Italy

Italy functions in the narrative as more than a destination. It is the place Lu Xun chooses for relaxation, the setting of a birthday-season excursion and nightlife, and the foreign landscape in which private relationships become difficult to conceal. Travel briefly promises escape from domestic pressures, yet Italy instead concentrates illness, jealousy, family history, and romantic rivalry into a sequence of revelations that alters how the characters understand one another.

A Journey Meant for Rest

Italy first appears as the destination of Lu Xun’s proposed retreat. He asks Su Xiangcheng to accompany him because he is tired and wants to go to Europe to relax, presenting the journey as an opportunity for shared leisure rather than business or conflict. The promise of rest is immediately unsettled when Su Xiangcheng catches a cold on the second day after Lu Xun leaves for Italy. Her illness converts the romantic journey into a scene of dependence: after arriving at the hotel, Lu Xun repeatedly insists on physical intimacy, while she lies on the bed feeling miserable and resents him for failing to treat her condition with sufficient restraint.

The contrast between the intended holiday and its bodily reality is important. Italy is associated with movement across borders, but Su Xiangcheng’s feverish weakness confines her to a bed and later leaves her unable to trust her own strength. The journey therefore exposes a recurring imbalance in the marriage between Lu Xun’s desire to possess and Su Xiangcheng’s need for care. The foreign setting does not dissolve that imbalance; it makes the conflict more visible by removing the familiar routines that might otherwise disguise it.

Nightlife, Performance, and Jealousy

During the Italian stay, Lu Xun, Su Xiangcheng, and Su Qingrou go to a famous bar for drinks. Su Qingrou is in a good mood, and after two cups she is pulled onto the dance floor by a foreign man. Su Xiangcheng watches with her chin resting in her hands, openly envious of Su Qingrou’s freedom to enjoy the evening. The scene gives Italy a social and performative dimension: identities are displayed through dancing, drinking, nicknames, and the attention of strangers, while the married couple’s intimacy remains tense beneath the amusement.

Lu Xun’s reaction changes the atmosphere. When a man and a woman enter the bar, his cold gaze immediately finds Su Qingrou dancing warmly with the foreigner, and his expression darkens. The jealousy is not expressed as an open declaration but as a visible alteration in his face and temperature. Su Xiangcheng responds by teasing him about the foreign man’s title, turning possessiveness into comic banter without eliminating its threat. The bar thus becomes a miniature theatre of competing claims: Su Qingrou performs independence, Su Xiangcheng observes and jokes, and Lu Xun silently marks the behavior that he considers dangerous.

The Italian Revelation of Lin Yanche

Italy’s decisive transformation occurs when Su Xiangcheng and Lu Xun turn a corner and discover Su Qingrou being held tightly by a man whose kiss is frantic. The man is Lin Yanche. The recognition shocks them because the scene collapses the distance between Su Qingrou’s public presentation and her concealed attachment. What had looked like a foreign holiday encounter becomes evidence of an unresolved relationship carried into Italy.

Su Xiangcheng immediately fears that Lin Yanche’s presence will cause trouble and insists that he must not involve her. The concern is not merely embarrassment. Lin Yanche’s appearance threatens to pull Su Qingrou back into a destructive emotional history and to contaminate the vacation shared by the sisters and Lu Xun. Italy consequently becomes a place where hidden bonds become visible through physical action rather than explanation: the embrace and kiss reveal more than any formal account could have done.

The episode also establishes Italy as a setting where kinship language and romantic desire come into conflict. Elsewhere, Shen Yiyun is described as the child adopted by Lu Xun’s uncle and therefore as his cousin, while Lu Xun distinguishes sharply between nominal family connection and blood relation. Chu Fei likewise speaks of a woman who wore the clothing of a close relative despite lacking actual kinship with him, while admitting that he liked her. These disputes over whether a relationship is familial, adopted, symbolic, or erotic echo the Italian discovery of Su Qingrou and Lin Yanche: labels that should impose boundaries repeatedly become masks for desire, suspicion, or control.

Memory and the Foreign Sky

Italy also becomes an emotional backdrop for Lu Xun’s past. When a phone call arrives, he feels as though the sky over Italy has darkened. He repeatedly calls Su Xiangcheng, but her phone remains off until Gordon sends him information about her flight. The physical sky is used to register psychological shock, while the failed calls convert distance into panic. The episode shows how quickly Lu Xun’s confidence gives way to urgent pursuit when he cannot verify Su Xiangcheng’s whereabouts.

His history explains why danger and separation carry such force. Lu Xun recounts that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve, that the kidnappers made him take various medicines, and that he nearly lost his life; as a result, he developed resistance to drugs. He narrates the experience with an unwavering gaze, as though describing someone else, suggesting that the passage of time has altered the immediate pain without erasing its imprint. He also remembers that a girl killed alongside him was about Su Xiangcheng’s age. Italy therefore holds two temporal layers at once: the present journey with its threats of abandonment and bodily vulnerability, and the childhood catastrophe that continues to shape Lu Xun’s responses to danger.

The country’s emotional geography is further enlarged by Su Xiangcheng’s memory of her mother. She recalls that her grandfather said her mother had a terminal illness and did not want to implicate the family. As a child, Su Xiangcheng drew a picture of her father and mother holding her hand; after seeing it, her mother walked onto the balcony. Lu Xun wipes away her tears and regrets not investigating the matter himself. The memory is not presented as a settled family history but as a wound reopened through conversation, with Italy serving as the distant setting in which old loss enters the couple’s present intimacy.

From Holiday Setting to Relational Pressure Chamber

The Italian episodes anticipate later patterns in which physical weakness, fear, and attachment become inseparable. Su Xiangwan collapses at an elevator entrance when fever and exhaustion leave her unable even to press the button, while Lu Xun later comforts a frightened Su Xiangcheng by holding her and assuring her that he has been there all along. These scenes are not Italian events themselves, but they clarify the pattern Italy first exposes: illness makes the body speak before the characters can organize their feelings, and care can appear alongside possessiveness rather than replacing it.

Italy also sharpens the rivalry around Su Xiangcheng. Chu Fei tells Lu Xun that Su Xiangcheng is an eyesore because Chu Fei likes her, though he says he prefers the process of pursuit and will not force a woman. Lu Xun, meanwhile, tests whether Su Xiangcheng recognizes him as her husband; she pulls off his shirt and identifies him as her husband, yet his uncertainty remains because he wonders whether she truly knows whom she is addressing. Her declaration briefly restores marital certainty, but the need to ask reveals how fragile that certainty has become.

In this sense, Italy is a location of failed escape. Lu Xun seeks rest, Su Xiangcheng seeks relief from pressure, and Su Qingrou finds a moment of pleasure on the dance floor, but the journey instead reveals sickness, jealousy, secret desire, inherited trauma, and the precarious boundaries of marriage. Its narrative significance lies in that reversal: the farther the characters travel from home, the less successfully they can keep the past and their concealed relationships out of sight.