Song Yuner's Drugged Impersonation of Su Xiangwan is a turning-point deception built around the dangerous power of resemblance. By drugging Lu Xun and presenting herself as Su Xiangwan, Song Yuner tries to exploit his altered judgment and her history with him; instead, the attempt reveals that Lu Xun can distinguish the woman he recognizes from the woman who merely reproduces her face and voice. The episode shifts the conflict from jealousy and suspicion toward questions of identity, bodily autonomy, memory, and the difference between an old attachment and a chosen marriage.

Causes and Background

Song Yuner's scheme grows out of a relationship already burdened by guilt, abandonment, and competing claims on Lu Xun. In an earlier confrontation, she insists that she has suffered the consequences of her choices and has been abandoned, while Lu Xun responds with cold humiliation rather than renewed tenderness. Her plea therefore carries two impulses at once: the wish to recover a lost position and the wish to make Lu Xun acknowledge that she still has emotional power over him. The impersonation transforms that emotional struggle into a calculated attack on his ability to identify the person before him.

The method depends on substitution. Song Yuner does not simply ask Lu Xun to love her again; she attempts to occupy Su Xiangwan's place by reproducing the external signs through which he knows his wife. Lu Xun later explains that Song Yuner's face looked like Su Xiangwan's and that her voice was the same. The deception thus targets the most immediate senses while leaving the deeper history of the marriage untouched. Its central irony is that the closer the imitation comes to appearance, the more sharply the missing identity matters.

What Happens

Lu Xun states that he had been drugged but that the drug produced no sexual response. His resistance is presented not as indifference to the situation but as a physical and psychological limit that prevents Song Yuner's plan from working. When she tries to pass as Su Xiangwan, he recognizes the resemblance, yet he does not treat resemblance as permission. He says that he did not touch her and that he restrained himself, despite the confusion created by her face and voice.

The decisive break comes when Song Yuner suddenly calls Lu Xun by his name. That detail exposes the impersonation. The woman before him may look and sound like Su Xiangwan, but the wrong form of address punctures the performance and restores the distinction between the two women. Lu Xun describes the moment as one in which he might otherwise have been deceived, making the event a narrow escape rather than a simple rejection from the outset.

The failed seduction then becomes evidence in Lu Xun's argument with Su Xiangwan. She challenges him over whether he felt anything when confronted with Song Yuner, insisting that a person may deceive others but cannot deceive himself. Lu Xun answers that he would not have touched Song Yuner even if he had been capable of doing so, and he emphasizes that he had resisted her. His defense is not merely that the plan failed; it is that he refused to let the counterfeit determine his conduct.

Lu Xun's Drug Resistance and Past Trauma

Lu Xun's immunity to the drug is tied to a childhood trauma rather than introduced as an isolated convenience. He recalls that he was kidnapped at the age of twelve, that the kidnappers forced or administered various medicines, and that he nearly lost his life. The experience left him resistant to drugs. The past therefore enters the present at the exact point when Song Yuner expects chemical manipulation to erase judgment.

This history changes the meaning of the event. What appears to be a romantic ambush is also an encounter between a present scheme and an old wound. Lu Xun's body carries the memory of captivity, and the same body that once made him vulnerable now frustrates an attempt to control him chemically. His unwavering gaze while recounting the kidnapping suggests that he has learned to narrate the pain as though it belonged to someone else, but the event proves that the past remains active in his physical responses and intimate decisions.

Consequences and Aftermath

The impersonation intensifies the crisis of trust between Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. Su Xiangwan initially has to process the fact that Lu Xun was drugged and that Song Yuner deliberately used her likeness. Lu Xun's explanation reassures her on the immediate question of whether he betrayed her, but it cannot erase the emotional violence of the situation. The danger lies precisely in the possibility that marriage could be attacked through a substitute who resembles one spouse closely enough to make the other doubt what occurred.

The surrounding aftermath keeps bodily vulnerability in view. When Su Xiangwan becomes ill with a high fever, her weakness becomes a source of alarm and a measure of Lu Xun's attachment. Lin Yanche warns Lu Xun that Su Xiangwan can suffer a fever for three days and three nights and tells him to prepare to identify the body. Lu Xun's face turns deathly pale, showing how quickly the earlier question of deception gives way to fear of losing the actual woman whose identity Song Yuner tried to steal.

The same contrast appears when Lu Xun is injured while protecting Su Xiangwan. She notices blood at the corner of his mouth, but he embraces her and tells her not to be afraid because he is there. His response places safety above the confusion generated by Song Yuner's impersonation: the authentic relationship is expressed through mutual recognition, physical protection, and the consequences each body bears, not through superficial likeness.

Narrative Significance

The event makes identity a matter of conduct rather than appearance. Song Yuner can reproduce Su Xiangwan's face and voice, but she cannot reproduce the history, address, trust, or bodily knowledge that bind Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. The failed substitution therefore exposes the weakness of possessive strategies that treat a loved person as an interchangeable image.

It also reveals how the novel joins romantic rivalry to wider structures of power. Drugging, impersonation, marriage, and family alliance all turn intimate bodies into contested territory. Song Yuner's position is shaped by her abandonment and by the old bond she believes she can reclaim, while Su Xiangwan's position is shaped by her status as Lu Xun's wife and by her physical fragility. The event does not resolve those unequal pressures, but it clarifies their cost: a relationship founded on recognition must repeatedly defend itself against attempts to reduce a person to a role, a face, or a legally usable name.

Finally, the episode establishes a pattern of revelation through contradiction. Song Yuner's plan assumes that drugs will overcome Lu Xun's judgment; his resistance overturns that assumption. Her imitation assumes that resemblance will produce recognition; the wrong name destroys it. The scene's value shift is therefore from apparent control to exposed failure, while its lasting consequence is a sharper distinction between the woman who performs Su Xiangwan and Su Xiangwan herself.