Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan's contract marriage and secret marriage status

The contract marriage and secret-marriage status of Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun is the central condition through which their relationship is negotiated, defended, and repeatedly destabilized. It is founded on a five-hundred-million-yuan transaction, yet Lu Xun gradually insists that the marriage carries obligations beyond money: he will not discard Su Xiangwan after marrying her, will protect her from others, and will bear responsibility for consequences connected to her. The resulting relationship occupies an unstable space between commercial contract, concealed domestic partnership, and possessive romance.

Contractual Origin and Unequal Terms

The marriage is initially understood by Su Xiangwan as a purchase rather than an equal union. She tells Lu Xun that, although they are married, their marriage differs from other people’s and that she will do what she ought to do while the marriage lasts; if he dislikes her, he may replace her wife at any time. Her language treats the arrangement as temporary, conditional, and governed by his choice. She also expresses the hope that both of them can live well, revealing that her apparent detachment is partly an attempt to protect the possibility of an independent life.

Lu Xun rejects that interpretation. He tells her that marriage is not a game in which he can marry her today and throw her out tomorrow. Having married her, he claims that he will fulfill the duties and obligations of a husband and will not allow other people to bully her easily. He further declares that, whether she has acted rightly or wrongly, he will not make her bear the consequences alone. The language converts a financial arrangement into a moral claim, but it does not erase the original imbalance: Lu Xun remains the purchaser and economic power-holder, while Su Xiangwan is the person whose value has been calculated in money.

That imbalance becomes explicit when Su Xiangwan proposes divorce. She offers to take none of Lu Xun’s property or alimony and proposes converting the five hundred million yuan into shares, returning both the capital and its interest. Her willingness to reverse the transaction is an attempt to regain control over the terms of the relationship. Lu Xun answers with contempt for the idea that sleeping with her several times could itself justify a five-hundred-million valuation, while she counters by invoking the far greater value of land he was willing to give Song Yun’er. Their argument exposes the market logic beneath the marriage: affection, sex, land, capital, and marital status are repeatedly compared as negotiable assets.

Secrecy, Public Recognition, and Marital Performance

The marriage is also secret, and its secrecy creates a sharp contrast between legal or private status and public knowledge. Su Xiangwan is treated as Lu Xun’s wife within the household and in moments of danger, yet the relationship remains vulnerable to outsiders’ assumptions, rivals’ interference, and family scrutiny. The hidden status makes every public gesture carry unusual weight. When Lu Xun removes his hat, reveals a scar, takes her hand, and accompanies her from a private room, the action functions as a visible acknowledgment even though the marriage itself is not openly presented as ordinary public life.

The concealed marriage is especially strained by the presence of Song Yun’er. Lu Xun tells Su Xiangwan that Song Yun’er knows it is her birthday and will attend the birthday dinner, despite the possibility that Song Yun’er will encounter Su Qingrou and Lin Yanche there. He explains that he spent the previous night talking with Song Yun’er and believes she has accepted that she must wait. The arrangement therefore does not isolate the marriage from prior attachments; instead, secrecy allows unresolved relationships to remain active around it, turning a supposedly private union into a field of surveillance, comparison, and rivalry.

Lu Xun repeatedly uses domestic and romantic gestures to perform the marriage’s reality. He arranges a European honeymoon, promises that a wedding can be held whenever Su Xiangwan wants, and tells her to come home with him rather than divorce. Later, when Su Xiangwan identifies their relationship by calling him her husband, he is still uncertain whether she recognizes him specifically or is simply assigning that title to any attractive and powerful man around her. The scene reveals that the word husband is both an intimate name and a vulnerable status: it can signify genuine recognition, social possession, or merely the role required by the contract.

Protection and the Failure of Consent

Lu Xun’s promise to protect Su Xiangwan is one of the marriage’s strongest internal claims, but the evidence also shows how protection can become coercive control. His insistence that she return home and remain married presents reconciliation as care, yet her earlier attempt to leave demonstrates that the contractual relationship does not provide an equally enforceable right to exit. The marriage therefore makes Su Xiangwan safer from some external threats while limiting her freedom within the relationship itself.

This contradiction becomes stark when Su Xiangwan is found physically weakened and later feverish. After a night without adequate covering, she wakes with a fever and such severe soreness that she has almost no strength; she asks Manager Wu to buy antipyretic medicine. Her vulnerability is not an abstract emotional condition but a bodily one, and it makes the question of marital responsibility concrete. The household expects that Lu Xun will become anxious if he learns she is ill, while the wider narrative links his authority over her body with the duties he claims as a husband.

The most severe challenge to the marriage’s romantic framing comes when Mo Beiyu condemns Lu Xun for torturing his woman until she fainted beside the road. Mo Beiyu says that, without his sister’s intervention, Lu Xun might already have received a notice to identify a body, then questions what qualification a rapist has to stand in the sunlight. The police investigation has established that Su Xiangwan was brought to an apartment by a young woman who did not know her, but the confrontation makes clear that the marriage cannot turn violence into legitimate intimacy. Lu Xun’s title as husband is set against the question of whether marital status can ever authorize bodily harm; the answer supplied by the accusation is an emphatic no.

Family Boundaries and Competing Claims

The secret marriage is repeatedly tested by alternative forms of kinship and intimacy. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is the child his uncle adopted and therefore his cousin, and that he arranged for her to stay near the theater after she came to Cloud City to perform. Su Xiangwan reacts with suspicion because the explanation resembles the earlier complications involving Song Yun’er. The episode shows how non-blood family ties can appear, from the spouse’s perspective, as a possible rival intimacy rather than a secure boundary.

Lu Xun later argues that a relative connected only by name is still a man or woman outside the protection of blood kinship, and that if every relationship like Shen Yiyun’s were treated as harmless, his mother would have too many supposed cousins to manage. Su Xiangwan’s suspicion thus challenges the family vocabulary Lu Xun uses to organize his social world. Adoption, cousinhood, and marital status overlap without producing automatic trust; the hidden marriage intensifies the problem because Su Xiangwan cannot rely on public recognition of her position.

The family’s own language also turns marriage into a strategic alliance. Su Qingrou tells Su Xiangwan that she and Jin Zhengnan may first hold a small engagement ceremony, mainly for the benefit of their two companies. When Su Xiangwan worries about Lin Yanche, Su Qingrou answers that they have a brother. The proposed engagement therefore combines emotional protection, corporate interests, and family backing, paralleling the way Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun’s marriage combines capital, status, and intimacy. In this world, formal relationships do not merely describe affection; they mobilize family power and redistribute risk.

Meaning and Development of the Status

The marriage changes meaning without ever becoming free of its original conditions. Su Xiangwan begins by treating herself as a replaceable wife acquired for money and offers to repay the investment with shares and interest. Lu Xun responds by recasting the arrangement as an enduring marital obligation and by promising practical protection. His European honeymoon plan, willingness to arrange a wedding, and demand that she return home make the relationship appear to move from contract to chosen partnership, but his control over the decision to remain married prevents that movement from becoming fully reciprocal.

The status is consequently defined by contradiction. It offers Su Xiangwan the name and protection of being Lu Xun’s wife, while secrecy and economic dependence weaken her ability to exercise equal authority. It allows Lu Xun to present possessiveness as responsibility, yet the accusations of coercion and the visible consequences of Su Xiangwan’s physical collapse expose the danger of that transformation. The contract marriage is therefore not merely a romantic premise. It is the mechanism through which the narrative asks whether money can initiate intimacy, whether marital duty can repair an unequal bargain, and whether protection retains moral value when the protected person cannot freely refuse it.