Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun's Marriage is the central relationship through which the narrative turns contractual obligation into an unstable struggle over love, freedom, dignity, and possession. Lu Xun publicly identifies Su Xiangwan as his wife and later refuses to let the marriage end, but the union is never allowed to settle into ordinary domesticity. It is marked instead by a five-hundred-million financial stake, competing women and family ties, threats against outsiders, bodily vulnerability, and repeated attempts to define what a husband and wife owe each other.

A Marriage Defined by Terms and Distance

Su Xiangwan understands from the beginning that the marriage does not resemble other marriages. She tells Lu Xun that she will do what she should during the marriage, while warning that he may replace her whenever he wishes and that she will not object. Her formulation gives the relationship the language of duty rather than desire: she offers performance, not a claim on his heart, and measures her own future by the possibility of being discarded.

The financial structure makes that emotional distance concrete. When Su Xiangwan seeks a divorce, she says that she will take none of Lu Xun's property or alimony and proposes converting the five hundred million in his capital into shares, returning both the principal and its interest. Her attempt to settle the marriage as an account reveals her determination to preserve independence even while acknowledging the material basis of the union. Lu Xun answers with contempt, reducing the bargain to the value of sexual access and comparing her unfavorably with the sacrifices he has made for Song Yun'er. The exchange exposes the marriage's governing imbalance: Su Xiangwan treats its obligations as something that can be repaid, while Lu Xun treats its emotional and sexual meaning as something he alone can price.

Public Recognition and Private Insecurity

Lu Xun nevertheless insists on giving the relationship a public name. When he visits Wang Taili, an old comrade of his father and a close chess friend of the family, he introduces Su Xiangwan solemnly as his wife rather than as a girlfriend. Su Xiangwan responds by accompanying him obediently and listening with a smile. The scene supplies the social legitimacy that the marriage lacks in private: before an older family connection, Lu Xun claims her, and she performs the role expected of his spouse.

That recognition does not erase the threats surrounding the union. Song Yun'er describes herself as someone who has been abandoned and attributes Lu Xun's present condition to her own earlier choices. Her tears and accusation turn the marriage into evidence of an old emotional injury: in her account, Lu Xun married another woman to anger her and made do with a wife he did not truly choose. Lu Xun's cold laughter makes the encounter a contest over humiliation rather than reconciliation, while Song Yun'er's presence confirms that Su Xiangwan's marriage is haunted by a prior attachment that has never become emotionally irrelevant.

The same insecurity reappears through kinship language. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is his adopted uncle's child and therefore his cousin, adding that she came to Cloud City to perform and that he arranged accommodation closer to the theater. Su Xiangwan compares this explanation with the earlier Song Yun'er situation and objects that such matters should have been disclosed proactively. Later, she challenges the idea that a non-blood relative should be treated as an unquestionable boundary, arguing that a named relative remains a man and a woman. The marriage therefore becomes a site where legal or familial labels are repeatedly tested against romantic suspicion.

Separation, Pursuit, and the Refusal of Divorce

The marriage reaches a dark point when Su Xiangwan asks for divorce and Lu Xun refuses to accept the separation. He tells her to come home with him, calls her affectionately, promises that he will not divorce her, and says that he will settle any trouble she causes rather than permit the relationship to break apart. This gesture changes the immediate direction of the plot: Su Xiangwan's attempt to convert the marriage into a clean financial settlement is met by Lu Xun's insistence that the bond cannot be reduced to property or dissolved by her decision alone.

Yet the refusal is double-edged. Lu Xun's language presents persistence as reassurance, but it also shows his need to retain control over the marriage's continuation. The same relationship that gives Su Xiangwan a recognized status restricts her ability to leave. This tension is intensified by the wider pattern of coercion attached to their union. Lu Xun later forces Su Xiangwan to have sex, and when she collapses by the roadside after being tortured to such a state, Mo Beiyu condemns him as a rapist and says that a body-identification notice might otherwise have followed. The marriage's romantic framing cannot safely absorb this fact: the husband role and the perpetrator role occupy the same figure, making the relationship's claims of protection inseparable from the danger of domination.

Rival Attachments and the Marriage's Social Consequences

The marriage is also entangled with the crises of other couples. Su Xiangwan discovers Su Qingrou weeping, with deep and shallow kiss marks on her body, after Lin Yanche has locked her inside the manor. A photograph showing Lin Yanche passionately embracing Song Yun'er, taken at the same time, gives the scene an additional layer of betrayal. Su Xiangwan's pain for her sister is not separate from her own marital anxiety: the image of a woman trapped by one man's violence and confronted with another man's apparent infidelity reflects the larger world in which marriage names, sexual claims, and coercive power repeatedly diverge.

Su Qingrou later proposes holding a small engagement ceremony with Jin Zhengnan, primarily for the benefit of their two companies. She asks Su Xiangwan's opinion and dismisses concern about Lin Yanche by reminding her that they have a brother. The proposed engagement reveals how intimate arrangements in this family also function as corporate instruments, while the troubled marriage of Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun provides the background against which every new promise is evaluated. Personal commitment is never purely personal; it carries company interests, family protection, and the threat of retaliation.

Lu Xun's conflict with Chu Fei further places the marriage inside a rivalry over Su Xiangwan. Chu Fei says that he once desired a woman who was similarly presented as a close relative, though they ultimately had no blood relationship, and declares that he liked her greatly. He calls Lu Xun an eyesore and says that he prefers the process of pursuit to immediate possession, allowing the chase to continue as long as possible. Lu Xun reads this as a plan concerning Su Xiangwan. The exchange contrasts two forms of romantic pursuit—Lu Xun's claim to an existing marriage and Chu Fei's deliberate cultivation of pursuit—while showing that Su Xiangwan's own wishes risk being displaced by male competition.

Bodies, Care, and the Possibility of Recognition

The marriage's emotional movement is often registered through the body before it is articulated in words. After Lu Xun loses his temper over a wedding gown, Su Xiangwan admits that the incident still casts a shadow over her. In the car, she receives from Su Qingrou a picture book filled with clothing designs, and the exchange redirects attention from marital injury toward her sister's creative work. The wedding gown remains an object of unresolved feeling: it represents preparation for a shared future, but also the damage left when Lu Xun destroys what he prepared for her.

Illness makes the relationship's power more intimate and more immediate. After kicking off her blanket during the night, Su Xiangwan develops a fever the next morning; her body aches and she has almost no strength. She asks Manager Wu to buy antipyretic medicine, while he worries that Lu Xun will be anxious if he learns she is ill. The episode exposes a fragile form of domestic care that is mediated through household staff and concern for Lu Xun's reaction rather than through Su Xiangwan's direct dependence on her husband.

At another point, when Lu Xun asks what their relationship is, Su Xiangwan pulls off his shirt flirtatiously and identifies him as her husband. His uncertainty is revealing: even with marriage as an established fact, he wonders whether she recognizes him in that role, while she can name the relationship with apparent ease. The moment briefly reverses the marriage's usual instability. The title is no longer merely a public declaration or a legal arrangement; it becomes an answer supplied by Su Xiangwan herself, though the surrounding doubt shows how precarious that recognition remains.

Significance and Unresolved Promise

Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun's Marriage operates as both romance plot and ethical pressure point. Its movement resembles a cycle of approach, rejection, attempted separation, and forced return, but it does not offer uncomplicated proof that possession has become love. Lu Xun publicly claims Su Xiangwan, refuses divorce, and seeks to bring her home; at the same time, his contempt, jealousy, coercion, and control repeatedly threaten the dignity and freedom that marriage is supposed to secure.

The relationship also unsettles the boundaries between spouse, rival, cousin, adopted relative, and pursued woman. Shen Yiyun's status as Lu Xun's cousin, Chu Fei's attraction to a woman presented as kin, Song Yun'er's abandoned attachment, and the challenges raised by Su Xiangwan all show that names of belonging can protect intimacy, disguise desire, or become weapons in conflict. Against this unstable network, the marriage's decisive question is not whether Lu Xun can keep Su Xiangwan, but whether the marital name can ever be separated from the unequal power through which he keeps her. The available episodes leave that promise unresolved: the union survives as a bond, yet its survival remains contested by the difference between being called a wife and being treated as a free and fully recognized partner.