Su Xiangcheng Goes to Yancheng to Avoid Lu Xun marks a decisive flight from the pressure surrounding Su Xiangcheng’s relationship with Lu Xun. The journey is arranged as a retreat to the Sanatorium in Yan City, but it also functions as a boundary: Su Xiangcheng chooses distance, turns off her phone, and refuses immediate contact while Lu Xun searches for her and prepares to bring her back. The event therefore joins practical recuperation with emotional resistance, making geographic separation the clearest action available to a woman struggling to recover control over her own life.

Causes and Background

Su Xiangcheng’s retreat follows a period in which illness, fear, and intimate control have repeatedly shaped the couple’s decisions. Lu Xun’s own history includes a kidnapping at the age of twelve, during which he was drugged and nearly lost his life; the experience left him resistant to medication and marked by pain that he can recount with striking emotional distance. His respiratory illness also recurs suddenly, forcing him to carry medicine and spray it into his mouth when an attack begins. These details establish a relationship in which bodily vulnerability is never merely private: sickness repeatedly becomes a source of alarm, protection, surveillance, and authority.

Su Xiangcheng’s vulnerability is likewise treated as a matter requiring supervision. When she becomes dangerously weak and feverish, she collapses at an elevator before she can press the button. Lu Xun later reassures her while holding her, telling her not to be afraid because he has been there all along. The tenderness in these scenes is genuine within the narrative, but it is inseparable from the possessive structure around it. Care provides comfort while also making separation appear unacceptable, so escape to Yan City becomes a way for Su Xiangcheng to seek safety outside Lu Xun’s immediate reach.

The wider family crisis adds another layer of pressure. Su Xiangcheng remembers that her mother had a terminal illness and withdrew from the family because she did not want to implicate them; she also remembers the traumatic image of her mother walking onto a balcony after seeing a drawing of the family holding hands. That memory links illness, guilt, abandonment, and family protection long before the journey to Yan City. Su Xiangcheng’s decision to leave can thus be read not as a simple change of scenery, but as an attempt to interrupt a recurring pattern in which love is expressed through sacrifice, concealment, and control.

The Plan and the Journey

Chu Fei offers the practical solution when Su Xiangcheng is already questioning whether her distrust has become too severe. He proposes that she and Su Qingrou go with him to Yan City, where he had previously discussed recuperating at the Sanatorium with Warm Snow. The arrangement promises mutual support: the two women can look after one another while staying away from the immediate conflict in Cloud City. Chu Fei does not leave the suggestion abstract; he takes out his phone and instructs his assistant to book a plane ticket, making the escape immediate and organized.

Su Xiangcheng accepts because the alternative is more threatening to her. The narrative explicitly presents Chu Fei’s plan as preferable to confronting Lu Xun. Yan City offers distance, a period of rest, and the possibility of living without having every decision answered by Lu Xun’s presence. The trip is therefore both a medical retreat and a strategic withdrawal. Su Qingrou’s involvement also prevents the departure from being framed as isolated recklessness: the women travel together, creating a small protective unit within a broader family conflict.

Once the plan is made, Su Xiangcheng turns off her cell phone. She does not want to be disturbed by anyone or anything and wants only a few quiet days. This concrete act gives the event its emotional center. The phone is the channel through which Lu Xun can locate, question, and summon her; switching it off temporarily closes that channel. Her silence is not an accidental loss of contact but a chosen refusal to remain continuously available.

Lu Xun’s Pursuit

The withdrawal immediately destabilizes Cloud City. Lu Xun cannot find Su Xiangcheng for the entire day and calls Su Qingrou instead. When he learns that Su Xiangcheng is with her but has gone out to relax, his uncertainty does not lead him to respect the retreat. His next step is to capture Su Xiangcheng and bring her back. The language of retrieval reveals the conflict at the heart of the event: Su Xiangcheng understands her departure as a necessary pause, while Lu Xun understands her absence as a problem to be solved through pursuit.

The difficulty is greater than Lu Xun expects because Su Qingrou is not in Cloud City either. Both women have gone to Yan City, which is described as Jin Zhengnan’s territory. Their destination therefore provides not only physical distance but also a different sphere of influence, making the search more complicated than a domestic disagreement. Lin Yancheng, despite being hospitalized, offers to accompany Lu Xun there after hearing where Su Xiangcheng has gone. Lu Xun rejects the idea and tells him to remain in the Hospital, invoking the injuries he has already suffered rather than allowing the search to become another impulsive expedition.

Lu Xun’s urgency is intensified by the way illness has trained him to imagine absence as catastrophe. When Lin Yanche warns him that Su Xiangcheng is physically fragile, describing her menstrual pain, susceptibility to influenza, and tendency to suffer fever for several days, Lu Xun reacts with sudden, visible distress. His face turns deathly pale. The warning is cruelly phrased, but it exposes how quickly Lu Xun’s anger and possessiveness give way to fear when Su Xiangcheng’s body is placed beyond his supervision.

Medical and Emotional Stakes

The event occurs within a narrative where diagnoses repeatedly reorganize relationships. Su Qingrou is hospitalized after acute appendicitis and undergoes surgery to remove her appendix, showing that the journey toward Yan City is connected to an actual pattern of medical vulnerability rather than a purely symbolic escape. Lu Xun is also summoned to the Hospital when Lin Yanche is admitted, and the message frames their meeting through the practical task of taking Grandfather home together. Hospitalization, family duty, and romantic conflict continually overlap, leaving little space in which illness can remain separate from obligation.

The contrast between the two women’s retreat and the men’s reactions is significant. Su Xiangcheng seeks quiet by shutting down communication; Lu Xun responds by intensifying communication through others and planning to retrieve her. Su Qingrou’s presence makes the retreat more secure, but it also draws Lu Xun into a wider network of family and territorial relationships. Yan City is not an empty refuge: it is linked to Jin Zhengnan, to the Sanatorium, and to the possibility that protection may come from people other than Lu Xun.

The medical frame later expands when Yun Xiao reveals that Lin Yanche has liver cancer and is waiting for a suitable donor, with death as the alternative. This revelation does not belong to the journey itself, but it deepens the atmosphere surrounding it: every attempt to escape, pursue, protect, or confront another person occurs against bodies that may suddenly fail. Lu Xun’s recurring illness, Su Xiangcheng’s fever and collapse, Su Qingrou’s surgery, and Lin Yanche’s cancer make the characters’ claims over one another inseparable from fear of physical loss.

Consequences and Significance

Su Xiangcheng’s departure gives her a temporary space in which rest becomes an act of self-determination. She is not merely carried away by circumstances; she agrees to Chu Fei’s plan, travels with Su Qingrou, and deliberately removes herself from communication. Her objective is modest but radical within the surrounding relationship: to live peacefully for a few days without being disturbed. Yan City becomes a threshold between the life governed by immediate confrontation and a possible life in which distance can produce clarity.

For Lu Xun, however, the event converts emotional uncertainty into pursuit. Once he learns where Su Xiangcheng is, he does not treat the separation as settled. He intends to find her and bring her back, and Yan City’s association with Jin Zhengnan turns the personal chase into a confrontation shaped by territory, allies, and competing forms of protection. The event consequently advances the recurring pursuit-and-withdrawal pattern between Lu Xun and Su Xiangcheng: her silence creates distance, his fear converts distance into action, and his action confirms why she needed distance in the first place.

The journey’s lasting importance lies in that paradox. Su Xiangcheng seeks refuge because closeness has become inseparable from control, while Lu Xun pursues her because absence awakens his fear of losing her. Their conflict is not resolved by the plane ticket or by the temporary quiet of Yan City. Instead, the retreat makes the underlying structure visible: care can shelter, but it can also confine; illness can invite tenderness, but it can also remove decision-making power; and leaving can be both an act of self-preservation and the event that provokes the strongest attempt to reclaim the person who left.