Ruilang's Gender Role In Xu Jifang

Before Ruilang met Xu Jifang at the festival, Ruilang does not clearly define his gender role to the readers. We only know that he is a boy with “matchless beauty”, which his brows like “crescent moons, his eyes like autumn pools, his lips like cherries, his waist like a willow front (Li, 105). Ruilang’s father perceives his son as a female rather than a male because at the beginning of the story, we learned that Ruilang is not allow to go out without his father’s permission. Usually males can go out whatever they want both before and after marriage, but female cannot. Ruilang’s sexual orientation changed to bisexual after Xu Jifang saved Ruilang from falling down the cliff, Ruilang thought to himself, “if I never have a lover, well and