Choosing between Love and Freedom

Choosing between Love and Freedom is one of the defining conflicts in Su Xiangwan’s relationship with Lu Xun. Her feelings become unmistakable through physical distress, anxious waiting, and the sweetness of a brief message from him, but the surrounding marriage is marked by a five-hundred-million capital arrangement, demands for divorce, threats against other people, and sexual coercion. The concept therefore does not present love and freedom as two abstract ideals calmly weighed against each other. It emerges as a crisis in which affection is real, while the conditions under which that affection is experienced remain threatening and unequal.

Love Begins as Anxiety and Recognition

Su Xiangwan’s feelings first become legible through concern rather than confession. After learning that Lu Xun had returned and was staying in a hospital because he had become ill, she held her chest for a long time, unable to quiet the turmoil inside her. She recognized that her worry for him differed from the concern she felt for Su Qingrou, even though she could not yet define the difference. The uncertainty turns inward: Su Xiangwan asks whether she has truly fallen in love with him, then immediately asks what, exactly, she loves about him. Her headache and impulse to cover her head with the blanket express a conflict that language cannot settle. The body registers attachment before the mind can give it a stable name.

The relationship also advances through small signs of reciprocal attention. Because Lu Xun had an important meeting in the morning, Su Xiangwan did not call him and instead sent a message. His reply, telling her to go and return as soon as possible, produced a sweetness that she could not suppress. The response is modest, but its emotional effect is disproportionate: a practical exchange becomes evidence that she matters to him. She knows that this kind of happiness may not last, as it has not lasted on previous occasions, yet the knowledge does not cancel the feeling. Her inability to continue deceiving herself marks a movement from guarded denial toward emotional acknowledgment.

Freedom under the Terms of Marriage

The possibility of freedom appears most explicitly when Su Xiangwan proposes divorce. She says that Lu Xun’s property will remain his, that she will take neither it nor alimony, and that she will convert his five hundred million in capital into shares and return it with interest. Her offer attempts to disentangle the marriage financially as well as emotionally. It treats the contract as something that can be settled, repaid, and closed, allowing her to leave without claiming material compensation.

Lu Xun’s response exposes the unequal logic beneath that proposed settlement. He mocks the idea that Su Xiangwan could be worth five hundred million merely because he slept with her a few times, reducing the relationship to a crude calculation of sexual and financial value. Her counterargument invokes his willingness to give away tens of billions of land when another woman, Song Yuner, was involved. The exchange makes the language of love inseparable from the language of assets, compensation, and perceived worth. Su Xiangwan seeks freedom by returning what she believes she owes; Lu Xun answers by challenging the value of her body and the legitimacy of her claim to define the transaction.

This context prevents her later choice from being read as a simple romantic surrender. Her marriage is not only an emotional bond but also a structure involving property, capital, and control. The financial terms give the relationship a contractual surface, while the emotional consequences exceed any calculation. The very act of trying to repay the five hundred million shows Su Xiangwan’s determination to recover independence, even as her attachment makes complete separation harder.

Coercion and the Limits of Romantic Choice

The conflict becomes darker when Lu Xun uses other people’s safety as leverage. Lin Yanche threatens Su Qingrou that if she leaves the manor, Jin Zhengnan will never leave the hospital. Su Qingrou objects that Jin Zhengnan is merely her friend, but the threat turns her movement into a hostage exchange. This episode establishes a broader world in which intimate relationships are enforced through intimidation rather than mutual consent. Freedom is not merely emotionally difficult; it can carry consequences imposed on friends and relatives.

The same moral danger appears when Mo Beiyu condemns Lu Xun after Su Xiangwan has been found unconscious by the roadside. Mo Beiyu says that he cannot tolerate a man who has tortured his woman into such a condition and declares that Lu Xun would otherwise have received a body-identification notice. He then challenges Lu Xun’s right to stand in the sunlight, calling him a rapist. The confrontation places the language of romantic possession against the language of bodily harm and accountability. Whatever emotional bond exists between Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun, the narrative does not allow that bond to make coercion disappear.

Su Xiangwan’s fever further grounds the dilemma in physical vulnerability. After sleeping without enough cover, she develops a fever, becomes so sore that she almost has no strength, and weakly asks Manager Wu to buy antipyretic medicine. The episode is not itself a declaration of love, but it reinforces the bodily stakes surrounding the relationship. Intimacy in this story is repeatedly registered through the body—through illness, pain, exhaustion, and loss of control—so the desire for freedom cannot be treated as a purely philosophical preference detached from physical safety.

The Choice and Its Unresolved Cost

Su Xiangwan eventually admits that she loves Lu Xun, but she qualifies the admission: it is only a shallow level of love. When forced to choose between freedom and love, she believes she might still choose freedom without hesitation. The qualification is decisive. Love has become undeniable, yet it has not become sufficient. Her attachment can make her happy, cause her to worry, and draw her attention back to Lu Xun, but it does not persuade her that surrendering autonomy is acceptable.

That hesitation gives the concept its central force. Su Xiangwan is neither emotionally untouched nor romantically absorbed. She can acknowledge that Lu Xun matters to her while refusing to make that fact the sole standard by which her life should be organized. Her love is therefore presented as partial, unstable, and vulnerable to repetition: she expects happiness to fade because similar happiness has faded before. The choice is not between a cold life of freedom and a complete life of love. It is between preserving self-determination and remaining within a relationship that offers genuine feeling alongside danger and control.

The narrative leaves this conflict open rather than resolving it through a final declaration. Su Xiangwan’s emotions continue to move toward Lu Xun, but her stated preference for freedom remains a counterforce. Her chest tightening, her sweet response to his message, her wish to stop thinking about him, and her attempt to return the five hundred million all belong to the same emotional structure: attachment repeatedly draws her close, while self-preservation tells her not to mistake closeness for liberation. Choosing between Love and Freedom thus functions less as a completed decision than as the story’s continuing ethical pressure.