The sisterly relationship between Su Xiangcheng and Su Qingrui

The sisterly relationship between Su Xiangcheng and Su Qingrou is one of the book’s most intimate forms of solidarity, but it is never simple. Su Xiangcheng seeks Su Qingrou as an elder sister, confidante, and emotional refuge, while Su Qingrou often protects her by withholding painful information. The bond offers comfort in moments of illness, fear, and romantic crisis, yet the same protective silence leaves Su Xiangcheng feeling that she has been treated as an outsider within her own family.

Identity and Family Position

Su Xiangcheng approaches Su Qingrou as a genuine elder sister rather than merely a relative. When Su Xiangcheng visits her in the Hospital, Su Qingrou immediately sees through her attempt to conceal what has happened, and Su Xiangcheng finally recounts the events of the preceding days before breaking down in tears. Su Qingrou responds with a sigh and recognizes that Lu Xun is even more troublesome than Song Yun’er, then warns that continued conflict will widen the distance between the couple. She offers to speak to Lu Xun on Su Xiangcheng’s behalf, but Su Xiangcheng refuses, insisting that Su Qingrou should not become involved. The exchange establishes their different forms of care: Su Qingrou offers intervention, while Su Xiangcheng tries to protect her sister from being drawn further into her marital troubles.

Their closeness is also expressed through quiet physical and domestic companionship. Su Xiangcheng leans against Su Qingrou’s chest and reads stories aloud to her; as the reading continues, both women begin to cry. The scene replaces the more violent pressures surrounding them with shared vulnerability. The book becomes a temporary shelter, and reading becomes a form of mutual care in which neither sister needs to explain the entire history of her pain.

Protection, Secrecy, and Unequal Knowledge

The relationship is repeatedly shaped by information that Su Qingrou knows but does not disclose. When Su Xiangcheng confronts her about the hidden dealings involving Song Yun’er, she says that everything has always involved four people and that she still does not know how many matters have been concealed from her. She tells Su Qingrou that she has always treated her as a real sister, whereas Su Qingrou has treated her as a cousin. The complaint is not a rejection of kinship; it is a demand for its full emotional meaning. Su Xiangcheng wants sisterhood to include honesty, participation, and the right to know what affects her life.

This tension is grounded in a wider family history of silence. Su Xiangcheng remembers being told that her mother had a terminal illness and withdrew so as not to implicate the family. She also remembers drawing her father and mother holding her hand, after which her mother walked onto the balcony. The memory links family love with guilt, concealment, and a child’s incomplete understanding of adult decisions. Su Qingrou’s later silences therefore do not occur in an emotional vacuum: they repeat a family pattern in which painful truths are withheld in the name of protection, leaving the person being protected to experience the silence as abandonment or exclusion.

Illness, Fear, and the Work of Care

The sisters’ bond becomes especially visible when bodily vulnerability makes ordinary independence impossible. Su Xiangcheng is so weak with fever that she collapses at the elevator before she can press the button. Lu Xun later brings her hot milk and comforts her when she says she is afraid, but Su Xiangcheng’s relationship with Su Qingrou provides a different kind of emotional anchorage: it is the place where she can narrate events, admit distress, and ask for guidance without presenting herself as composed.

Illness also enlarges the sisters’ shared field of concern. Su Qingrou is connected to the crisis surrounding Lin Yanche, whose liver cancer leaves him waiting for a suitable source for a liver transplant and otherwise facing death. Su Xiangcheng learns this information while watching Lin Yanche grow visibly thin, and the revelation deepens her awareness that her sister’s life remains entangled with danger, illness, and unresolved emotional obligations. The sisters do not stand outside these crises as detached observers; each woman’s suffering alters the other’s decisions and sense of responsibility.

Relationships, Boundaries, and Conflict

Su Qingrou’s relationship with Lin Yanche and Su Xiangcheng’s marriage to Lu Xun create parallel pressures around the meaning of kinship and romantic legitimacy. Su Xiangcheng argues that a relative without a blood connection is still a man and a woman, rejecting the idea that a family label automatically removes romantic danger. Her remarks concern Shen Yiyun’s status as Lu Xun’s adopted cousin, but they also illuminate the sisters’ own position: family names can define loyalty, disguise desire, and determine who is believed when boundaries become unstable.

Su Xiangcheng’s insistence on calling Su Qingrou her sister is therefore both affectionate and political within the family structure. She does not want to be reduced to a cousin whose access to family knowledge is limited. At the same time, Su Qingrou’s conduct suggests that she sees concealment as a protective duty. Their conflict is not caused by indifference but by incompatible definitions of care. Su Xiangcheng equates sisterhood with being told the truth; Su Qingrou often equates it with preventing Su Xiangcheng from carrying more pain.

Narrative Significance

The relationship gives the novel a counterpoint to its controlling marriages and competitive romantic pursuits. Lu Xun’s care for Su Xiangcheng is frequently entangled with possessiveness, while Chu Fei openly describes pursuit as a process whose value lies in the chase. Against those dynamics, the sisters’ shared reading, hospital conversation, tears, and attempts to shield one another establish intimacy without romantic possession. Yet the relationship is not idealized: its tenderness coexists with secrecy, resentment, and the fear that one sister has been placed outside the circle of trust.

Su Xiangcheng and Su Qingrou’s bond consequently carries the book’s larger question of whether family can become a place of genuine mutual recognition rather than another system of control. Su Xiangcheng continues to seek Su Qingrou even while accusing her of withholding the truth, and Su Qingrou continues to offer help even when Su Xiangcheng refuses her intervention. Their relationship remains valuable precisely because it holds both impulses together: the wish to protect and the demand to be trusted. It is a sisterhood sustained not by perfect transparency, but by repeated returns to care after silence has caused harm.