Su Xiangwan and Lu Shengxun's Marriage and Romance

Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun’s marriage and romance are shaped by a persistent contradiction: each can speak in the language of attachment, yet their relationship is repeatedly tested by control, jealousy, and unequal power. Su Xiangwan treats the marriage as something she can end and settle; Lu Xun’s gestures of care and longing sit beside conduct that restricts her choices. Their bond gains emotional force not through a clean progression from hostility to harmony, but through recurring clashes over money, other people, sexual intimacy, and the meaning of being husband and wife.

Identity and Terms of the Relationship

An explicit crisis brings the marriage’s financial terms to the surface. Su Xiangwan asks for a divorce and says she will take none of Lu Xun’s property or alimony. She offers instead to convert the five hundred million in capital into shares and return it, together with the interest. Her proposal makes separation sound like an account she can close: she will repay what she received and leave no financial claim behind. Lu Xun answers by mocking her valuation of their sexual relationship, while she counters by invoking his willingness to give away land in connection with Song Yun’er. Money, sex, and fidelity are thus placed in the same argument, each becoming evidence in a dispute about what Lu Xun values and what Su Xiangwan owes him.

The scene also shows how far apart their understandings of the marriage can be. Su Xiangwan frames divorce as a concrete choice and offers a practical settlement; Lu Xun responds not by accepting the terms but by turning the proposed repayment into a taunt about her worth. The arrangement’s financial language does not make the relationship emotionally neutral. Instead, it reveals how easily affection, sexual access, and material obligation become entangled—and how difficult it is for Su Xiangwan to assert independence within that entanglement.

Possession, Jealousy, and the Claim of Home

Lu Xun’s attachment often appears as a demand for closeness. He asks Su Xiangwan to spend an evening dining with him and his friends, although she agrees despite not wanting to attend. When he discovers she is awake, he tells her that he placed Yun’er in the guest room without seeking her consent and asks whether she blames him. The explanation acknowledges that he made the decision for her; the scene’s domestic intimacy softens the admission, but does not erase its unilateral character.

Jealousy makes the tension more explicit. Returning to the bedroom, Lu Xun asks whom Su Xiangwan saw that day and accuses her of being eager to flirt when someone invites her out. She answers by acting spoiled and calling him stingy, turning confrontation into a familiar exchange without resolving the accusation beneath it. In another dispute, she does not want to share a car with Song Yun’er and suggests riding with Lin Yanche instead; Lu Xun’s brief reassurance that Yun’er is only getting a ride does not change Su Xiangwan’s objection. The recurring pattern is not simply that one partner is jealous: each shared space, invitation, or journey can become a test of whose discomfort will govern the other’s choices.

Yet Lu Xun also makes an unmistakable claim of domestic belonging. He quietly approaches Su Xiangwan while she is asleep, wraps her in his arms, and murmurs that he has come to take her home. The gentleness of the moment contrasts with the possessive force that marks other encounters. Home functions both as a promise of reunion and as a claim Lu Xun makes on her, leaving the emotional comfort of the gesture inseparable from the question of whether she can choose the terms of return.

Intimacy, Coercion, and Bodily Consequences

The relationship’s physical intimacy is not consistently presented as mutual or freely chosen. In one episode, Lu Xun finds Su Xiangwan in the cloakroom reaching for clothes and lifts her into the air after wrapping his arms around her waist. Elsewhere, a sexual encounter leaves her on the floor, unwilling to get up; Lu Xun tries to coax her to leave the room’s papers to him. The sequence makes the aftermath visible rather than treating intimacy as consequence-free: she is left physically and emotionally distressed, while his soothing address does not itself establish consent.

The consequences become severe when Su Xiangwan is found unconscious by the roadside after being tortured by her husband, as Mo Beiyu describes it. Mo condemns Lu Xun as a rapist and confronts him in front of the police. The accusation turns the relationship’s private violence into a public moral and legal challenge. It also prevents Lu Xun’s declarations of love or care from serving as sufficient evidence that the marriage is safe: the account of her condition, and the intervention of someone who finds her, expose the bodily cost of his control.

A fever offers a smaller but revealing domestic consequence. After sleeping without clothes and kicking off the blanket, Su Xiangwan wakes the next morning sore, weak, and feverish, then asks Manager Wu to buy antipyretic medicine. Another night, she notices that Lu Xun carefully covers her with a blanket and draws her into his arms when she shifts away in her sleep. She wonders whether he has protected her this way on other nights. These moments establish care as a real part of their shared life, but they do not cancel the more serious episodes of coercion; the contrast is central to the relationship rather than a resolution of it.

Trust, Kinship, and Rival Claims

Their conflicts also turn on people whose relationship to Lu Xun Su Xiangwan does not fully understand. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is his uncle’s adopted daughter and cousin, and that he arranged for her to stay near the theater where she performs. Su Xiangwan objects that he should have told her proactively, comparing the omission to what happened with Song Yun’er before. The disclosure is therefore not only a question of kinship: it is a trust issue made sharper by a previous source of jealousy.

That uncertainty spills beyond the couple. When Shen Hui defends Shen Yiyun as Lu Xun’s cousin, Su Xiangwan rejects the assumption that a family label alone settles the matter, emphasizing that they are not blood relatives and that such a connection still places a man and woman together. Her response shows how kinship language can reassure one person while failing to reassure another. A different rival claim comes from Chu Fei, who says that clothes suggesting closeness to a female relative do not create actual kinship and admits that he likes Su Xiangwan. He says he prefers pursuit to simply obtaining what he wants. His words make Lu Xun’s concern explicit: the marriage exists amid competing claims on Su Xiangwan, but she is not merely the object over which men compete.

Change and Narrative Significance

The marriage is sustained by sharp reversals in tone. At breakfast, Lu Xun chooses to spend a rare day off with his parents and wife rather than pick up friends; when Su Xiangwan says her sister helped her stop eating so much chili, he praises her obedience and tells her that if she were equally obedient to him, he could give her the whole world. The extravagant promise sounds affectionate, but its condition exposes the bargain embedded in it: he imagines generosity as something granted in return for submission. Su Xiangwan’s expression darkens, suggesting that she hears the condition even within the reassurance.

At other moments, the language of marriage becomes a form of recognition. When Lu Xun asks what he is to her, Su Xiangwan pulls off his shirt flirtatiously and calls him her husband. Even then, he remains uncertain whether she knows who he is, a doubt sharpened by the presence of other men she might address as handsome or husband. The moment captures both intimacy and insecurity: the title has emotional power, but it cannot by itself settle the question of trust.

Taken together, these episodes portray a bond in which attachment is expressed through shared meals, embraces, invitations, and the promise of home, while autonomy is challenged by unilateral decisions, jealousy, and sexual violence. Lu Xun’s attention increasingly centers on Su Xiangwan, and he admits internally that he is absorbed by her; that intensity explains the force of his pursuit without making its consequences harmless. Su Xiangwan, meanwhile, moves between playful affection, direct resistance, and a practical willingness to leave. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved gap between being cherished and being controlled: the story makes marital devotion consequential precisely because it cannot be judged by tender gestures alone.