The weight of an egg: 3.5 micrograms.
The weight of fifty million dollars in cash: 2.5 tons.
Jing Tian asked for the latter over the phone at Montage Laguna Beach, and what she mortgaged was the former.
She went there for egg retrieval. The surrogate child was expected to be born in 2027; if things went faster, the child could even be born in the Year of the Horse. This was her own suggestion. Once at the clinic, she said that without fifty million, she wouldn't proceed.
Montage Laguna Beach sits on a sea cliff, with the Pacific Ocean below. I booked the entire floor for thirty days for one million dollars, just for her privacy. She stayed for eight days and left.
For the remaining twenty-two days, the hotel cleaners went up as usual. My assistant told me she ran into one while returning the keys: a Mexican woman pushing a cart, going room by room, changing towels, wiping surfaces, tucking in bed corners, and closing the doors behind her. It took two hours to finish the entire floor.
The assistant asked her why she was still cleaning when no one was staying there.
She said the registry showed someone was there.
A Palace of Versailles that had lost its queen.
I suddenly realized that Jing Tian liked this. She liked a place being empty because of her. She liked it when nothing happened.
Along with the empty Montage Laguna Beach, a Gulfstream G700 sat awkwardly at Van Nuys, with the crew reporting for duty every day.
She made that call on the eighth day. No one saw her after that.
---
In 2007, someone was already burning money for her. That year, I had just entered Peking University.
Of course, I wasn't the one burning the money.
A QQ window popped up, and she was the spokesperson. It was on that old Lenovo IBM machine with a blurry resolution. I saved the image.
I was surfing the web in a Peking University dormitory that cost a thousand yuan a year in rent. I found her on Xiaonei and sent a friend request. Xiaonei required a message; I wrote and deleted, deleted and wrote for about forty minutes, and finally sent: "Hello."
She didn't accept.
Perhaps she never even used Xiaonei.
In the years that followed, whenever I did anything, I thought about one question: at what point would she accept? I thought about it at my first billion, and I thought about it at ten billion.
Later, I stopped thinking about it. Renren had long since gone bankrupt.
I never applied a second time.
In 2011, Beijing was cold. I bought a down jacket for one hundred and fifty yuan. I remember the price because I hesitated for three days.
That same year, she filmed a 150-million-yuan movie, "The Warring States." Sun Honglei, Francis Ng, Kim Hee-sun, Kiichi Nakai, and Jiang Wu were invited as foils, much like Montage Laguna Beach and the Gulfstream G700 nineteen years later. They didn't know why they were there; since they had come, something had to happen, but nothing did.
Then came the $150 million "The Great Wall." Zhang Yimou, Andy Lau, Matt Damon. Then Jackie Chan. The list of the Jing Tian Universe grew longer and longer.
I was already in the US by then, studying, starting a business, getting busier. The only thing that didn't change was that no matter how much trouble it was, I transferred that QQ image to every new device I got.
Nineteen years later, my name was added to the list.
---
We met for the first time at the Rosewood. I always thought I would be nervous the day I met her.
I wasn't.
She was thinner than in her photos, dressed casually, leaning on the sofa. I looked at her and suddenly couldn't remember what I had been waiting for.
I took her to see Cattelan's banana. She looked at it for a long time and asked me, "How much is this?"
Six point two million dollars.
She said, "What if it rots?"
I was silent. She said, "Never mind, let's go watch a movie."
I said okay.
She said there couldn't be anyone else in the theater except the two of us.
I said okay.
I went out to make a call. When I came back, she was still standing in front of that banana.
The movie was "Zootopia 2."
A two-person screening room is a scene usually reserved for the Central Propaganda Department's reviews.
I had my assistant buy every seat in the cinema.
I had read articles criticizing fake box office numbers where theaters were sold out but only two people watched. Now I understood; maybe it wasn't all for the box office.
Buying all the seats wasn't hard; the trouble was the tickets already sold. The assistant and bodyguards went to the cinema entrance early, and when they met audience members who had bought tickets, they handed them cash.
A couple with a child arrived; the child was already holding popcorn high at the door.
The assistant handed over a stack of money. The child didn't understand why they couldn't go in, but the adults took the money, said thank you, asked nothing, and left.
That day, twenty-six people took the money.
After watching, she changed her WeChat avatar to Officer Judy.
That night, I rubbed her breasts with my hand, and she pushed me away.
I thought she was unwilling. I withdrew my hand, prepared to say something.
She didn't speak. She sat up, pulled a small bag from her purse, unzipped it, and inside was a row of items, like a set of tiny tools.
She said, "Your nails are scratching me; it hurts."
I took a look. I had always just clipped them casually with a nail clipper; the edges were sharp, though I never noticed.
She said, "Come here."
She placed my hand on her lap and filed them one by one.
First the coarse side, then another side, then another. She would file for a bit, hold it up to the light to check, and then continue.
I asked how long this would take.
She said, "Until they don't scratch anymore."
For ten fingers, she spent nearly an hour.
In between, she taught me: this side is for shaping, this side is for polishing, and the last side shouldn't be rubbed back and forth, but in one direction.
I said okay.
When she finished, she turned my hand over to look and felt it.
She said, "There, it's done."
"Touch me now, wherever you want."
At one point, she said, "If I'm not around in the future, no one will ever polish your nails for you again."
I smiled and said nothing.
When I had known her for three months, I had someone prepare a document. Her projects over the years, partners, company equity, Jing Guoqing, Tian Xinai, all the associated accounts, the apartment rented in Beijing, the house bought in Shanghai, and some other things. It was finished in a week, forty-some pages in total. There were also some matters involving men and women, which I felt were the least important.
There were things in there she later told me about, but what she said was different from what was written. I didn't say anything.
There were things she never mentioned. I didn't ask.
I believed everything she said.
I kept that document; I've kept it until now.
But I didn't believe a single word of it.
---
She said, "There are too many people in Hong Kong, I'll be recognized. Let's go somewhere else."
I said okay.
She pointed to Tenerife on the map.
I said okay.
I went out to make a call and only then found out it was in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of Africa. The next day at noon, our group of thirty set off; the A330 was waiting at the airport.
In the plane's bedroom, she asked me, "Is my name pretty?"
I said it was.
She said, "My father's surname and my mother's surname are put together. Isn't that a coincidence?"
I said I remembered it from the first day.
She hugged me and said, "Don't call me Jing Tian anymore. Call me Mom."
"Okay, Mom."
After landing, the captain came to tell me, "Boss, they didn't want to let us land at first. They've never seen a private jet this big on the island."
The rules on the island were the same: no one could be around. The assistant handled it; no one asked why, and this time I didn't ask how many people were involved.
The Ritz-Carlton faced the Atlantic, and the floor-to-ceiling windows were too large. She couldn't have a single ray of light while sleeping. The assistant used black tape to seal the entire room; outside it was bright as day, but inside it was as dark as a solitary confinement cell. The tape would peel off in the sun, so it had to be reapplied every day.
There were eleven assistants; they arrived at 6:30 AM and didn't leave until we were asleep. Two girls were responsible for the tape: one for the window frames, and one for the indicator lights on the air conditioner and outlets. After taping, they checked three times. They bought thirty rolls of tape and later added twenty more. They discovered that tape applied after 3 PM was most likely to fall off because the glass was hottest then, so they switched to mornings. No one taught them this; they figured it out themselves. They would discuss it among themselves like a craft.
She knew the names of those two girls. I didn't.
We stopped by the road in Teide National Park to watch the sunset. The assistant brought roses from the car and opened champagne.
Mom looked at the sea of clouds and said, "So beautiful. But not as beautiful as the sunset in Delingha, Qinghai."
I am from Qinghai.
I didn't say anything.
At night, we watched the stars on the mountain peak; it was still cold even in cotton coats.
Mom said, "Make a wish."
I asked, "What did you wish for?"
Mom said, "I'm not telling you."
Mom said, "It's too beautiful. But it's just too cold. Shall we go to the Maldives?"
I said, "Okay."
Tenerife was minus fifteen degrees; the Maldives was twenty-seven degrees. The straight-line distance was 9,500 kilometers, an eleven-hour flight. However, the airport in the Maldives was too small, so we had to switch from our wide-body jet to a small plane midway.
Mom said, "Small planes are so noisy. Big planes are better."
On the flight to the Maldives, in the bedroom, Mom told me her wish was to have a child with me. It had to be through surrogacy.
I never asked why. I assumed she was afraid of the pain.
Midway, Mom suddenly sat up to find her phone, connected to Starlink, and said, "Oh no."
I asked what was wrong.
She said, "Someone is threatening me. They've been asking for three days, and I haven't replied."
I asked, "How much?"
She said, "None of your business."
She typed for a long time, deleting and revising. After finishing, she placed the phone face down on her lap, then turned it over to look again after a while.
I asked who it was.
She said, "Someone I used to be with. Finance. They went to prison, took the fall for something."
"They're out now with nowhere to go and are determined to find me."
I said, "Just call the police and have them arrested."
She glanced at me. "You don't understand."
I asked, "Did you give it?"
She said, "I did."
"How much?"
"Eighty thousand."
I said, "You had to think for three days about that?"
She didn't speak.
She didn't say much for the rest of the day. She only fell asleep after we landed.
Mom's suitcase was the first to arrive at Soneva Jani. The luggage for thirty people couldn't fit on the small plane, so it was split among three. Mom had only one suitcase, on its own plane; she said she didn't want it placed with anyone else's.
Soneva Jani is famous for "no news, no shoes," and Mom was relieved.
The hotel butler, bodyguards, and assistants totaled twenty-six people, plus two drone operators following from a distance. The assistants started taping again: the air conditioner lights, the outlet lights, over and over.
At night, we exchanged our exes like secret codes, like a dynasty checking era names. Mom didn't want any mistakes, but she had a forbidden word: that athlete could not be mentioned.
I didn't mention him, though I knew the tattoo on Mom's back was for him.
Maybe it was too big to be removed.
She said, "We're family now. My parents didn't have it easy raising me; you have to give a bride price."
I said okay.
She gave two names, Jing Guoqing and Tian Xinai, and two accounts.
Thirty million RMB.
I transferred it. Those two names were ones I had first seen in those forty-some pages.
After a while, she handed me her phone to see. Tian Xinai had replied with two words: "Received."
Once Mom said, "Do you know what I'm thinking when I ask for these things?"
I asked, "What?"
She said, "I'm wondering if you'll ever say no."
I said, "I won't."
She said, "Then it's no fun."
I thought, is there anything I can't do?
When I was too bored, I played with that 2007 QQ image, trying to transfer it to a new device. Mom leaned over. "Why are you hiding a photo of another woman? Who is this?"
I was silent. I said nothing.
She saw the image was too blurry and went back to her business.
That night, I deleted the photo.
The next day, I recovered it from my old phone.
Mom was constantly scrolling on her phone. I asked what she was looking at.
She said it was nothing, just some nonsense about billing order disputes.
Billing order disputes—in a show, only one star can be ranked first. Even between the male and female leads, only one can be first.
I said, "How boring."
She said, "Yeah. What's harder is that sometimes there are 'set couples' who spend forty or fifty days together. They have sex at night and fight over billing order during the day."
I said, "That's so against human nature."
She said, "Yeah."
"But once the filming is over, no matter how many times they've had sex, it's as if nothing ever happened."
Then she watched for another half hour.
On January 2, 2026, at Soneva Jani, in the new year, I proposed to Mom.
I decided on the morning of January 1. The ring was in Hong Kong. There was nowhere to buy a ring on the island, so an assistant took a seaplane to Malé and returned in the afternoon with the ring in a hotel envelope.
Mom said, "The diamond is too small."
Mom said, "It's okay, you can get a bigger one later."
"Also, can you come to Beijing?"
I was silent.
She thought I didn't want to go.
Mom said, "Why are you so good to me?"
I said, "Because I like you."
She said, "Were you like this with others before?"
I said, "No."
She smiled and said nothing.
One morning I woke up early, and she wasn't in bed.
I went out to look; she was sitting on the terrace facing the sea. The entire sea was black. No lights were on; it wasn't dawn yet.
I asked why she was up so early.
She said, "I'm counting the days."
I asked, "Counting what?"
She said, "Go back to sleep."
I sat with her for a while, not knowing what to say. Later, I went back to sleep.
When I woke up again, she had already finished her makeup.
We stayed in the Maldives for fourteen days, and not a single person recognized her.
On the thirteenth night at the restaurant, she took off her sunglasses. After a while, she took off her hat and placed it on the table. She sat through the meal just like that. At the next table was an old German couple, and the waiter was Sri Lankan; no one gave her a second look.
After eating, she put her hat back on.
Mom said, "Let's go back."
I said, "Haven't you stayed long enough?"
She said, "It's too quiet."
Returning to Hong Kong, Mom met my parents.
That night she said, "The family needs to prepare for the meeting of both sets of parents and the wedding; we need to settle as much as possible. Still Jing Guoqing and Tian Xinai."
I didn't ask why.
I said, "Each card has a daily limit of one million."
Mom said, "That's too slow."
"Transfer from five cards."
Five cards, two accounts, rotating transfers. When I got to the third card, I hesitated for a moment. I still finished the transfers.
Mom said, "The efficiency is too low."
I said, "Let's bring our parents to Hong Kong to spend the New Year together."
Mom said, "It's already been decided to spend the New Year in Hainan this year. Maybe next year."
During the Spring Festival, fireworks were set off at Victoria Harbour, and a million people came. She wasn't there.
At 3 AM, I sent my parents back.
The roads were empty. There wasn't a single car waiting at the red light, but I still stopped.
Mom said we wouldn't meet for now; she was going to Los Angeles for egg retrieval immediately. She had to handle things at hand first.
Mom asked again, "Can you come to Beijing?"
I was silent.
She didn't say what was in Beijing. I didn't ask.
Mom said a house must be bought in Hong Kong, in her name.
I said, "Okay."
We didn't meet on Valentine's Day either.
Once she said on the phone, "I had eight vials of blood drawn this morning."
I said, "That's so many."
She said, "It's okay."
I said, "You've worked hard."
Then we talked about other things.
Only later did I learn that such blood draws must be done on an empty stomach, on the second or third day of the menstrual cycle; the timing cannot be wrong. She probably left the house around 6 AM that morning; it was winter in Beijing, and it wasn't yet light. Later, there were more and more tests. I knew about this because an item was added to the assistant's monthly summary of payments. It first appeared last year, for a small amount, a few thousand yuan. Later, it appeared every month, sometimes two or three times. I approved them quickly. Amounts like that didn't require me to look at the details. Only later did I find out those were for blood draws, six hormone tests, ultrasounds, and AMH. They were to see how much reserve she had left, how many could be retrieved, and if it was worth proceeding.
These were all done in Beijing.
I don't know which hospital it was. I also don't know if she went alone or if someone accompanied her.
On February 25, she landed in Hong Kong.
She said she wouldn't go to Los Angeles unless she saw the Hong Kong house first.
I sent her all the dozen or so houses I had looked at over the past six months. She disliked all of them. I hadn't visited a single one of those houses; the assistant had spent six months picking them one by one, the assistant sent them to me, and I sent them to her. There was one in Mid-Levels where you could see Victoria Harbour in the video; it was filmed at dusk. For a split second, the camera shook, capturing the shadow of the person filming on the wall. I looked at that shadow and wondered who this person was, how far they had walked today, how many houses they had seen, and if they knew who this house was for.
Time was too tight; she still boarded the G700 to Los Angeles and flew to Montage Laguna Beach on February 28.
---
On the eighth day, Mom called. It was afternoon for her and early morning for me.
She said, "Fifty million, US dollars."
I said, "Let me think about it."
She didn't speak. I could hear the sea on her end.
After a while, she said, "Okay."
She hung up.
Since I had known her, I had never said "let me think about it" to her.
I used Claude Code to read the API and ran through all my cash assets; the conclusion was that it wouldn't have any impact on me. I checked again. I entered the question into Claude Code, and Claude said, "Do not give her this fifty million dollars."
I asked, "Does she not love me anymore?"
Claude said, "I don't care about or understand love. But you cannot give her this fifty million dollars."
I had never refused her, not out of generosity, but out of fear. Fear of the answer in the next second.
And now, someone had said it for me.
I stared at that line of text for a long time. What made my skin crawl wasn't its intelligence, but that Claude didn't hesitate at all.
It wasn't conflicted.
I thought then that this was probably something higher. Humans can't do that.
Does she not love me anymore?
She called back the next day.
Mom said, "The sea is huge."
I said, "Is it?"
She said, "This floor is too big; there's an echo. Someone came to clean this morning, and I hid in the bathroom waiting for them to leave."
I said, "We can tell them not to come."
She said, "No need."
She said, "The clinic asked me when the child's father would arrive."
I said, "I can send someone over."
She said, "No need."
Then she said, "Have you thought about it?"
I didn't speak. I wasn't thinking; I wasn't thinking about anything. On the phone, there was the sea on her end and Victoria Harbour on mine; no one spoke on either side. I counted eleven seconds.
Jing Tian said, "Fine."
Jing Tian said, "I understand."
She hung up.
I later recalled countless times what else she had said during those two days besides the fifty million. The sea is huge, the floor is too big, she hid in the bathroom. I remember all of it, every single word. What I can't remember is her voice—what her tone was when she said "I understand."
I can't remember. Later, I stopped trying.
I placed the phone on the nightstand, screen down. Then I did something I still don't understand: I placed my hand on my chest and counted.
My heartbeat was steady.
I counted again; it was still steady. Sixty-some beats a minute, no different from usual. I sat there, my hand pressed against my chest, like a doctor examining someone else.
I thought, so that's how it is.
I did nothing for the rest of the day. I stayed in the room from dark until dawn, watching Victoria Harbour turn from blue to gray to black. At 6 AM, the buildings in the financial center across the harbor began to light up one by one. The assistant knocked once to ask about dinner arrangements; I said no need.
I didn't cry. I was waiting for myself to cry.
---
Later, the assistant settled the accounts with me; one item was for hotel compensation in Tenerife. After we left, the tape was still applied for a few days because no one told them to stop. The hotel said it had been on for too long and too many times, and the adhesive residue on the window frames couldn't be cleaned off; the entire pane of glass had to be replaced.
I said to approve it.
That pane of glass faced the Atlantic.
In the bill, the item for aircraft fuel was more expensive than the floor at the Montage. I asked about it. The assistant said the A330 was designed for two hundred people, and we only had thirty; it was too light, and the takeoff trim was wrong. So every time, they had to add extra fuel to make it heavy enough. Once they arrived, the extra fuel couldn't be kept; it had to be dumped.
I asked, "Every time?"
He said, "Every time."
There was also a box sent back from the Los Angeles clinic. Eight days of ovulation induction injections, which needed to be refrigerated; not a single one had been used.
And the deposit for the surrogacy agency, two hundred thousand dollars, non-refundable. The surrogate had been chosen in January, a thirty-four-year-old Californian who had given birth twice. Her photo was in the file; I never looked at it. She had been ready since January.
After Jing Tian left, I pulled out that 2007 photo to look at it once. Nineteen years had passed, and device resolution was getting higher and higher, yet this image seemed to have lower and lower resolution; her face was a blur. I zoomed in for a long time, trying to find any difference between her then and later. I couldn't find a single one. Because that photo was never clear to begin with.
One day I used a nail clipper to clip my nails; after clipping, I felt them, and they were sharp.
I remembered that thing was still in the drawer, the one she left behind.
I took it out and filed a couple of times, but it wasn't right. She had said to go in one direction; I forgot which direction.
I put it back.
My nails are still scratchy now.
One morning a reminder popped up on my phone, set by the assistant when scheduling last year: Three months before the due date, prepare the room.
I swiped it away.
After she left, I kept thinking about one question.
If I had given it that day, would she have stayed?
I thought about it for a long time.
Later, I took out that document and read it again. Forty-some pages.
Then I remembered the fireworks over Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong on the night of the Spring Festival.
A million people surged in like a tide, and when the fireworks ended, a million people receded.
A million people.
It's like this every year.
At 3 AM in Hong Kong,
Nothing happened.
This article is purely fictional; any resemblance is coincidental.
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