Twelve-year-old period

The period of age twelve is not merely a date in the characters’ biographies; it is a buried threshold at which childhood gives way to danger, guilt, and an enduring distrust of safety. Lu Xun survives a kidnapping that nearly kills him, while Su Xiangwan remembers the moment when her mother, believed to be terminally ill, walked onto a balcony after seeing a child’s drawing. These two memories remain central to the novel’s understanding of how early catastrophe can govern adult relationships long after the immediate event has ended.

Two Childhood Wounds

Lu Xun recalls that he was kidnapped at twelve and that the kidnappers forced him to take various medicines, leaving him close to death. The experience also involved a little girl of approximately his age who was killed alongside him. His account is delivered with striking emotional control: he looks directly at the pain of the past as though recounting someone else’s life, and the narration observes that the suffering, though unforgettable, no longer feels exactly as it once did. The distance suggests survival without erasure. The event has receded in time, but it remains a permanent point of reference for his body and memory.

Su Xiangwan’s recollection of the same age period is shaped by a different form of helplessness. Her grandfather had told the family that her mother suffered from a terminal illness and did not want to implicate them. He believed Su Xiangwan was too young to remember, but she does remember: while drawing, she depicted her father and mother holding her hand, and after her mother saw the picture, she walked onto the balcony. The memory binds childhood creativity to unbearable guilt. The child did not cause the tragedy, yet the remembered sequence leaves her confronting the drawing as if it were part of the event’s chain of responsibility.

How the Past Returns

Lu Xun’s kidnapping becomes relevant in the present because it explains his resistance to drugs. He tells Su Xiangwan that the medicines used by the kidnappers left him resistant to many drugs, making such methods ineffective against him. A past assault therefore survives not only as a story but as a lasting bodily consequence. The disclosure changes the meaning of his apparent composure: his calm is not evidence that nothing happened, but evidence that an old danger has been incorporated into the way he understands threats.

The memory also alters the emotional balance between Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. When he mentions that his first love at twelve was the girl who deceived him and nearly caused his death, Su Xiangwan does not respond with jealousy. Instead, she feels pity for the child he had been and recognizes the disproportion between his young age and the severity of what he endured. His confession transforms a potentially competitive romantic memory into an act of witnessing. The past does not disappear, but it can be received differently when another person responds with concern rather than suspicion.

Su Xiangwan’s maternal trauma likewise returns through fear and physical vulnerability. In a later episode, while burning with fever and losing consciousness, she collapses at the elevator before she can press the button. The bodily crisis recalls the broader pattern by which danger overwhelms her capacity to act or escape. The novel does not state that the fever is identical to the childhood trauma, but it places the memory of early loss beside later scenes of collapse, making physical weakness another route through which insecurity becomes visible.

Fear, Care, and Attachment

The age-twelve memories help explain why care in the novel is rarely simple comfort. Lu Xun responds to danger with vigilance, control, and intense protection, while Su Xiangwan carries fear that can surface as tears, withdrawal, or bodily shutdown. After she becomes frightened, she tells Lu Xun that she is scared, and he holds her, assuring her that he has been there all along. The reassurance is powerful precisely because it answers the abandonment embedded in both characters’ histories: one survived captivity after being left at the mercy of kidnappers, and the other witnessed a mother’s disappearance from the family’s emotional world.

Yet the same protective impulse can carry the pressure of control. Lu Xun’s childhood near-death experience makes threats feel immediate even when the danger is mediated through another person’s actions. His response to Su Xiangwan’s vulnerability is therefore not detached sympathy but an attempt to keep her within reach. The period of age twelve functions as the hidden source of that intensity, turning protection into both a refuge and a potential constraint.

Narrative Significance

These memories are revealed retrospectively rather than presented as a continuous childhood narrative. The novel first shows adult reactions—drug resistance, fear, collapse, and the need to be held—then opens the past behind them. This delayed structure makes the memories explanatory without making them fully reparative. Knowing what happened clarifies the characters’ behavior, but it does not undo the kidnapping, the girl’s death, or the mother’s suicide.

The two histories also create a deliberate contrast. Lu Xun’s trauma is a story of abduction, chemical coercion, survival, and the loss of a companion; Su Xiangwan’s is a story of illness, family silence, a child’s guilt, and maternal suicide. One wound is inflicted by strangers, the other is absorbed within the family, yet both produce the same central question of whether loved ones can remain present when danger arrives. The period of age twelve thus becomes a shared symbolic boundary: childhood is supposed to promise protection, but for these characters it becomes the moment when protection fails and later love must attempt, imperfectly, to answer that failure.