Song Yun'er's victim state after sexual assault

Song Yun'er’s victim status after being sexually assaulted by a client is not a private wound kept at the edge of the plot; it becomes a revelation that rearranges several relationships at once. Lu Xun tells Su Xiangwan that the client was introduced by Lin Yanche, while the ensuing police involvement and Lu Xun’s furious confrontation with Lin Yanche show how the assault is absorbed into the story’s systems of friendship, male protection, commercial responsibility, and public shame.

Disclosure and Immediate Circumstances

Lu Xun reveals the assault during a tense exchange with Su Xiangwan, warning her that Song Yun'er had been raped by a client Lin Yanche introduced to her. The information interrupts their personal conflict and changes its meaning: Song Yun'er is no longer merely an inconvenient former intimate or an antagonist in a romantic dispute, but someone whose immediate vulnerability has become impossible to ignore. Su Xiangwan reacts with disbelief, asking how a client introduced by Lin Yanche could have dared to do such a thing, and the question directs attention toward the professional and social network that enabled the encounter.

The disclosure also explains why Lu Xun remains involved despite his anger. The assault has already become a matter requiring institutional accountability. Even if Jin Zhengnan chooses not to pursue the matter, the police have been alerted and will still require an explanation. The victim’s condition therefore moves across several spheres at once: personal trauma, the conduct of a client, Lin Yanche’s responsibility as the person who introduced him, and the police response that prevents the incident from being treated as a purely private scandal.

A Victim Caught in Older Conflicts

Song Yun'er’s suffering is narrated against the history of her relationship with Lu Xun. In an earlier confrontation, she clings to his trouser leg and pleads for his help, admitting that she is not like him and cannot casually marry or simply make do with a woman. She says that she knows her own actions helped produce the person he has become, but insists that she has already received her punishment and has been abandoned. Her language frames the assault within a larger emotional economy of guilt, rejection, and supposed retribution, even though the violence itself cannot ethically be reduced to punishment for past romantic choices.

Lu Xun answers her self-abasement with cold humiliation, asking who is uglier when both are forced to confront themselves in the mirror. Song Yun'er then wonders whether he has been waiting for an opportunity to humiliate her and whether he still blames her. This exchange gives her victim status a deeply unstable setting. She seeks protection from the same man whose resentment makes protection feel conditional, while he treats her pain through the vocabulary of an unfinished personal reckoning.

Lu Xun’s Protective Intervention

Lu Xun’s response is direct and aggressive once he learns that Lin Yanche may be connected to the assault. When Su Xiangwan’s phone is taken from her, Lu Xun speaks to Lin Yanche with open contempt, condemning him for threatening her through such a matter and warning that he will no longer tolerate Lin Yanche bullying the woman under his protection. He ends the call by throwing the phone onto the bed, turning his anger into a physical gesture that communicates both urgency and control.

His intervention is therefore protective but also possessive. He treats the assault as grounds for confronting Lin Yanche and defending Song Yun'er’s position within the wider circle, yet his language places the response inside his own authority over the women involved. The novel repeatedly presents protection through this double movement: care offers shelter, but it can also reproduce the hierarchy in which a powerful man claims the right to decide what must happen next.

Trauma, Silence, and the Body

The evidence gives Song Yun'er’s victimization a comparatively indirect presentation. The assault is named by another character, while the surrounding scenes emphasize consequences, accusation, and the responses of men and institutions. This narrative distance makes the victim’s silence significant: her experience is known, but it is largely transmitted through Lu Xun’s disclosure and the subsequent struggle over responsibility.

Other bodily crises elsewhere in the story sharpen the contrast. Su Qingrou is found weeping, locked away, and marked by deep and shallow kiss marks after Lin Yanche’s coercion; Su Xiangwan later develops a severe fever and becomes physically unable to remain standing, fainting before she can press an elevator button. Lu Xun responds to fear with close physical reassurance, telling Su Xiangwan that he has been there all along. These scenes establish a recurring pattern in which women’s endangered bodies generate male intervention, while the women’s own accounts are constrained by shock, illness, coercion, or dependence.

Consequences for Relationships and Reputation

The assault intensifies the already damaged relationship between Lu Xun and Lin Yanche. Their friendship and alliance are forced to pass through a question of accountability: Lin Yanche’s introduction of the client links him to the conditions surrounding the crime, and Lu Xun’s warning threatens the continuity of their cooperation. The event also places Song Yun'er’s previous connection with Lu Xun under a harsher light, because her appeal for help is made after abandonment and humiliation have already weakened her access to trustworthy support.

The surrounding plot repeatedly tests the boundary between kinship language and romantic possession. Shen Yiyun is described as Lu Xun’s cousin through adoption rather than blood, and Lu Xun later rejects the idea that a nominal relative is necessarily separated from gendered desire. Chu Fei similarly says that a woman who appeared to be a close relative was not actually related to him and that he liked her intensely. Against this unstable vocabulary of cousins, sisters, wives, and former lovers, Song Yun'er’s victim status exposes the danger of treating women as movable pieces in male-controlled networks. The assault is not merely another turn in a love triangle; it reveals the material consequences of those networks when professional access, sexual vulnerability, and reputational power converge.

The state of having been assaulted consequently remains tied to both injury and social interpretation. Song Yun'er’s pain is acknowledged, but it is also made into evidence in disputes among Lu Xun, Lin Yanche, Jin Zhengnan, and Su Xiangwan. Her victimization changes what the other characters owe her, yet the narrative shows how quickly that obligation can be contested, redirected, or absorbed into the men’s struggle over authority. That tension gives the state its lasting significance: it marks Song Yun'er as someone in need of protection while exposing the limits of protection that depends on possession, resentment, and control.