The sibling relationship between Chu Fei and Su Qingrou

The relationship between Chu Fei and Su Qingrou is defined by sibling loyalty under extreme pressure. Chu Fei is not merely a relative who offers sympathy from a distance: when Su Qingrou is ill and entangled in hostility between Lu Xun and Lin Yanche, he enters the room, offers to take responsibility for the matter, and later proposes moving her to Yan City for recuperation. His intervention turns family affection into an active source of protection, while Su Qingrou’s fear that his involvement will provoke even more hatred shows how dangerous that protection can become.

Family Bond and Protective Position

Chu Fei’s role in Su Qingrou’s life is established through direct action. When Su Xiangcheng is distressed and Su Qingrou is unwell, Chu Fei arrives carrying fruit and says that the matter can be left to him. The gesture is modest, but the offer is not: he presents himself as someone capable of entering a conflict that has already overwhelmed the sisters. Su Qingrou immediately resists this protection. She warns that both Lu Xun and Lin Yanche hate Chu Fei intensely and that his involvement would only create another wave of hostility. Her objection reveals that the sibling bond exists inside a wider network of male power, business rivalry, and threatened relationships rather than outside it.

Chu Fei nevertheless accepts the danger of intervention. He declares that he is willing to proceed for Su Xiangcheng’s sake and looks at her with an intensity she finds difficult to endure. Although this moment is not itself a declaration about Su Qingrou, it clarifies the family structure around her: Chu Fei is prepared to act decisively for the women connected to him, and his protective capacity can itself become a source of suspicion and conflict. Su Qingrou therefore has a brother who is powerful enough to help, but whose help may alter the balance among every other faction involved.

Protection Through Relocation

The sibling relationship becomes operational when Chu Fei proposes a concrete escape from the immediate crisis. He suggests that the two women accompany him to Yan City, explaining that he had already discussed recuperating at the sanatorium there and that they could look after one another. He immediately takes out his phone and instructs his assistant to book plane tickets, making the proposal an arrangement rather than a vague promise. The speed of the plan gives family care a logistical form: distance, medical recuperation, and mutual supervision are treated as safeguards against the pressure surrounding Su Qingrou.

The journey also reveals the scale of Chu Fei’s resources. That night, Chu Fei’s men are waiting at the Yan City airport as soon as the travelers arrive, as though their arrival time had been calculated in advance. Lu Xun has brought many people of his own, so the group does not assume that safety is guaranteed; instead, the appearance of Chu Fei’s forces confirms that the trip is embedded in a contest of organized power. Su Qingrou’s brother can protect her because he commands personnel and territory, but this protection also converts a family response into a strategic confrontation.

Kinship Beside Desire and Rivalry

The relationship is especially significant because the novel repeatedly tests the boundary between kinship and desire elsewhere in the same social circle. Chu Fei tells Lu Xun that a woman who appears to be a close relative need not actually be related by blood, and that he had once liked such a woman intensely. He distinguishes formal appearance from biological connection and insists that he does not force women, preferring the prolonged process of pursuit. In this context, family language is shown to be an unstable social category: it can describe genuine belonging, conceal desire, or be used by others to regulate it.

That instability makes the sibling designation between Chu Fei and Su Qingrou narratively important. The evidence identifies them as siblings, while the surrounding conflicts rely heavily on the difference between blood kinship, adopted kinship, cousins, spouses, and nominal relatives. Lu Xun speaks of Shen Yiyun as the child adopted by his uncle and therefore his cousin, while also emphasizing that she is not related to him by blood. He later argues that a relative without blood connection remains a man and a woman beneath the name of kinship. These exchanges do not erase Chu Fei and Su Qingrou’s sibling bond; rather, they show the novel’s recurring concern with how family names create boundaries that characters may defend, exploit, or challenge.

Su Qingrou’s Engagement and Chu Fei’s Position

Su Qingrou’s proposed engagement to Jin Zhengnan further changes the meaning of the sibling relationship. She tells Su Xiangcheng that she and Jin Zhengnan may first hold a small engagement ceremony, primarily for the benefit of their two companies. The plan is therefore both personal and commercial. Su Qingrou knows that Lin Yanche will react, but she answers the concern by reminding her sister that they have a brother. Chu Fei’s existence becomes part of the calculation: he is imagined as a protective family resource against the consequences of an engagement that may also be intended to provoke or restrain Lin Yanche.

Lu Xun immediately understands the engagement as a deliberate pressure point. After receiving the news from Lin Yanche, he thinks that Su Qingrou seems to be acting intentionally, striking at Lin Yanche’s vulnerable place and turning old wounds into a weapon. The engagement thus places Chu Fei’s sister at the center of a triangular struggle involving marriage, revenge, business interests, and emotional retaliation. Her brother’s protective status gives the plan credibility, but it also ensures that the family relationship becomes entangled with the strategic maneuvers of the surrounding men.

Care, Surveillance, and Narrative Significance

Chu Fei’s concern for Su Qingrou is also shown through information management. When Su Xiangcheng asks whether her elder sister is all right, Chu Fei explains that he had been afraid she did not know what was happening and had therefore hesitated to ask. He then reports that Su Qingrou had not slept the previous night and suggests that Su Xiangcheng stay with her. The exchange presents care as attention to sleep, knowledge, and companionship rather than only as physical rescue. Chu Fei monitors the situation while encouraging the sisters to support one another.

At the same time, this care occurs in a world where women are frequently treated as stakes in male conflict. Su Qingrou has already suffered through coercion and confinement, and Su Xiangcheng’s reaction to the marks on her body is one of pain. The image of physical injury makes clear why Chu Fei’s protection matters, while the surrounding threats show why it cannot be uncomplicated. His brotherhood offers shelter, transportation, personnel, and retaliation, but the need for such measures is itself evidence of the vulnerability imposed on Su Qingrou.

The relationship therefore serves as both emotional refuge and structural leverage. Chu Fei gives Su Qingrou a family connection capable of becoming action, and Su Qingrou’s decisions repeatedly activate that connection within larger struggles over marriage, revenge, and power. Their sibling bond does not resolve the conflicts around her; it changes their scale. What begins as a brother’s promise to help becomes a force that can move people to Yan City, mobilize an organized entourage, and reshape the negotiations among Lu Xun, Lin Yanche, Jin Zhengnan, and the Su family. Through this relationship, the novel treats kinship not as a quiet background fact but as a contested form of protection whose emotional meaning is inseparable from its practical power.