I like it when you love me!

“I like it when you love me!” is an expression associated with Lu Xun’s intimate exchanges with Su Xiangwan. In its decisive occurrence, Lu Xun is lying in a Hospital Ward while Su Xiangwan sits beside him and peels an apple. He asks her to talk rather than busy herself with food, then turns the ordinary act of caregiving into a direct declaration of desire. The expression therefore marks a movement from duty and marital status toward acknowledged emotional reciprocity.

Definition and Immediate Context

The line appears as the title of Chapter 199 and is repeated at the opening of Chapter 200, giving it unusual structural weight. The repetition distinguishes the exact formulation from a weaker or more possessive alternative: Lu Xun says that he likes her loving him, not merely that he likes her and wants her to love him. The wording presents her affection as something he experiences and values, while also making his pleasure in that affection unmistakable.

The scene is deliberately domestic. After Lin Yanche leaves, Su Xiangwan quietly remains at Lu Xun’s bedside and peels an apple for him. Lu Xun says that he does not want to eat and asks her to talk with him instead. When Su Xiangwan prepares to leave to buy him something, he tells her that he wants nothing but her in that moment and speaks his endearment seriously. The expression follows this exchange as both confession and response to her presence.

Relation to Care and Desire

The line gains force from the contrast between Su Xiangwan’s practical concern and Lu Xun’s romantic redirection of it. She focuses on whether the patient has eaten; he focuses on the emotional meaning of her staying beside him. Her care is expressed through an apple, a conversation, and the offer to buy food, whereas his answer transforms those gestures into evidence of love. When she becomes visibly embarrassed and insists that they should eat because she is hungry, the scene retains its comic domestic balance rather than becoming a purely solemn confession.

Lu Xun’s desire is also framed through physical and emotional intensity. He follows the declaration with a deep kiss, making the statement an action as well as a description of feeling. The kiss does not replace the verbal admission; it confirms it. The phrase names the condition that pleases him, and the kiss gives that condition a bodily consequence.

Development Across the Marriage

The expression resonates with earlier moments in which the meaning of intimacy is disputed or tested. Su Xiangwan once drunkenly pulls off Lu Xun’s shirt and identifies him as her husband when he asks about their relationship. Her answer establishes the marital bond, but his uncertainty about whether she actually recognizes him reveals how fragile that reassurance can be. The later bedside declaration is more emotionally specific: it is not simply a claim about what they are called, but an admission that he wants her affection and enjoys receiving it.

The same pattern appears in Lu Xun’s conflicts over women described through kinship. Shen Yiyun is introduced as the adopted child of Lu Xun’s uncle and therefore his cousin, while Lu Xun insists that a non-blood relative who is only a relative by name remains a man or woman rather than a true blood relation. Chu Fei similarly presents the boundary between kinship language and romantic pursuit as unstable, explaining that the woman in question wore the clothes of a close relative but was not actually related to him, and that he liked her greatly. Against these competing uses of family terminology, Lu Xun’s line to Su Xiangwan identifies affection as the crucial emotional boundary: what matters is not merely the title of wife, cousin, or relative, but whether love is being freely felt and returned.

Repetition and Narrative Function

The line’s recurrence at the transition between Chapters 199 and 200 turns a private sentence into a refrain. First, it appears within the bedside exchange, where Lu Xun says it while kissing Su Xiangwan. Then the next chapter restates the sentence and clarifies the distinction between liking someone and liking that person’s love. This repeated presentation slows the narrative around a small verbal change, inviting attention to the difference between pursuit and mutuality.

The expression also functions as a compact counterpoint to Lu Xun’s earlier possessive behavior and to the wider atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and control. A demand to remain close can imply constraint, but this sentence records the emotional reward he receives when Su Xiangwan herself behaves lovingly. The emphasis shifts from what he orders her to do to what her affection does to him. That shift does not erase the tensions in their marriage, yet it offers a more reciprocal vocabulary for the relationship.

Meaning and Ending Resonance

Su Xiangwan answers the sentiment with a faint smile and says that she feels the same, while still reminding him that he is a patient and that she needs to find food. Her reply joins emotional acceptance to practical restraint. She does not abandon ordinary care when the scene becomes romantic; instead, affection is shown as compatible with attention to bodily needs and the patient’s condition.

Lu Xun then offers to buy whatever she wants to eat, and she agrees. The exchange ends not with an abstract promise but with a modest arrangement between two people sharing a bedside moment. “I like it when you love me!” thus signifies a small but consequential form of marital security: Lu Xun is able to name his pleasure in Su Xiangwan’s love, and Su Xiangwan is able to acknowledge the feeling without surrendering her own immediate needs. The expression’s lasting importance comes from that balance between desire and care, declaration and response, and the formal fact of marriage and the lived experience of being loved within it.