Sun Ge Love Story: My Girlfriend Jingtian
Editor’s note: This piece is “My Girlfriend Jing Tian” (《我的女友景甜》), an anonymous work of satirical fiction that spread across the Chinese internet in 2026. The original was published on GitHub as a XeLaTeX typesetting project (HEJustinSun/my-girlfriend-jingtian-latex, which drew 3.4k stars within days of release). It is written as a first-person fictional narrative; the author is not the narrator of the story. All plot, dialogue, and character behavior are artistic invention, unrelated to the actual circumstances of any real person. We reprint the text in full as a record of an internet-culture phenomenon.
The weight of one egg: 3.5 micrograms.
The weight of $50 million in cash: 2.5 tons.
The latter was what Jing Tian asked me for on the phone from Montage Laguna Beach. The former was what she pledged.
She went there for the egg retrieval. The child carried by the surrogate was due in 2027; a little early, and it would still be born in the Year of the Horse. She raised it herself. At the clinic she said, no $50 million, no retrieval.
Montage Laguna Beach stands on the cliffs, the Pacific below. One floor, taken whole: thirty days, $1 million, for her privacy. She stayed eight and left.
For the remaining twenty-two days, the cleaners went up every day as usual. My assistant told me; she had walked in on it once, coming to return the keys. A Mexican woman pushing a cart, going room to room, changing the towels, wiping the counters, tucking in the corners of the duvet, stepping out and pulling the door shut behind her. A full floor, two hours.
My assistant asked her, no one is staying here — why do it at all.
She said, the register says the rooms are occupied.
A Versailles without its queen.
It hit me all at once: Jing Tian liked this. Jing Tian liked a place standing empty because of her. Nothing happening at all.
Standing empty along with Montage Laguna Beach was a Gulfstream G700, parked awkwardly at Van Nuys, its crew reporting for duty every day as usual.
On the eighth day she made that call. After that, no one saw her again.
In 2007 people were already burning money for her. That year I started at Peking University.
Not me, of course.
A window popped up on QQ with her as the face of the campaign. On that old Lenovo-IBM machine the resolution was a blur. I saved the picture.
I got online from a Peking University dorm that cost 1,000 yuan a year, found her on Xiaonei.com, sent a friend request. Xiaonei made you attach a message. I wrote it and deleted it, deleted and wrote it, for about forty minutes, and in the end sent one word: hello.
She never accepted.
Maybe she had never used Xiaonei at all.
For years after that, everything I did carried one question: how much would it take for her to accept. I thought about it when I made my first billion. I thought about it at ten billion.
In time I stopped. Renren had been dead for years.
I never sent a second request.
2011 was cold in Beijing. I bought a down jacket, 150 yuan. I remember the price because I hesitated for three days.
That same year she shot a 150 million yuan movie, Warring States. Sun Honglei, Francis Ng, Kim Hee-sun, Kiichi Nakai, Jiang Wu — hired as foils the way Montage Laguna Beach and the Gulfstream G700 would be nineteen years later. They did not know what they were there for. Having come all this way, something had to happen. Nothing happened.
Then came The Great Wall, 150 million US dollars. Zhang Yimou, Andy Lau, Matt Damon. Then Jackie Chan. The list of the Jing Tian universe kept getting longer.
By then I was in America — school, a company, busier and busier. One thing never changed: with every new device, however much of a hassle, I carried that QQ picture over.
Nineteen years later, my name went on the list.
The Rosewood was where we first met. I had always assumed that the day I met her I would be nervous.
I wasn’t.
She was thinner than in photos, dressed carelessly, sunk into the sofa. I looked at her and suddenly could not remember what I had been waiting for.
I took her to see Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian. She stood there a long while, then asked me, how much is this.
$6.2 million.
She said, what happens when it rots.
I went quiet. She said, forget it, let’s go see a movie.
I said all right.
She said, in the screening room there could be no one but the two of us.
I said all right.
I stepped out to make a call. When I came back she was still standing in front of the banana.
The movie was Zootopia 2.
A screening room for two — ordinarily this is how the CPC Central Propaganda Department screens a film.
I had my assistant buy out every seat in the cinema.
I had read the exposés on faked box office: tickets bought out, two people watching. Now I understood. Maybe it was never entirely about the box office.
Buying out the seats was easy. The trouble was the tickets already sold. The assistant and the bodyguards got there ahead of time and stood at the doors, handing cash to anyone who showed up with a ticket.
A couple came with their child, the child already holding the popcorn up high at the entrance.
The assistant handed over a thick wad of bills. The child could not understand why they could not go in. The grown-ups took the money, said thank you, asked nothing, and left.
Twenty-six people took the money that day.
After the movie she changed her WeChat avatar to Officer Judy Hopps.
That night I reached over and kneaded her tit, and she pushed me away.
I thought she did not want it. I drew my hand back and got ready to say something.
She said nothing. She sat up, dug a small pouch out of her bag, unzipped it. Inside, a row of things, like a set of very small tools.
She said, your nails are digging into me.
I looked. I had always just snipped a couple of times with the clipper and left it; the edges were sharp, and I never noticed.
She said, come here.
She laid my hand on her lap and filed, one finger at a time.
The coarse side first, then the flip side, then the third. Every so often she lifted a finger to the light to check, and went back to filing.
I said, how long does this take.
She said, file until it stops scratching.
Ten fingers. It took her close to an hour.
Partway through she taught me: this side for shape, this side for polish, and the last one — never back and forth, one direction only.
I said all right.
When she finished she turned my hand over, looked it over, ran a fingertip across it.
She said, there.
Go ahead and touch. Anywhere you like.
Somewhere in the middle she said a thing. She said, someday when I am gone, no one will ever buff your nails for you again.
I smiled a little and said nothing.
Three months after I met her, I had a file put together. Her projects over the years, her partners, the company equity, Jing Guoqing, Tian Xin’ai, the few related accounts, the apartment rented in Beijing, the one bought in Shanghai, some other things. It took a week. Forty-odd pages. There was the business of men and women too; that part I judged the least important.
Some of what was in it she told me about later, and her telling did not quite match the pages. I said nothing.
Some of it she never brought up. I never asked either.
I believed everything she said.
I kept the file. I have it still.
I don’t believe a word of it.
She said, Hong Kong is too crowded, someone will recognize me, let’s get out for a while.
I said all right.
She pointed at Tenerife on the map.
I said all right.
I went out to make a call, and only when I came back did I learn the place sits in the Atlantic, off the northwest coast of Africa. At noon the next day the thirty of us set out. The Airbus A330 was waiting at the airport.
In the plane’s bedroom she asked me, does my name sound nice.
I said, it sounds nice.
She said, it is my father’s surname and my mother’s put together. Isn’t that something.
I said I had remembered it from the first day.
Holding on to me, she said, from now on don’t call me Jing Tian. Call me Mama.
All right, Mama.
After we landed the captain came over and told me, boss, at first the island would not let us land. They had never seen a private plane that big.
The rule on the island was the same: no one could be near. The assistant handled it. Nobody asked why, and this time I did not ask how many people.
The Ritz-Carlton faces the Atlantic, floor-to-ceiling glass, far too much of it. She could not sleep with a single thread of light. The assistant sealed the whole room in black tape — bright as noon outside, dark as a cell inside. The sun loosened the tape, and it had to be redone every day.
There were eleven on the assistant team. They arrived at six thirty in the morning and left only after we had gone to sleep. Two girls did the taping, one for the window frames, one for the indicator lights on the air conditioners and the sockets; after taping, they checked everything three times. They bought thirty rolls of tape, then twenty more. They found that anything taped after three in the afternoon came loose fastest, because by then the glass was hottest, so they switched to mornings. Nobody taught them this; they worked it out themselves. Between themselves they discussed it, the way one discusses a craft.
She knew the names of those two girls. I did not.
We stopped by the road in Teide National Park to watch the sunset. The assistant unloaded roses from the car and opened the champagne.
Mama watched the sea of clouds and said, it’s beautiful. But it’s not as good as the sunset in Delingha, Qinghai.
I’m from Qinghai.
I didn’t say so.
At night we watched the stars from the summit, padded coats on, and still the cold got through.
Mama said, make a wish.
I asked, what did you wish for.
Mama said, not telling.
Mama said, it’s so beautiful. But it’s just too cold. Let’s go to the Maldives, all right.
I said, fine.
Tenerife was fifteen below zero, the Maldives twenty-seven. Nine thousand five hundred kilometers in a straight line, eleven hours in the air. But the airport in the Maldives was too small for a wide-body; partway there we had to change to a small plane.
Mama said, the small plane is so noisy. The big one is better.
In the bedroom of the plane to the Maldives, Mama told me what she had wished for: a child with me. It had to be by surrogacy.
I never asked why. I assumed she was afraid of the pain.
Partway there, Mama sat up suddenly, reached for her phone, connected to Starlink, and said, oh no.
I asked what happened.
She said, someone is threatening me. Three days now he has been asking. I haven’t answered.
I said, how much does he want.
She said, this doesn’t concern you.
She typed for a long time, deleting and rewriting, rewriting and deleting. When she finished she turned the phone face-down on her lap, and a minute later turned it over to look again.
I asked who the man was.
She said, someone who used to work with me. Finance. He went in. Took the fall for something.
He came out with nowhere to go. Insisted on finding me.
I said, then just call the police and have him taken.
She gave me a look. You don’t understand.
I said, did you pay him.
She said she had.
How much.
80,000.
I said, and that took three days of thinking.
She said nothing.
For the rest of the day she hardly spoke. She slept only after we landed.
The first thing to reach Soneva Jani was Mama’s suitcase. Thirty people’s luggage would not fit on one small plane; it went in three loads. Mama had a single suitcase, on a plane of its own, because she said it must not ride with anyone else’s.
Soneva Jani is famous for its no news, no shoes. That put Mama at ease.
Butler, bodyguards, assistants — twenty-six people in all, plus two drone operators trailing far behind. The assistants began taping again: the AC lights, the socket lights, over and over.
That night we traded exes the way you trade code words, the way a dynasty cross-checks its reign titles. Mama would tolerate no slip-ups. But there was one forbidden word: the athlete could not be mentioned.
I didn’t mention it. I knew, though, that the tattoo on Mama’s back was there because of the athlete.
Maybe too big to remove.
She said, now we’re family. My parents raised me all this way — it wasn’t easy. You owe a bride price.
I said all right.
She gave me two names, Jing Guoqing and Tian Xin’ai, and two accounts.
30 million, RMB.
I transferred it. I had seen the two names for the first time in those forty-odd pages.
A moment later she held out her phone for me to see. Tian Xin’ai had replied with two characters: received.
Once Mama said, do you know what I’m thinking when I ask you for these things.
I said, what.
She said, I’m wondering whether one time you’ll say no.
I said I never would.
She said, then it’s no fun anymore.
I thought, and what is it I can’t do.
When the boredom got bad, I fiddled with that QQ picture from 2007, trying to move it onto the new device. Mama leaned in. Keeping photos of other women behind my back — who is this.
I went quiet. Said nothing at all.
The picture was too blurry to make out, so she went off to other things.
That night I deleted the picture.
The next day I fished it back out of the old phone.
Mama scrolled her own phone without stopping. I asked what she was looking at.
She said, nothing. Just that billing-wars nonsense.
Billing wars: on any one show, only one star may take first position. Even the male lead and the female lead — only one of them can be first.
I said, how boring.
She said, it is. And sometimes it’s worse. The set couples: forty or fifty days shut in with one production, shooting with a single man, sleeping with him at night, and by day still fighting over billing.
I said, that’s against human nature.
She said, it is.
But once the shoot wraps, no matter how many times it happened, it’s as if none of it ever did.
Then she scrolled for another half hour.
On January 2, 2026, at Soneva Jani, in the new year, I proposed to Mama.
I had decided on the morning of January 1. The ring was in Hong Kong. Nowhere on the island sold rings, so the assistant took a seaplane to Malé and was back in the afternoon, the ring inside a hotel envelope.
Mama said, the diamond is too small.
Mama said, it’s fine. I’ll make it up with a big one later.
Also — could you come to Beijing?
I went quiet.
She took it that I did not want to go.
Mama 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 gave a small laugh and said nothing.
One morning I woke early. She wasn’t in bed.
I went out to look. She was sitting on the terrace facing the sea, the whole sea black. No lights on, the sky not yet light.
I asked why she was up so early.
She said, I’m counting days.
I said, counting what.
She said, go back to sleep.
I sat beside her a while, not knowing what to say. Then I went back to bed.
By the time I woke again her makeup was done.
Fourteen days in the Maldives, and not one person recognized her.
On the thirteenth night, in the restaurant, she took off her sunglasses. A little later the hat came off too, set on the table. She sat through a whole meal like that. At the next table an elderly German couple; the waiter was Sri Lankan. No one gave her a second look.
When the meal was over she put the hat back on.
Mama said, let’s go back.
I said, we haven’t used up the stay yet, have we.
She said, it’s too quiet.
Back in Hong Kong, Mama met my parents.
That same evening she said, the two families meeting and the wedding all need preparing, and the greasing should be as generous as possible. Still Jing Guoqing and Tian Xin’ai.
I didn’t ask why.
I said, one card tops out at a million a day.
Mama said, too slow.
Use five.
Five cards, two accounts, taking turns. On the third card I paused. I saw the transfers through anyway.
Mama said, so inefficient.
I said, for Lunar New Year, let’s bring both sets of parents to Hong Kong and spend it together.
Mama said, this year is already set — New Year in Hainan. Next year, then.
At Lunar New Year they set off fireworks over Victoria Harbour. A million people came. She wasn’t there.
At three in the morning I sent my parents home.
The roads were empty. Not one car waiting at the red light. I stopped anyway.
Mama said we would not see each other for now — she was off to Los Angeles soon for the egg retrieval, and the things at hand had to be settled first.
Mama asked again: can you come to Beijing?
I went quiet.
She didn’t say what was in Beijing. I didn’t ask either.
Mama said, a place in Hong Kong is a must, and it goes in her name.
I said, fine.
We didn’t meet on Valentine’s Day either.
Once, on the phone, she said, they drew eight vials of blood this morning.
I said, that many.
She said, it’s nothing much.
I said, that sounds hard.
Then we talked about other things.
Only later did I learn that this kind of blood draw calls for fasting, that it has to be the second or third day of the menstrual cycle, that the day cannot slip. That morning she had left the house around six — Beijing, winter, before daylight. The tests grew more numerous after that. I learned of it because a new line appeared in the assistant’s monthly consolidated payment statement. The first time was last year, a small amount, a few thousand yuan. Then it came every month, sometimes two or three entries at once. I approved them quickly. Sums like that don’t require me to read the details. Only later did I find out what they were: the blood draws, the six-hormone panel, the ultrasounds, the AMH. To see how much reserve remained, how many eggs could be retrieved, whether it was worth going on.
All of it was done in Beijing.
I don’t know which hospital. I don’t know whether she went alone or someone went with her.
On February 25 she landed in Hong Kong.
She said she wasn’t going to Los Angeles unless she saw the Hong Kong apartment first.
I sent her the dozen-plus apartments viewed over the past half year. She found them all ugly. I hadn’t set foot in a single one; the assistant spent six months picking them out one by one, sent them to me, and I passed them on. One was in the Mid-Levels, the video caught Victoria Harbour, filmed at dusk. For an instant the camera wobbled and caught the shadow of the person filming on the wall. I watched the shadow and thought, who is this, how far did he walk today, how many apartments did he see, does he know who this one is being shown to.
Time was too tight. She got on the G700 for Los Angeles anyway, and on February 28 flew down to Montage Laguna Beach.
On the eighth day Mama called. Afternoon on her end, the small hours on mine.
She said, $50 million, in US dollars.
I said, let me think about it.
She said nothing. I could hear the sea on her end.
After a while she said, all right.
She hung up.
In all the time I had known her, I had never once said to her, let me think about it.
I used Claude Code to read the API and ran every cash asset I had through it. The conclusion: no effect on me at all. I ran it again. Then I typed a question into Claude Code, and Claude said, do not give her the $50 million.
I asked, does she not love me anymore?
Claude said, as for love, I don’t care about it and I don’t understand it. But you cannot give her the $50 million.
I had never refused her anything. Not generosity — fear. Fear of the answer the next second would bring.
And now someone had said it for me.
I stared at that line of text for a long time. What chilled me to the bone wasn’t that it was smart. It was that Claude hadn’t hesitated at all.
It didn’t struggle.
I thought then, this must be some higher kind of thing. A person can’t be like this.
Does she not love me anymore.
The next day she called back.
Mama said, the sea is big.
I said, is it.
She said, this floor is too big, it echoes. In the morning people come to clean, and I hide in the bathroom until they go.
I said, you could have them not 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 it through.
I didn’t speak. Not thinking — I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. On the line, her sea; on mine, Victoria Harbour. Neither side said a word. I counted: eleven seconds.
Jing Tian said, fine.
Jing Tian said, I see.
She hung up.
Afterward I replayed it countless times: across those two days, apart from the $50 million, what else did she say. The sea is big. The floor is too big. She hides in the bathroom. That’s all of it. I remember every word, exactly. What I can’t pull back is her voice — the moment she said, I see — what tone that was.
I couldn’t get it back. In time I stopped trying.
I set the phone on the nightstand, screen down. Then I did something I still can’t explain: I laid my hand on my chest and counted.
The heartbeat was steady.
I counted again. Steady still. Sixty-some beats a minute, no different from any other day. I sat there with my hand pressed to my chest like a doctor examining somebody else.
I thought, so this is how it is.
I did nothing for the rest of that day. I stayed in the room until dark and then until dawn, watching Victoria Harbour go from blue to gray to black. At six in the morning the towers of the financial district across the harbour began to light up, one by one. At some point the assistant knocked, asked about dinner arrangements. I said, don’t bother.
I didn’t cry. I kept waiting to.
Later, when the assistant came to settle the accounts with me, there was a line item for hotel compensation in Tenerife. After we left, the taping had gone on for a few more days; no one told them to stop. The hotel said it had gone on too long, too many times — the tape residue on the window frames would not come off, and that pane of glass would have to be replaced in full.
I said, approved.
That glass faced the Atlantic.
The jet fuel line on the bill came to more than the floor at the Montage. I asked about it. The assistant said, the A330 is built for two hundred passengers; we were only thirty. Too light, so the takeoff trim was wrong. Every time, extra fuel had to be loaded until the weight was enough — and on arrival the surplus could not be kept. It had to be dumped.
I said, every time?
He said, every time.
There was also a box shipped back from the Los Angeles clinic. Eight days of ovarian stimulation injections, the refrigerated kind. Not one vial opened.
And the surrogacy agency’s deposit, $200,000, nonrefundable. The surrogate had been booked in January — a Californian, thirty-four, two children of her own. Her file had her photo. I never looked. She had been ready since January.
After Jing Tian left, I dug out that 2007 picture and looked at it once. Nineteen years. The pixels of devices kept climbing, and the picture seemed to sink lower and lower, the face all smear. I enlarged it and stared a long time, trying to find any difference between that face and the one that came after. I found none. That photo had never been clear to begin with.
One day I trimmed my nails with the clipper, ran a finger over them. Sharp.
Then I remembered the drawer — the thing she had left in it.
I took it out and gave it a few strokes. Wrong. She had said one direction only. I had forgotten which.
I put it back.
My nails still scratch, to this day.
One morning the phone pushed an alert. The assistant had set it last year while drawing up schedules: three months before the due date, prepare the room.
I swiped it away.
After she left, one question stayed with me.
If I had given her the money that day, would she have stayed.
I thought about it a long time.
Then I took out the file and read it through again. Forty-odd pages.
And then I remembered Lunar New Year night, from the top floor, looking down at the fireworks over Victoria Harbour.
A million people flooding in like a tide. When the fireworks ended, a million people flowing back out.
A million people.
Every year the same.
Hong Kong at three in the morning,
nothing happens at all.
References
An anonymous work of satirical fiction that went viral on the Chinese internet in 2026, reproduced here in full. Written in the first person as a literary device — every event, name, and dialogue in it is invented.