Wei Xuan

Wei Xuan is Shen Tang’s biological father, but his significance lies less in an active presence than in the damage left by his disappearance. He enters the story through the Shen family’s account of Shen Xiuxiu’s lost years: a young man who drew her away from her family, concealed or embodied a deeply exploitative household structure, and ultimately became associated with coercion, domestic abuse, abandonment, and the unresolved disappearance of his child. His absence is therefore not empty space. It is the condition that shaped Shen Tang’s orphaned childhood, her mother’s death, and the painful reconstruction of the Shen family’s identity.

Identity and Background

Wei Xuan became important to Shen Xiuxiu when she was attending college. The Shen family was scholarly and had cherished Shen Xiuxiu as its only daughter, yet her relationship with Wei Xuan made her increasingly rebellious and determined to stay with him. Her relatives investigated him and learned that he came from a rural village. His background by itself was not the decisive objection. The alarming details concerned the family system around him: he had five older sisters who had left school early to marry, with their earnings used to support him as the only son, while the household practiced pronounced preference for sons over daughters.

The family also learned that Wei Xuan already had a girlfriend in his hometown and that she had become pregnant while they were still in high school. Shen Xiuxiu rejected these reports, believing that her relatives had fabricated them because they despised his origins. The account does not present the conflict as a simple disagreement over class or rural identity. Instead, it places Wei Xuan within a pattern of unequal family obligations, concealed commitments, and persuasive manipulation that Shen Xiuxiu was unable or unwilling to recognize at the time.

Relationship with Shen Xiuxiu

The relationship moved rapidly from youthful attachment to estrangement from her family. When Shen Xiuxiu became pregnant outside marriage, the Shen family intended for her to have an abortion. Under Wei Xuan’s urging, however, she ran away from home rather than submit to that decision. She took no valuable possessions with her and left only a letter, turning what might have been a family confrontation into a complete disappearance.

The family initially assumed that hardship would force her to return. When she stopped attending university, they realized that the situation was more serious and began searching for her. They learned that she had left with Wei Xuan, but no one knew where the pair had gone. Even a search in Wei Xuan’s hometown produced no trace. His role in the story is thus tied to a chain of broken assurances: he was persuasive enough to make Shen Xiuxiu abandon her family, yet elusive enough that the family could not locate him afterward.

Abuse, Disappearance, and Family Ruin

More than a decade later, the Shen family reconstructed the final stage of Shen Xiuxiu’s life. When relatives eventually found her, she was far more haggard than before, her body covered in bruises from long-term abuse. A blow to her head had left her on the brink of death, and a neighbor had taken her to the hospital. The evidence identifies Wei Xuan as the man connected to this prolonged violence, while also emphasizing that he vanished when the family went to look for him.

Wei Xuan disappeared without a trace together with the child, while Shen Tang was also gone. Shen Boyuan later admitted that he sometimes thought that arriving sooner might have saved his sister. This regret gives Wei Xuan’s absence a second force: he is not merely an estranged partner but the figure around whom the family’s delay, guilt, and grief accumulate. Shen Xiuxiu’s death is presented through the consequences of the abuse rather than through a direct confrontation with her abuser, making the family’s testimony the only surviving route to understanding what happened.

Shen Tang’s Origins and the Meaning of Care

Wei Xuan’s disappearance left Shen Tang outside the family that should have raised her. The child from that history grew up in the Orphanage, where she regarded the other children as brothers and sisters even without a blood connection. One eight-year-old boy from the institution contracted leukemia, and Shen Tang had spent her savings helping pay for his surgery. Her commitment to the children was so extensive that, apart from money recently provided by her contractual husband, she was essentially penniless.

This contrast defines Wei Xuan’s place in Shen Tang’s character arc. Blood makes him her father, but it does not make him a source of protection, loyalty, or belonging. The children of the Orphanage are not her biological siblings, yet she treats their survival as her responsibility. The original Shen Tang’s ambition to become successful and earn money was partly self-directed and partly intended to support those children. Against that practical, sustained form of chosen family, Wei Xuan’s biological connection appears morally hollow.

The distinction also complicates Shen Tang’s feelings after the family history is revealed. She experiences guilt and disgust because Wei Xuan’s blood runs through her veins, as though his actions had contaminated her identity. The narrative does not make her responsible for his conduct; instead, her reaction shows how inherited identity can become a burden even when character and action have diverged from ancestry. Wei Xuan’s legacy is therefore psychological as well as historical: he makes Shen Tang question whether blood can carry guilt, while her life demonstrates that care is created through conduct.

Narrative Role and Significance

Wei Xuan never needs to dominate the present-day action to remain structurally powerful. His choices explain why Shen Tang was separated from the Shen family, why Shen Xiuxiu died, why the family spent years searching, and why a later blood test carries such emotional weight. When the hospital confirms that Shen Tang and the family are biologically related, the result establishes the fact of kinship but cannot repair the years of absence. The test proves lineage; it does not erase abandonment.

His story also exposes several competing definitions of family. The Shen family’s initial attempt to control Shen Xiuxiu’s pregnancy reveals the pressure of parental authority and social expectation, while Wei Xuan’s influence turns romantic attachment into isolation. The Gu family’s acceptance of Shen Tang, the Orphanage’s practical bonds, and Shen Lan’s invitation for Shen Tang to meet her girlfriend all offer different models of belonging beyond the narrow question of blood. Against these relationships, Wei Xuan functions as a negative example of biological fatherhood: a man whose connection to Shen Tang is established genetically but denied through action.

The later domestic warmth of the Shen household intensifies that contrast. Shen Boyuan cooks for Shen Tang and welcomes her home, surprising her because his public image had seemed distant and austere. Such ordinary care supplies what Wei Xuan never did: presence, labor, and an unforced attempt to make a returned family member feel at home. Wei Xuan’s decisive narrative function is consequently to define the wound that reunion must address. He is the absent father behind Shen Tang’s orphaned identity, the alleged manipulator behind Shen Xiuxiu’s fatal departure, and the enduring reminder that a family can be recovered by truth and care only after violence has already changed it forever.