su Xiangwan; he insists that her condition cannot be ignored or concealed behind the language of marriage.

The contrast is sharpened by Lu Xun’s own reaction. Earlier, Lin Yanche warns him that Su Xiangwan is physically fragile, that illness can leave her feverish for three days and three nights, and that he should prepare to identify her body. Lu Xun is visibly shaken by the possibility of her death. Yet the fact that another man has actually found and nursed her exposes the gap between alarm after separation and responsible care during vulnerability. Mo Beiyu occupies that gap.

Gratitude, Dependency, and Boundaries

When Su Xiangwan emerges, she ignores Lu Xun and walks directly to Mo Beiyu and his cousin to thank them for their care. She bows to them, and Liu Xi immediately notices that her body is still hot and urges her to return to bed and recover. The scene makes gratitude visible as a social acknowledgment of labor: Su Xiangwan names the people who sustained her when she could not sustain herself, while Lu Xun remains outside the center of that exchange.

Mo Beiyu’s care is nevertheless not free of physical intimacy. Feeding a helpless patient, supporting her against his body, covering her with a blanket, and offering to apply ointment all place him in close contact with her. The difference lies in the stated function and immediate context of those actions. His touch is organized around treatment and recovery, whereas Lu Xun’s insistence on applying the ointment is accompanied by a coercive refusal to accept her declaration that she will do it herself. The narrative thus distinguishes voluntary or medically justified care from care used to override a woman’s choice.

That distinction also prevents Mo Beiyu from becoming a simple romantic replacement. His importance comes from the alternative structure he represents: he notices incapacity, supplies water, explains what happened, and intervenes when the patient is being returned to the man accused of causing her condition. The relationship carries emotional warmth, but its strongest foundation is responsibility toward a vulnerable person.

Wider Relationship Network and Significance

The relationship is framed by a larger web of unstable kinship labels and romantic claims. Su Xiangwan’s husband is legally and socially positioned as her protector, yet Lu Xun’s conduct makes that protective title morally suspect. Mo Beiyu, by contrast, is not her husband; his authority comes from medical knowledge, prior familiarity, and the concrete fact that his household sheltered her. The resulting contrast asks whether protection belongs automatically to the person with the marital title or to the person who actually responds to bodily danger.

Other scenes extend the same tension. Shen Yiyun is described as Lu Xun’s adopted cousin, while Lu Xun argues that a relative who is not related by blood may still be a man or woman rather than a neutral family category. Chu Fei similarly admits that he has no blood relationship with a woman he likes and treats the process of pursuit as desirable. Against these arrangements, Mo Beiyu’s connection with Su Xiangwan is unusually legible: it is named through care, medical attention, and rescue rather than through the appropriation of kinship language or a demand for romantic access.

The relationship also clarifies the book’s recurring association between illness and power. Su Xiangwan’s weakness and fever make her vulnerable to being moved, watched, and spoken for. Mo Beiyu partly answers that vulnerability by giving her information and preserving her physical survival, but the surrounding scenes show how easily care can become control. His conduct is significant precisely because it offers protection without the husband’s claim that marriage settles every question of bodily authority. In this relationship, the sick body is not merely a plot device or proof of devotion; it is the place where competing definitions of love, responsibility, and entitlement are tested.