The Mourning Period

The Mourning Period is the interval during which Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun’s planned wedding must be postponed after Lu Yanche proposes to Song Yuner. Although it appears at first to be a matter of family custom and timing, the period becomes a narrative threshold between one arrangement of loyalties and another. It suspends the expected celebration, reveals the collapse of Su Qingrou’s position, and creates space for memories of bereavement, kidnapping, illness, and fear to return to the surface.

Definition and Immediate Function

The Mourning Period is invoked by Lu Xun as the reason that his wedding with Su Xiangwan cannot proceed immediately. He explains that Lu Yanche and Song Yuner will first arrange their wedding, and that Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun can hold theirs again after the mourning period has ended. The statement is delivered indifferently, but its consequences are far from neutral: Song Yuner moves from apparent defeat to triumph, while Su Qingrou is left as a forsaken wife. The interval therefore marks not only a pause in ceremony but also a reordering of romantic and familial status.

The phrase carries institutional weight because it turns private desire into something subject to inherited obligation. Su Xiangwan’s astonishment comes from the speed of the reversal surrounding her. The wedding is not simply delayed by inconvenience; it is displaced by another couple’s advance, while mourning provides the accepted boundary that makes the postponement appear inevitable. In this way, The Mourning Period converts emotional upheaval into a calendar of restraint.

Family Loss and the Return of Buried Memory

The period is closely associated with the family’s suppressed history of death. When Lu Xun asks how Su Xiangwan’s mother escaped from the family’s life, Su Xiangwan recalls that her grandfather had said her mother was terminally ill and did not want to implicate the family. She then discloses that she remembered more than her grandfather believed: as a child, she had been drawing a picture of her father and mother holding her hand when her mother looked at it and walked onto the balcony. The memory links mourning to an unresolved childhood scene and makes the interval a time in which the past can no longer remain safely generalized as illness or absence.

This recollection changes the meaning of grief. The family’s explanation had reduced the mother’s disappearance to a medical condition and an act of self-sacrifice, but Su Xiangwan’s remembered image preserves the event as a witnessed rupture. The drawing becomes the concrete object around which memory gathers, while the balcony remains the point at which family life turns into loss. Lu Xun wipes away her tears and regrets not investigating the matter himself, revealing that mourning also activates his protective response and his wish to replace concealment with knowledge.

Trauma, Vulnerability, and Care

The Mourning Period exists alongside other moments when earlier wounds break into present experience. Lu Xun recounts that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve, that his kidnappers forced him to take various medicines, and that he nearly lost his life. As a result, he developed resistance to drugs. He describes the ordeal with an unwavering gaze, as though recounting somebody else’s history, suggesting that time has altered the feeling without erasing the event. His childhood trauma becomes part of the adult identity through which he interprets danger and distrust.

The contrast between Lu Xun’s controlled recollection and Su Xiangwan’s bodily collapse is significant. At an elevator entrance, Su Xiangwan is so weak and feverish that her legs feel powerless and her consciousness fades; before she can press the button, she faints and falls to the floor. The mourning interval thus belongs to a story in which grief is not confined to formal observance. It is carried through the body as fever, exhaustion, memory, and loss of control.

Afterward, Lu Xun brings Su Xiangwan hot milk and finds her still dazed, her eyes nearly without focus. She tells him that she is frightened, and he holds her while reassuring her that he has been there all along. His response gives the period an intimate counterpart to its public restrictions. Where mourning delays a wedding and exposes family injury, care attempts to establish a smaller, immediate security through presence, warmth, and physical shelter.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

As a time marker, The Mourning Period interrupts the forward motion of romance. The anticipated wedding cannot serve as a simple culmination because family grief takes precedence, and the interruption exposes the instability beneath apparent romantic victories. Song Yuner’s rise and Su Qingrou’s abandonment occur under the same temporal condition, making the period a device for dramatic reversal rather than a neutral interval.

Its deeper function is to make waiting productive. During the suspension, hidden relations and old injuries become legible: Su Xiangwan’s mother died in circumstances concealed by the family, Lu Xun’s resistance to drugs originates in a childhood kidnapping, and Su Xiangwan’s fear is expressed through a fever-induced collapse. The interval gathers these different forms of vulnerability without resolving them into a single explanation. It is a threshold where public ritual, private memory, and bodily distress meet.

The Mourning Period therefore represents more than a prohibition against immediate celebration. It is the time in which the characters are forced to live with what cannot be hurried past: the dead, the abandoned, the kidnapped child still present within the adult, and the frightened woman who needs someone to remain beside her. Its eventual endpoint promises the possibility of a renewed wedding, but the evidence shows that any such renewal must follow confrontation with the histories that made celebration impossible in the first place.