Sun Jie and Wu Liyao's marriage

Sun Jie and Wu Liyao’s marriage emerges through the details Sun Jie shares after Wu Liyao disappears and is found dead. His recollections establish a life organized around touring and childcare, a painful disagreement over another pregnancy, and a warning he says he failed to make others believe: Wu Liyao had been watched before she vanished. The marriage is presented not as a simple explanation for her absence, but as a relationship whose ordinary pressures and unfinished grief complicate the search for what happened to her.

A Marriage Shaped by Touring

When Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling approach Sun Jie at the monastery where he is staying, he avoids discussing his wife in the monks’ communal room and leads them to a deserted square beneath the balconies of their living quarters. There, after Li Yan explains that the police have recovered a woman’s body that may be Wu Liyao’s, Sun Jie asks whether she is dead. His response is restrained; the account emphasizes how long he remains silent before asking why the body might be hers. He agrees to identify it, a necessary act that makes the possibility of her death immediate without resolving the marriage’s history.

Sun Jie describes Wu Liyao’s disappearance as sudden and inconsistent with the arrangements she had left behind. She went shopping on a Saturday morning and did not return. A pot of soup remained on the stove, she had begun a letter to her mother, and she had washed clothes to pack for a tour. These unfinished domestic tasks form the basis of his conviction that she intended to come home. He rejects the suggestion that she had planned to leave or was seeing someone else, explaining that the troupe’s demands left the couple little time even for each other. The touring life thus appears both as a practical constraint on their intimacy and as the context in which Wu Liyao’s absence first seemed inexplicable.

The Warning Sun Jie Says Was Dismissed

Sun Jie also tells the investigators that Wu Liyao had described being followed. He says she first saw a man in the atrium outside the theatre after a performance, then again on a bus. At first she did not consider these encounters alarming. A few days later, according to Sun Jie, she saw the same man smoking near the bus stop outside the exhibition hall and watching her board. She later encountered him in their street, standing just inside an alley entrance; by then she was frightened enough to tell her husband.

The account reaches Li Yan as an unexpected lead: the report he has seen contains no mention of a man following Wu Liyao. Sun Jie says that people had not believed him when he raised it, treating him as a distraught husband looking for excuses for a wife who had left. His claim is presented as testimony, not as an independently confirmed identification of the follower. Even so, the repeated sightings give the investigation a different possibility to consider: Wu Liyao may have been watched before she disappeared. What Sun Jie knew, and what the investigation had failed to record, become sharply distinct.

Their Daughter and the Unresolved Pregnancy

When Li Yan later returns to speak with Sun Jie, the question of whether the couple had children opens another part of their shared history. Sun Jie has an eight-year-old daughter. His mother looked after her while he and Wu Liyao performed or travelled on tour and now cares for her full-time. Li Yan tells Margaret Campbell that Sun Jie hardly knows his daughter and that she scarcely knows her father. The details give the touring life a consequence beyond the couple’s limited time together: it has also left the father and daughter distant.

Sun Jie recounts a further conflict from a couple of years before Wu Liyao’s disappearance. She became pregnant again, and he suspected that she hoped for a boy. He responded by warning that having another child would bring heavy penalties under the One-Child Policy. The disagreement became severe; eventually Wu Liyao agreed to end the pregnancy, and Sun Jie later acknowledged that he had bullied her into that decision. He believed their relationship never fully recovered. During a later argument, she blamed him for the death of their unborn child. The recollection presents the decision not as a closed episode but as a lasting fracture, one that Sun Jie still carries as regret.

Grief, Disclosure, and the Investigation

At the later meeting, Sun Jie is preparing to leave after the acrobatic show. He initially responds to Li Yan with hostility and says he needs to put Wu Liyao’s death behind him. When Li Yan asks about children, however, Sun Jie’s composure gives way as he recounts the family history. Margaret Campbell watches without understanding their Chinese conversation, yet reads the pain in his expression and sees him begin to cry. The contrast with the mortuary is notable: he had not wept while identifying his wife’s body, but now, in the dressing room, tears come as he speaks about the child and the marriage’s damaged past.

Sun Jie’s account also alters the emotional terms of the investigation. His story links Wu Liyao’s disappearance to a reported pattern of surveillance, while his memories of the pregnancy disclose how the couple’s relationship had changed before she vanished. Li Yan recognizes that the abortion conflict recalls his sister’s experience, and Margaret, hearing his account afterward, suddenly realizes that she has overlooked something important. The passage does not yet specify what she has understood. It does, however, place Sun Jie and Wu Liyao’s marriage at the intersection of personal loss and investigative discovery: a relationship remembered through unfinished domestic routines, an absent daughter’s distance, a painful decision, and a warning that may matter to the search for Wu Liyao’s killer.