English translation of the full Chinese essay.
There was an entrepreneur of great wealth, with many children, all born through surrogacy.
Mingyue asked, “One or two children are enough to bring comfort to a lifetime. Why do you have so many?”
The entrepreneur smiled. “If I had only one or two, and one day I were ‘disappeared’, there would be only one or two people looking for their father. Few in number, faint in voice.”
He paused, then continued:
“If I had a hundred children and went missing, a hundred people would be looking for their father.”
“A hundred people looking for their father would make quite a stir.”
Mingyue listened and remained silent for a long while.
People commonly seek safety through wealth.
Yet sometimes, the greater their wealth, the more acutely they know how elusive safety is.
In former times, many children meant continuing the family line.
Today, many children might instead be a means of protecting oneself.
A father is meant to protect his children.
Here, he would have a hundred children protect one father.
Was his argument absurd? Was his fear real?
Mingyue would not presume to judge. A thought simply came to him:
If a man needs the voices of a hundred children to ensure that he cannot vanish without a sound,
perhaps the question is not why he has a hundred children, but why he is so afraid of disappearing.