Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng's Marriage

Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan’s marriage is a relationship formed under a financial shadow and repeatedly tested by the conflict between his insistence on keeping her and her insistence that she remain free to leave. Su Xiangwan understands the marriage as a compromised bargain, while Lu Xun increasingly describes it as a lasting duty. Their attachment grows more intimate, but its development does not dissolve the imbalance between marital protection and personal autonomy: separation, money, jealousy, family expectations, and physical vulnerability remain woven into the bond.

Identity and Unequal Foundations

The marriage is already in place when Su Xiangwan tries to define what it means. She tells Lu Xun that their union is unlike other marriages and that she will do what she considers appropriate as a wife, but he may replace her whenever he chooses. Her words expose a basic instability: she treats her position as conditional, not secure, and offers compliance without claiming that the relationship is founded on mutual love. Lu Xun challenges her for assuming the worst, but the underlying uncertainty is not easily answered by reassurance.

Money gives that uncertainty a concrete form. Su Xiangwan thinks of herself as the wife Lu Xun bought for five hundred million, a description that makes affection difficult for her to separate from the circumstances of the marriage. When she later proposes divorce, she offers to take none of his property or alimony. Instead, she proposes converting the five hundred million into shares and returning the capital with interest. Her offer is not simply a demand to end the relationship: it is an attempt to settle its financial account and leave without remaining indebted to him. Lu Xun rejects her valuation of herself in bitter terms and compares what he gave her with what he was willing to offer Song Yuner, sharpening the very comparison that already troubles Su Xiangwan.

Doubt, Departure, and the Threat of Divorce

The past attachment to Song Yuner is central to Su Xiangwan’s doubts. When Lu Xun asks whether she believes he loves her, she argues that he loved Song Yuner for years and had known her for only days when they married. She says she understood from the beginning why he insisted on marrying her, and doubts that a declaration of love can overcome that history. Her tears and description of the preceding days as an emotional plunge make clear that the problem is not abstract: she feels wronged and exhausted by how quickly the marriage has moved from its beginning to the possibility of breaking apart.

Song Yuner’s own account adds another angle to the triangle. She tells Lu Xun that she has been abandoned and links her present condition to his decision to marry another woman. Lu Xun answers her coldly, turning the exchange into a confrontation over humiliation and blame. When he returns to the hotel, the previous night’s decorations have been removed and Su Xiangwan is gone with her luggage. He does not know whether she has gone home or sought out Su Qingrou. The empty room turns their marital dispute into a physical absence: whatever the decorations had signified, they are no longer there, and Su Xiangwan has taken the practical step of leaving.

Her later refusal to return makes the separation more than a temporary gesture. Lu Xun asks her to come home, but she says she will not, and he suspects Lin Yanche has offered her something in exchange for leaving. When she proposes divorce and the return of his money, Lu Xun resists the premise that their relationship can be closed like a transaction. At another point he pleads with her not to divorce him, promises to help settle trouble she encounters, and asks her not to break up with him. Her response is not immediate trust; she sees his effort to appease her and observes that, if he refuses to agree, she may not be able to get away regardless. The gap between being asked to stay and being able to leave remains part of the relationship’s conflict.

Duty, Intimacy, and Attempts at Repair

Lu Xun’s clearest counterclaim to Su Xiangwan’s sense of disposability is his insistence that marriage creates obligations. He tells her that he will not marry her one day and cast her aside the next, that he intends to fulfill his duties as a husband, and that he will not allow others to bully her easily. He also says she should not have to bear the consequences of every mistake alone, even if she may disagree with how he resolves a problem. To Su Xiangwan, these words land with the force of a marriage vow. They offer a form of security grounded not in her belief that he loves her, but in his stated commitment to act as her husband.

That promise is followed by their first kiss in the bridal chamber. Lu Xun kisses her seriously, with a sense of ceremony, and the narration presents the moment as a decisive intensification of his attachment. He imagines a future with her and describes ordinary workdays as something to finish early so he can return to her. Yet the account also stresses that Su Xiangwan has proposed divorce more than once and that Lu Xun will not let her go. He interprets her wish to escape as evidence that he has not treated her well enough, and resolves to keep treating her better. The passage therefore holds two meanings together: his devotion is genuine within the narrative, but his answer to her desire for separation is persistence, not acceptance.

Their later exchanges continue to move between playfulness and insecurity. In one intimate moment Su Xiangwan pulls off Lu Xun’s shirt and calls him her husband, while he remains unsure whether she recognizes him. The scene gives the marital title a teasing, affectionate charge, but also reflects how little a title alone can settle. Lu Xun’s concern is not merely that she perform the role of wife; he wants confidence that she knows and chooses him. The relationship’s emotional progress is registered in gestures, yet its security remains repeatedly questioned.

Family, Jealousy, and the Marriage’s Limits

Marriage also brings Su Xiangwan into family expectations that extend beyond the couple. Shen Hui raises the prospect of having a child sooner rather than later and suggests that Su Xiangwan, whom she considers somewhat weak, and Lu Xun take traditional medicine to build their health before autumn. Su Xiangwan agrees with her mother-in-law, while Lu Xun remarks that taking medicine will not prevent him from getting sick. The exchange places the couple’s bodily condition and possible parenthood within family life, though it does not establish that they have a child or that they follow the suggested treatment.

Trust is tested again when Su Xiangwan learns that Shen Yiyun is Lu Xun’s cousin, an adopted child of his uncle who has come to Cloud City to perform. Lu Xun says he arranged nearby accommodation for her. Su Xiangwan objects that he should have told her, comparing the omission to an earlier problem involving Song Yuner. Lu Xun accepts the correction and promises to mend his ways. The episode shows how disclosure has become part of the marriage’s practical work: even a family connection and a seemingly ordinary housing arrangement can renew suspicion when the information arrives late.

That suspicion becomes explicit in a later argument with Shen Hui. Su Xiangwan points out that a cousin who is not related by blood is, apart from the name, a man and a woman, and warns that if every relationship were treated as equivalent to Shen Yiyun’s, Lu Xun would have too many women for her to manage. Shen Hui sharply rebukes her. The exchange frames marital security through competing definitions of kinship: Shen Hui treats the cousin relationship as a reason for trust, while Su Xiangwan treats the absence of blood ties as a reason not to dismiss the possibility of jealousy. Her position is not simply resolved by Lu Xun’s title as husband; it must be negotiated against family explanations and her own need for transparency.

The marriage’s limits are most starkly visible in the aftermath of Su Xiangwan’s physical collapse. After Lu Xun has tortured her to the point that she faints by the roadside, Mo Beiyu condemns him as a rapist in front of the police and challenges his right to appear respectable. This is a direct public accusation, not a private misunderstanding, and it brings the coercive dimension of the relationship into view alongside its romantic declarations. The contrast matters: Lu Xun’s promises to protect his wife and fulfill his obligations cannot by themselves make the marriage safe or equal. Su Xiangwan’s fever and weakness elsewhere in the story likewise remind the reader that she is not only a wife in disputes over love, money, and jealousy, but a physically vulnerable person whose condition has consequences.

Change and Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the relationship changes from an arrangement Su Xiangwan believes she can repay and leave into a bond Lu Xun insists carries obligations beyond the original bargain. She does not simply accept his account: she leaves, refuses to return, proposes divorce, offers back the capital with interest, and challenges his handling of women whose connections to him are explained through old affection or family labels. Lu Xun, in turn, moves from offering the prospect of a European honeymoon and a wedding whenever she wants to declaring that he will not abandon her and will take responsibility as her husband. Those gestures mark a genuine emotional turn, but the repeated resistance to separation prevents the marriage from becoming a simple story of reassurance.

The relationship’s defining tension is therefore between care as a promise and control as a practice. Lu Xun’s language of duty can give Su Xiangwan a measure of emotional security, and their intimacy supplies signs of attachment that she once doubted. Yet his refusal to let her go, the financial terms shadowing the marriage, the recurring comparison with Song Yuner, the struggle over disclosure, and the accusation made after her collapse keep autonomy and safety in question. Their marriage matters to the narrative not because affection erases these conflicts, but because each reconciliation has to contend with them anew.