Su Xiangwan Leaves Home

Su Xiangwan Leaves Home is the decisive rupture in Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun’s marriage: after Lu Xun forces sexual contact despite her refusal, she waits until he leaves, escapes the bedroom, and disappears from the house. Her flight is not a casual separation but an act of bodily self-preservation, and its immediate consequences include a frantic search, a phone turned off, public condemnation of Lu Xun, and Su Xiangwan’s collapse from fever before she can reach the elevator.

Causes and Immediate Trigger

The departure follows a long pattern in which marriage, money, and possession are treated as interchangeable. Earlier, Su Xiangwan had proposed divorce and offered to convert Lu Xun’s five hundred million in capital into shares, returning both the principal and interest while taking no property or alimony. Her offer framed separation as a financial settlement and an attempt to disentangle herself from him. Lu Xun answered by reducing her worth to the sexual terms of their relationship, making clear that he understood the marriage through ownership and humiliation rather than mutual consent.

The immediate crisis occurs when Lu Xun presses his body onto Su Xiangwan before she can finish speaking, bites and kisses her by force, and begins to take what she has not agreed to give. She has neither the strength nor the opportunity to resist effectively. When he finally releases her, she explicitly says that she does not want to continue. The scene therefore gives the departure a clear cause: Su Xiangwan leaves after her refusal has been ignored and her physical boundaries have been violated.

The Escape from the House

Lu Xun does not leave the bedroom until ten o’clock in the morning. Su Xiangwan is described as filled with despair, pain, and hatred, including hatred of herself for having fallen in love with a man she now experiences as crude and brutal. Once he is gone, she uses the last of her strength to put on casual pajamas and run out. She does not even stop to put on shoes; the abandoned shoes beside the bed become a concrete trace of the speed and desperation of her escape.

The departure changes the meaning of the domestic space. What should function as a marital home has become a place from which Su Xiangwan must flee, while Lu Xun’s immediate reaction reveals the instability beneath his anger. When he returns and discovers that she has disappeared, his anger vanishes and he is left shocked by the absence. His belated alarm cannot undo the fact that the house became unsafe before it became empty.

Physical Consequences and Search

Su Xiangwan’s escape is made more dangerous by her deteriorating physical condition. She is burning with fever, her legs are weak and sore, and her consciousness is fading. At the elevator, she reaches toward the button but faints before her fingertips can touch it. The action thus turns a symbolic break from the marriage into a bodily crisis: freedom is attempted through movement, but the body damaged and exhausted by the preceding ordeal cannot carry her far.

The disappearance immediately alarms those around her. Su Qingrou senses that something has happened, calls Su Xiangwan, and finds that the phone has been turned off. That silence confirms the seriousness of the flight without explaining where Su Xiangwan has gone. The search then intersects with Mo Beiyu and Liu Xi, who have found her after she collapsed by the roadside. A police leader reports that surveillance shows a young woman bringing Mrs. Lu back to her apartment, while Lu Xun’s account establishes that Su Xiangwan and the young woman did not know each other. The investigation therefore treats the rescue as potentially benevolent or suspicious, but the visible fact remains that Su Xiangwan had been left in a state severe enough to require intervention.

Public Exposure of Private Violence

The rescue converts an intimate marital conflict into a public confrontation. Liu Xi says that the intervention was made out of good intentions, while another speaker condemns Lu Xun for torturing his woman until she fainted beside the road and says that, without the rescue, he might have received a notice to identify her body. Mo Beiyu then confronts Lu Xun directly, asking what qualification a rapist has to stand in the sunlight. Their exchanged gaze turns Su Xiangwan’s disappearance into an accusation against Lu Xun’s conduct.

This confrontation is significant because Lu Xun’s authority cannot fully contain the consequences of the flight. In the home, his power allows him to ignore Su Xiangwan’s refusal and define the relationship on his own terms. Outside the home, witnesses, police, rescuers, and Su Xiangwan’s physical condition make the violence legible as harm rather than marital entitlement. The episode strips away the protective language of marriage and reveals the difference between Lu Xun’s claim over Su Xiangwan and her actual need for protection from him.

Relationship Pattern and Narrative Significance

Su Xiangwan’s departure belongs to a recurring pursuit-and-escape structure. Lu Xun responds to insecurity with surveillance, control, and possessiveness, while Su Xiangwan withdraws when closeness becomes coercion. His later insistence that she is his wife, and her own intoxicated declaration that he is her husband, show the contradiction at the center of the relationship: marital naming can signal attachment, yet it does not guarantee safety or consent. The same family and kinship language also produces confusion elsewhere. Shen Yiyun is identified as an adopted relative and Lu Xun’s cousin, while Lu Xun dismisses non-blood relations as merely men and women under a name; these disputes over titles and boundaries echo the larger struggle over whether a relationship’s label can override individual autonomy.

The flight also resonates with earlier wounds. Su Xiangwan recalls that her mother, believed to have had a terminal illness, walked onto a balcony after seeing a drawing of herself holding hands with Su Xiangwan and her father. Lu Xun, in turn, reveals that he was kidnapped at twelve, drugged by his captors, and left resistant to medication. These histories help explain why fear, abandonment, bodily danger, and desperate attempts to control an uncertain situation recur around the couple, but they do not excuse Lu Xun’s violence. Su Xiangwan’s fever, collapse, and flight make trauma physical rather than merely remembered.

The action’s significance is sharpened by its aftermath. Lu Xun can later offer care and reassurance, including holding Su Xiangwan while she cries that she is frightened and telling her that he has been there all along. Yet that comforting image exists beside the earlier forced assault and the escape it caused. The result is not a simple reconciliation of danger and tenderness. Su Xiangwan Leaves Home establishes that emotional attachment, marital status, financial arrangements, and declarations of protection remain inadequate when the person claiming intimacy is also the source of the immediate threat.