Ah Zhu and Ah Zi

Ah Zhu and Ah Zi are sisters whose shared parentage is concealed by their separate childhoods and disclosed through matching marks: each bears a red Duan character on her shoulder. Their relationship joins a story of abandoned daughters to a later bond of protection and remembrance. Ah Zhu’s final request that Xiao Feng look after Ah Zi carries the sisters’ separation forward as an obligation, while Ah Zi’s recollections show how she comes to understand the love her sister had for him.

Identity and Separation

Ah Zhu and Ah Zi are the daughters of Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu. Duan Zhengchun had already married Dao Baifeng, and his relationship with Ruan Xingzhu was one of several romances from his youth in the Central Plains. When he wished to return to Dali, he and Ruan Xingzhu argued and separated. Their daughters were born about a year apart, but neither could remain with their mother: Ruan Xingzhu feared that her strict father would kill her if he learned of the relationship, and sent both girls to be raised by other families.

The sisters were too young to recognize their parents or one another. Ah Zhu was just over a year old when she was given to another household; the person who adopted her knew only that her mother’s surname was Ruan. To leave a way for the girls to be recognized, Ruan Xingzhu had a red Duan character tattooed on each daughter’s shoulder. Their matching gold locks offered another identifying sign: Ah Zhu later notes that hers and Ah Zi’s bear the same twelve characters. These marks preserve the family connection even as fosterage and distance obscure it.

Recognition and Shared Childhood

Ah Zhu learns that she and Ah Zi are sisters after seeing the mark on Ah Zi’s shoulder. She explains the discovery to Xiao Feng, who then understands that she, too, is Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu’s daughter. The recognition reverses the sisters’ apparent separation: the identifying mark is not merely a sign of their father’s family but evidence of their mother’s effort to make a future reunion possible.

Ah Zhu connects their childhoods to Xiao Feng’s own lost family history. She tells him that, on hearing people discuss his origins in the Apricot Forest, she felt pity for him because they were both children separated from their parents. The parallel does not erase the differences in their circumstances, but it lets Ah Zhu describe their shared experience as an early kinship of loss. Her compassion for Xiao Feng is thus framed alongside the knowledge that she and Ah Zi were also deprived of the chance to grow up with their parents or with one another.

Ah Zhu’s Request and Ah Zi’s Place in Their Bond

As Ah Zhu lies gravely ill, she insists on finishing what she has to tell Xiao Feng. She asks him to keep an eye on Ah Zi because she has only one younger sister, the two have lost their childhood together, and she fears Ah Zi may go astray. Xiao Feng initially answers as though recovery and reunion are still possible, imagining that they will find Ah Zi once Ah Zhu is well. Ah Zhu instead imagines the younger sister joining them beyond Yanmen Pass, where the three might ride, hunt, and tend cattle and sheep. The imagined future makes the separation tangible: the sisters have found each other only after the years in which they might have shared such a life.

Ah Zi overhears this exchange and rejects the labels of elder sister and brother-in-law, saying she will not go. Even in that moment of refusal, the conversation establishes the place Ah Zhu wants her to have in the future she and Xiao Feng had planned. Ah Zhu’s request also turns her sisterhood into a charge entrusted to Xiao Feng: she cannot restore the time they lost, but she can ask him to protect Ah Zi and keep the possibility of reunion alive.

Memory, Understanding, and Legacy

Later, when Ah Zi and Xiao Feng are together in danger, Ah Zi acknowledges that her earlier attack with a poison needle was meant to immobilize him so that he could not leave her. She explains that she feared he might abandon her and tells him she now understands why Ah Zhu loved him. Xiao Feng’s pity for Ah Zi is sharpened by the knowledge that she is suffering alongside him; he recalls Ah Zhu’s devotion and wonders how Ah Zi could understand it. The exchange shows both the persistence of the sisters’ bond and the distance between them: Ah Zi can recognize her sister’s love, but cannot claim to know fully what it meant to her.

Ah Zi also recalls how her parents and one of Duan Zhengchun’s attendants had admired Xiao Feng’s martial skill after he left Little Mirror Lake. They discussed his fight at Juxian Manor, where he sought treatment for a woman whom they did not know was Ah Zhu. They condemned him for alleged cruelty toward his foster parents and master, yet also noted his loyalty to the woman he had helped. Ah Zi laughs as she recounts the contradiction, then recalls Ruan Xingzhu’s defense of a man’s faithfulness. Through this remembered conversation, Ah Zi presents her sister’s love as part of a wider contrast between public judgment and private loyalty.

Ah Zi’s recollections become a form of consolation for Xiao Feng. She tells him that her mother praised his faithfulness, even while criticizing Duan Zhengchun’s many romances and observing that her daughters, too, could be cruel. The account does not turn the sisters into identical figures: Ah Zhu’s care appears in her appeal that Xiao Feng protect Ah Zi, while Ah Zi’s attachment is marked by her fear of being left and her eventual recognition of her sister’s love. Their relationship therefore persists not through a shared upbringing, which they were denied, but through the marks that disclose their origin, Ah Zhu’s final concern for her younger sister, and the memories Ah Zi carries into her conversations with Xiao Feng.