Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng’s European Honeymoon

Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng’s European Honeymoon is significant because it is both a romantic promise and a test of whether Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng can inhabit their marriage as something more than a five-hundred-million-yuan arrangement. Lu Xun announces that he has planned a honeymoon in Europe, will rearrange his work, and will provide a wedding whenever Su Xiangcheng wants one. The journey therefore appears to offer a transition from secret marriage to acknowledged emotional commitment, but its course instead reveals how quickly private affection is disrupted by entertainment-industry scrutiny, old loyalties, illness, and competing claims on Lu Xun’s attention.

Promise, Marriage, and Public Status

Lu Xun introduces the European journey while Su Xiangcheng is already treating their new relationship as if it might end almost as soon as it began. He insists that he is serious, kisses her, and presents the honeymoon, future wedding, and willingness to hear her objections as concrete proofs of commitment. Yet Su Xiangcheng remains conscious that she is the wife Lu Xun acquired through a five-hundred-million-yuan arrangement. The honeymoon thus begins under a contradiction: Lu Xun speaks in the language of choice and devotion, while Su Xiangcheng still understands the marriage through purchase, obligation, and the fear that she cannot simply leave.

The planned trip also changes how Lu Xun handles Luo Jingjing. When Luo Jingjing attempts to invite him to a meal, Lu Xun answers in businesslike terms that his wife and he are going to Europe for their honeymoon and directs official matters through her agent and his assistant. This is more than scheduling information. By naming Su Xiangcheng as his wife in front of Luo Jingjing, Lu Xun turns the concealed relationship into a public boundary and refuses to let an entertainment-industry connection occupy the place of the marriage. Luo Jingjing is left unwilling as the couple departs together, while the honeymoon becomes an outward declaration of marital priority.

Italy and the Failure of the Ideal Holiday

The journey leads them to Italy, but the promised escape immediately becomes physically difficult for Su Xiangcheng. She catches a cold on the second day after Lu Xun leaves for Italy, and after they arrive at the hotel Lu Xun repeatedly overwhelms her instead of allowing her to recover. She lies on the bed, sneezes, looks miserable, and blames him for making the honeymoon harder. The contrast between the elegant idea of a European honeymoon and her feverish, exhausted condition makes the trip less a serene retreat than an intensification of their private conflict over care, desire, and control.

Even while Su Xiangcheng is weak, Lu Xun tries to frame the journey as a birthday gesture. He stops bullying her, strokes her hair, and tells her that a small problem has arisen because Lin Yanche has come to Italy with Song Yun’er and may have guessed what was happening. Su Xiangcheng understands that Lin Yanche knows about her birthday, and she thanks Lu Xun for his intentions. Lu Xun answers that nothing is unnecessary as long as she likes it and tells her not to worry about anything else. His tenderness is genuine within the scene, but it is also defensive: the birthday celebration and honeymoon cannot be protected from the wider network of suspicion surrounding their marriage.

Intrusion by Old Relationships

The honeymoon’s private space is broken when Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng receive Su Qingrou and go with her to a famous bar for drinks. Su Qingrou becomes cheerful after two drinks and is pulled onto the dance floor by a foreign man, leaving Su Xiangcheng watching with envy. The social outing briefly creates the appearance of leisure, but it also moves the couple into a public environment where other relationships can surface.

That danger becomes explicit when Su Xiangcheng and Lu Xun turn a corner and see Su Qingrou being held tightly and kissed wildly by Lin Yanche. The shock is immediate because Lin Yanche is precisely the person whose presence Lu Xun had identified as a threat to the trip. Su Xiangcheng fears that Lin Yanche’s people will collapse in Italy and insists that Su Qingrou must not be dragged into the fallout. The honeymoon therefore becomes entangled with the Lin–Su conflict: Lu Xun’s attempt to create protected marital time cannot separate him from the crises of the people closest to them.

Lu Xun’s old obligations reach their clearest breaking point when the promised honeymoon ends in failure and he arranges two of the fastest flights to bring Song Yun’er home. He feels guilt and resentment at once, blaming himself for being unable to set aside past kindness and ignore her. His response shows why the trip cannot function as a simple romantic retreat. Even after choosing Su Xiangcheng publicly as his wife, Lu Xun continues to define himself through responsibility toward Song Yun’er, declaring through his actions that he will not abandon her on the day she is abandoned. The return journey consequently registers not merely logistical defeat but the collision between present marriage and inherited emotional debt.

Secrecy, Jealousy, and the Marriage’s Boundaries

The European episode continues to shape later disputes over what Su Xiangcheng is entitled to know and what Lu Xun is expected to disclose. Lu Xun’s explanation that Shen Yiyun is his adopted uncle’s child, his cousin, and a performer for whom he arranged lodging near the theater shows that the couple’s conflicts repeatedly arise from information withheld until suspicion has already formed. Su Xiangcheng compares this silence to the earlier trouble involving Song Yun’er and demands that her husband correct his mistakes. The honeymoon’s failure thus becomes part of a recurring marital pattern: Lu Xun acts first to manage people and crises, while Su Xiangcheng experiences the lack of explanation as exclusion.

The same boundary is challenged when Song Yun’er discusses the secret marriage with Lu Xun in Su Xiangcheng’s presence. Su Xiangcheng objects that, regardless of how close Song Yun’er and Lu Xun may be, their relationship has not reached the level at which Song Yun’er can discuss men with her husband in front of her. Song Yun’er falls silent and leaves. The scene gives the honeymoon’s public declaration a sharper domestic consequence: once Lu Xun has called Su Xiangcheng his wife, the title becomes a claim to authority over the emotional and conversational space surrounding him.

Lu Xun’s possessiveness is also tested by Su Xiangcheng’s vulnerability and by rivals who treat kinship as a disguise for desire. Chu Fei tells Lu Xun that a woman who had once seemed like a close relative was not actually related to him and that he liked her, making Lu Xun an eyesore. Chu Fei says he prefers the process of pursuit and will not force a woman, while Lu Xun immediately asks whether he has other plans for Su Xiangcheng. The exchange clarifies that the honeymoon has not removed the threat of pursuit; it has made the marriage more visible to men who regard Su Xiangcheng’s marital status as an obstacle to test rather than a boundary to respect.

Intimacy, Control, and the Journey’s Afterlife

The honeymoon’s private intimacy is repeatedly rendered through bodily imbalance. Lu Xun finds Su Xiangcheng in the cloakroom, dressed only in underwear and reaching for clothes, then wraps an arm around her waist and lifts her. In another episode, their encounter shifts into an office setting, leaving no paper available after the drawing is completed and Su Xiangcheng squatting on the floor, unwilling to rise while Lu Xun coaxes her. These scenes preserve the relationship’s attraction, but they also show how Lu Xun’s desire can eclipse Su Xiangcheng’s comfort. The trip’s romantic vocabulary therefore never fully escapes the marriage’s underlying structure of possession and unequal power.

At the same time, Su Xiangcheng does not remain only the passive recipient of Lu Xun’s claims. When Lu Xun asks what their relationship is, she pulls off his shirt and answers through action and flirtation that he is her husband. The response is especially revealing because Lu Xun is uncertain whether she knows which man he is, while Su Xiangcheng defines him through the marital bond rather than through his rank, appearance, or the interchangeable admiration of other men. Her claim does not erase the marriage’s coercive origins, but it demonstrates that the relationship has acquired an emotional and performative reality of its own.

The journey’s consequences persist through reminders of wedding clothing, public naming, and mediated communication. Su Xiangcheng remains troubled by a wedding gown associated with Song Yun’er and later receives from Su Qingrou a picture book containing designs for clothes she created herself. The contrast is decisive: the purchased or contested wedding dress belongs to the marriage’s rivalry and public symbolism, while the design book gives Su Xiangcheng an image of authorship and personal imagination. The European Honeymoon therefore ends without delivering uncomplicated happiness, but it leaves behind a changed marital grammar. Lu Xun has publicly called Su Xiangcheng his wife, defended the trip as theirs, and promised a wedding; Su Xiangcheng has begun to answer not merely as the woman bought into the marriage, but as the person who can insist on its boundaries, judge its failures, and decide whether its promises have substance.