Su Xiangcheng serving as acting PR supervisor at Imperial Group

Su Xiangcheng serving as acting PR supervisor at Imperial Group is a state of provisional authority that changes how she moves through the story. Installed in a department weakened by the supervisor’s absence, she enters a workplace that already interprets young female advancement through romance and scandal. Rather than retreat from that gaze, she turns it into a contest over competence, rules, and reputation, making the appointment both a professional challenge and a public test of her marriage to Lu Xun.

Appointment and Institutional Setting

The Public Relations Department of Imperial Group has been unusually idle because its supervisor has been away for some time. Su Xiangcheng is sent in to restore order, but her arrival immediately unsettles the existing hierarchy. She looks younger than the other employees, and even a highly qualified deputy supervisor is described as unconvincing in the face of her appointment. The office therefore receives her not simply as a new manager, but as an outsider whose authority appears to have been granted from above rather than earned through the department’s normal career path.

The company’s gossip gives that suspicion a specifically gendered form. Before long, employees throughout the company know that a young and beautiful acting supervisor has arrived. Some speculate that she must be having an affair with an executive and suggest that Director Lu is the likely explanation. The rumors connect her professional position to the entertainment circle’s familiar arrangement between a celebrity and a financial backer, a relationship Lu Xun has already recognized as common but still feels sorry to see attached to Su Xiangcheng’s circumstances. Her appointment thus becomes a reputational spectacle: the office tries to explain a woman’s authority by reducing it to sexual access and executive protection.

The role also develops within the broader value of the Su Clan. Lu Xun recognizes that the Su Clan has a strong foundation and that abandoning it would be a pity, while also worrying that Su Xiangcheng might feel wronged. His decisions around her career are therefore caught between commercial calculation and personal protection. The acting position gives her a route into meaningful work, but it also carries the danger that every success will be credited to her connection with Lu Xun and every mistake treated as proof that she does not belong.

Confronting the Department’s Resistance

Su Xiangcheng is prepared for the hostility because she understands that a contested appointment can become more useful than an accepted one. In the tea room, women speak openly about her alleged affair with an executive. She does not answer with wounded indignation. Instead, she publicly turns the accusation against itself, stating that, as acting supervisor, she was supposedly born from an executive’s sleep and challenging anyone who disagrees to sleep with an executive and take the position themselves. Her response is deliberately sharp: she repeats the office’s insinuation so grotesquely that its hidden logic becomes visible.

The confrontation also establishes her method of leadership. Some employees hesitate and return to work, but others remain idle and refuse to recognize her authority. Su Xiangcheng responds by declaring that each of them will receive a penalty of three months’ salary, while offering bonuses of no less value to those capable of producing results. The measure is not merely retaliation. It converts the department’s informal judgment into an explicit performance system, replacing gossip and seniority with consequences that apply to conduct and output.

Annie, the most openly defiant employee, objects that Su Xiangcheng is only an acting supervisor and asks who she thinks she is to record punishments. The challenge exposes the central instability of the position: “acting” can mean temporary, but it is also being used as an argument that her orders need not be obeyed. Su Xiangcheng’s answer is to behave as the person responsible for the department now. Her authority is provisional in title, yet immediate in practice, and she refuses to let the temporary label become a license for paralysis.

Work as Performance and Proof

The appointment requires Su Xiangcheng to perform competence in settings where her identity is not fully known. Lu Xun’s special assistant, Gordon, informs her that Lu Xun has an evening meeting and needs two people from the Public Relations Department. She does not have to handle the assignment personally, but she believes that a new official should take responsibility. Her decision shows that the position is not being treated as a decorative title: she wants to establish its legitimacy through visible labor, including work that could have been delegated.

The banquet is attended by foreign merchants who do not know Su Xiangcheng personally or understand her true identity. That anonymity becomes an advantage. Freed from the immediate burden of being recognized as Lu Xun’s wife, she can be judged by the practical demands of public relations. Her alcohol tolerance is now much higher than before, although drinking makes her more boisterous and causes the merchants to laugh. She eventually joins her department in drinking the other side under the table, turning a potentially compromising social ritual into a successful piece of negotiation and team performance.

Lu Xun watches throughout the night as though his only task is to receive the guests’ flattery, while Su Xiangcheng manages the substantive work. She arranges for the foreign merchants to leave in an orderly fashion, and the result surprises him. The apparent ease of her performance conceals a physical cost: Gordon later reports that she secretly went to the bathroom to vomit. Her success therefore carries the double image that defines the role—public composure and private strain. She proves that she can represent Imperial Group, but the proof is achieved through emotional, bodily, and social labor that remains largely invisible to the people benefiting from it.

Marriage, Rumor, and Professional Authority

Su Xiangcheng’s office identity cannot be separated from her secret marriage to Lu Xun. At a meal, Song Yun’er discusses the secret marriage with Lu Xun in Su Xiangcheng’s presence as if the wife were not entitled to control the conversation. Su Xiangcheng finally interrupts with a calm but cutting reminder that she is Lu Xun’s wife and that Song Yun’er’s relationship with her has not reached the level at which the two women should discuss men together. Song Yun’er falls silent and soon leaves.

The exchange reveals why the acting appointment is so vulnerable to rumor. The marriage is hidden, yet the power associated with Lu Xun follows Su Xiangcheng into every public setting. Song Yun’er’s later phone call makes the same pressure more explicit: she accuses Lu Xun of treating matters involving Su Xiangnan as more important than her own concerns and condemns him for it. Whether the charge is fair or not, it shows how private loyalties are translated into competing claims upon Lu Xun’s time and protection. Su Xiangcheng’s professional standing is consequently entangled with a network of women, executives, family interests, and public assumptions about who is allowed to demand a powerful man’s attention.

Lu Xun also uses commercial power in defense of Su Xiangcheng. In negotiating with Lin Yanche over the East District land, he makes noninterference in his affairs with Susu a condition. Su Xiangcheng realizes that he is willing to fight Lin Yanche for her sake and to use a major transaction to force a separation. This protection safeguards her personal position, but it also confirms the difficulty she faces in proving that her opportunities are independent of Lu Xun’s influence. The same man who opens a path for her into Imperial Group can become the unseen explanation offered by everyone who doubts that she earned it.

Expansion of Her Role and Its Costs

The acting-supervisor state develops beyond the office and into the surrounding network of Imperial Group, family, and celebrity relations. When Su Xiangcheng enters a room where Lu Xun is speaking with a guest, she initially withdraws after seeing that someone is present. Lu Xun calls her back and addresses her as Manager Su, while she addresses another senior figure as Chief Su and takes the seat Lu Xun indicates. The scene is small but important: professional titles begin to structure interactions that had previously been governed mainly by marriage, kinship, or private intimacy.

Her work also places her near the arrangements that support other people’s careers. Lu Xun discusses giving Shen Yiyun’s commercial an opportunity to be seen across Cloud City, praising Shen Yiyun’s acting and asking that her future be protected. Su Xiangcheng enters while this negotiation is underway, and Lu Xun instructs her to wait. The moment positions her simultaneously as an executive participant, a subordinate in a formal workplace, and Lu Xun’s wife. She must learn to move between those roles without allowing any one of them to erase the others.

The state is further shadowed by the wider conflict surrounding Lu Xun. Lu Xun and Lin Yanche travel to Yan City, where Chu Fei’s men are waiting at the airport as if their arrival had been calculated in advance. Lu Xun has brought many people and is not immediately worried about their safety, but the appearance of Chu Fei’s forces resolves the doubts surrounding the journey. Later, a black truck brings Chu Fei and Lu Xun to the villa, with Lin Yanche following them in a strikingly altered condition: unshaven, unkempt, and extremely thin. These developments remind the reader that Su Xiangcheng’s professional advancement takes place amid dangerous alliances and personal crises, not within a stable corporate world.

The role also reveals the uneven economy of care in her marriage. When Su Xiangwan is weak with a prolonged fever, Mo Beiyu feeds her warm water by supporting her against him, insisting that she drink after she has been ill for two days. In another domestic scene, Lu Xun tells an associate that a wound is minor and that he prefers to handle his own care rather than have Su Xiangcheng serve him. These contrasting gestures place Su Xiangcheng within a system where women are repeatedly expected to care for injured or ill men, even as she herself is sometimes a patient or recipient of protection. Acting supervisor status gives her a public duty and a measure of command, but it does not erase the private expectations attached to wifehood.

Su Xiangcheng serving as acting PR supervisor at Imperial Group therefore represents more than a temporary transfer. It is her attempt to claim a professional self inside a structure dominated by Lu Xun’s capital, reputation, and commands. She meets sexist gossip with theatrical candor, idleness with measurable sanctions, and a high-pressure banquet with disciplined performance. Yet the position remains double-edged: it grants her visibility while exposing her to suspicion, and it offers independence while making Lu Xun’s protection impossible to ignore. Her authority begins as an appointment others can dismiss as favoritism, but through confrontation and labor she turns it into an active, if still contested, form of power.