Lu Xun’s injury and hospitalization

Lu Xun’s injury and hospitalization are not a brief medical interruption but a state that reorganizes his relationships and decisions. After Chu Fei’s men abduct Song Yuner, Lu Xun attempts to rescue her and ends up in the Hospital, where severe wounds, intravenous treatment, bandages, and medical supervision limit his movement without diminishing his determination. His pain becomes most consequential when Su Xiangwan is endangered: even injured, he leaves his ward to stop her from disappearing, converting physical weakness into an urgent display of attachment and possessiveness.

Causes and Medical Context

The immediate context of Lu Xun’s hospitalization is the abduction of Song Yuner by Chu Fei’s men after she arrives at the airport. The disappearance forces Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan to cancel their planned flight, while Lu Xun’s response escalates into direct action. Lin Yanche later confirms that Song Yuner has been saved by Su Xiangwan’s man but that Lu Xun is in the Hospital, establishing that the rescue has carried a bodily cost for him. Lu Xun’s injury therefore links the fate of Song Yuner to the vulnerability of his own body and makes his concern for her visible through hospitalization rather than through ordinary command.

The state also acquires depth from Lu Xun’s earlier medical and traumatic history. At twelve, he was kidnapped and forced to endure various drugs; he nearly lost his life and became resistant to all drugs. That childhood experience helps explain why illness and medication are not neutral details in his story. It gives his later medical condition a history of bodily endurance, while the narration presents him recalling the kidnapping with an unwavering gaze, as though describing someone else. The distance in his recollection contrasts with the immediate pain of his adult wounds, suggesting that physical crisis can reopen an older experience of helplessness even when Lu Xun refuses to present himself as frightened.

Hospitalization and Loss of Control

In the Hospital, Lu Xun’s authority is repeatedly checked by his body. While receiving an intravenous treatment, he is warned not to make things difficult for the medical staff because Chu Fei has ordered them to take good care of him. The hospital thus becomes both a place of protection and a site of imposed dependence: others decide how he is treated, while his injured condition prevents him from acting with his customary force. When Chu Fei provokes him by telephone, Lu Xun can only snarl from his sickbed and recognize that there is little he can do at that moment.

The contrast is especially sharp because Lu Xun remains emotionally active even when physically immobilized. During the telephone exchange, Chu Fei deliberately aggravates him by comparing his response to Song Yuner with his response to Su Xiangwan. Lin Yanche then points out that Lu Xun left Su Xiangwan alone in a hotel in order to pursue Song Yuner, calling the decision foolish. Lu Xun’s hospitalization therefore exposes a conflict between two forms of responsibility: rescuing the imperiled woman who has been taken, and preventing the woman left behind from feeling abandoned. His injuries make that conflict concrete, turning a question of romantic priority into a crisis of movement, timing, and medical risk.

Pursuit of Su Xiangwan

Lu Xun’s most revealing action during this state occurs when he hears Su Xiangwan’s voice near the Hospital. Song Yuner tries to stop him because he is still injured and receiving treatment, but Lu Xun runs out before the intervention can work. The narration emphasizes that he is in severe pain and barefoot when he chases Su Xiangwan. He catches her, pulls her up, and presses her against the wall, allowing his weakened body to fall against hers while he asks where she is going.

The scene reverses the expected meaning of hospitalization. A hospital patient should remain still, accept treatment, and permit others to manage the immediate danger. Lu Xun instead treats Su Xiangwan’s possible departure as the more urgent emergency. His body is too damaged for ordinary exertion, yet the fear of losing her produces a stronger impulse than the doctors’ authority. The pursuit is protective in its emotional origin but coercive in its physical form: he seeks to keep her close by using the remaining force of an injured body. Injury does not dissolve his possessiveness; it makes that possessiveness more exposed, desperate, and physically costly.

Su Xiangwan’s reaction completes the scene’s shift in power. She initially reaches out as if to push Lu Xun away, but when her hand touches his thick bandage, she loses the courage to do so. His wound becomes an emotional instrument without necessarily being deliberately used as one. The visible bandage transforms resistance into hesitation, while Lu Xun’s pain turns the confrontation into a struggle between her wish to leave and her unwillingness to worsen his condition. The injury therefore affects not only Lu Xun’s mobility but also the choices available to the person he is pursuing.

Care, Fear, and Recovery

After Lu Xun persuades Su Xiangwan to return, she obediently follows him back to the ward. The doctor and nurse hurriedly redress his wound, and the medical staff again ask him to stop making their work more difficult. This return does not erase the earlier breach of medical discipline; instead, it shows the temporary restoration of institutional control after Lu Xun has completed the emotionally necessary act of stopping Su Xiangwan. The ward becomes a place where his injury is cleaned and managed, but the reason for his escape lies outside medicine, in the preservation of his relationship.

The surrounding scenes repeatedly associate bodily weakness with care. Su Xiangwan herself collapses at an elevator before reaching the button, fainting after fever has left her legs weak and her consciousness fading. Lu Xun responds to her fear while blood still trickles from the corner of his mouth, crouching down and holding her tightly. Later, when she cries that she is scared, he holds her and assures her that he has been there all along. These moments establish a reciprocal but unequal care structure: both characters are physically vulnerable, yet Lu Xun continues to define safety through his presence and his ability to keep Su Xiangwan near him.

Other characters expose the labor that this romanticized protection requires. Mo Beiyu feeds Su Xiangwan water after she has been feverish for two days, while Lu Xun insists on applying ointment given by Hua Shuo even when she says she can do it herself. Lu Xun’s own hospitalization places him on the receiving end of similar care, but he resists the passivity that care entails. His later conversation emphasizes that he prefers to care for his woman himself and does not want her serving him. Even while injured, he imagines intimacy as an arrangement in which he remains the active protector rather than the dependent patient.

Narrative Significance

Lu Xun’s injury and hospitalization make the novel’s attachment pattern visible through bodily action. Separation triggers pursuit; pursuit aggravates injury; injury generates further caretaking and emotional leverage; reconciliation returns the couple to the ward but not to uncomplicated security. The pattern resembles an anxious cycle in which abandonment is answered by intensified control, and physical danger becomes proof that the relationship still commands absolute priority.

The state also places different illnesses in the same moral field. Lu Yanche’s liver cancer is disclosed as a condition that leaves him waiting for a suitable liver source or death, while Lu Xun’s wounds are the consequence of a rescue undertaken amid rivalry and coercion. Su Xiangwan’s fever, Lu Xun’s childhood drug resistance, and Lu Yanche’s terminal illness all show bodies that alter the balance of power around them. Yet Lu Xun’s injury is distinctive because it does not lead him toward withdrawal. It propels him out of the Hospital, barefoot and in severe pain, after Su Xiangwan.

By the end of the documented sequence, Lu Xun remains under medical care but has reasserted the relational role he values most. He is bandaged, receiving treatment, and dependent on doctors and nurses, yet he has also chased after Su Xiangwan, brought her back to the ward, and resumed speaking with confidence about holding and caring for her. The hospitalization consequently produces no permanent surrender of authority. It reveals the cost of his protective identity while showing why that identity remains so difficult for him to relinquish.