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At 12:40 in the afternoon, the coffee machine in the break room was still dripping. Three people leaned against the counter waiting for the microwave, and the conversation drifted from weekend camping to knees, then to "at your age, have you started taking anything too?" Ah-Hong, a twenty-nine-year-old sales assistant, laughed first. He said that last month, while shopping at a drugstore with his girlfriend, he saw a whole shelf of men's health supplements with Japanese packaging. He stared at them for a long time and only recognized the two characters for "energy." Old Zhou, a forty-three-year-old warehouse worker, chimed in. He said his cousin brought back a few boxes from a trip to Japan and handed them out to coworkers. The office buzzed about them for half a year. Some said they worked; some said they felt nothing at all. The fifty-six-year-old section chief didn't laugh. He only sa...

The wedding banquet had ended well past eleven, and there was hardly any traffic on the highway, the streetlights retreating one stretch at a time. She leaned back against the passenger seat, slipped off her heels, and tucked her feet up on the seat. He drove with the radio turned down low, leaving only the air conditioning and the hum of the tires inside the car. Earlier, the colleagues at their table had been talking about who got promoted and who just bought a new car. She had smiled and raised her glass, but she hadn't really heard a word of it.

"You were quiet tonight," she said first. He grunted in acknowledgment and said he needed to focus on driving. She didn't push it, but after a while she asked if someone had brought up the question of when they were going to have kids again. His grip on the steering wheel tightened for a moment. He said no, he was just a bit tired lately. Sh...

It was almost eleven by the time the wedding banquet let out. The highway streetlights receded one by one behind us, and the only sound in the car was the late-night radio program murmuring softly. She took off her high heels and tucked her feet up on the passenger seat, then suddenly asked him, "You were distracted the whole time today—did someone ask you again when we're having kids?" He gripped the steering wheel and didn't answer right away. Only after we passed the toll booth did he say, no, it wasn't that. It was the senior classmate at the next table who clapped him on the shoulder and said, "A man has to start taking care of himself at a certain age," then added, "You've been looking pretty worn out lately." She laughed when she heard that, but it wasn't a mocking laugh—it was the kind of laugh that says, "So you care about it too." The car was quiet for a few minutes. Then, as i...

A-Kai's remarriage was set for the fall. The invitations were already printed, yet on a Wednesday night he called his old classmate A-Hong. The two had known each other since high school—one ran a crew at a construction site, the other scheduled truck routes at a logistics depot. Their usual conversations were about whose car had broken down again or which lunchbox place had raised its prices. They rarely talked about anything deeper. That night, A-Kai's first sentence was: "Do you think someone like me is ready?" A-Hong was stunned for a few seconds. He didn't press for details, only said: "If what you're afraid of is your body, then go get it checked out first. Don't scare yourself."

A-Kai's worry wasn't unfounded. In the later years of his previous marriage, he was buried in overtime, social obligations, and shift work. His energy dropped fast, and on weekends all he wanted was to li...

A lot of people ask me: if you see a supplement name you've never heard of on your partner's phone, should you bring it up? My answer is yes — but how you ask determines whether it turns into an argument or a conversation. Here's the bottom line: first figure out what you're actually looking at, then decide whether to ask. When you do ask, talk about your worry, not about blame. And after you've asked, focus on "how do we face this together" rather than "why were you looking this up."

Here's how it started. Last weekend we were in the living room, each scrolling on our own phones, when a search page he hadn't closed suddenly popped up on his screen. Three words were sitting there. I'll admit I froze for a few seconds, and my first thought wasn't curiosity — it was panic. We've been together for years and rarely keep things from each other, so in that instant my mind ran through a lot of...

Ah-Hong hadn't even opened his lunchbox when he blurted out, "Have you guys ever heard of Japanese Tengsu?" The three people at the table spanned nearly twenty years in age, yet their reactions ran like three parallel lines. Ah-Hong, thirty-five, said his senior colleagues always pick some up when they travel abroad. Old Zhou, fifty-two, furrowed his brow and said that stuff had been talked to death ages ago. Xiao-Jie, twenty-three and fresh out of the military, looked completely lost and asked whether it was a health supplement or a medicine. Ah-Hong laughed and said, "Anyway, it's just for keeping your body in shape," and Old Zhou added, "The version I heard is different from yours." The conversation got cut off by the afternoon meeting.

Back at his desk, Ah-Hong couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. The same product, three different accounts, an...

The Saturday morning market is always wet. The asphalt gleams from the previous night's rain, and yellow lamps hang above the stalls, casting light on piles of greens. Chen Yanting carries two reusable bags and stands in front of the okra vendor, pinching a pod and holding it up to the light to inspect its ridges. He likes okra—likes the sticky, gel-like texture between juice and glue once it's cut. It works in omelets, cold dishes, soups. The vendor is an old man in a bamboo hat, weighing customers' produce while chatting with a regular. Mid-sentence, he suddenly blurts out: "This goes best with oysters—good for a man's constitution." Chen Yanting doesn't respond, just puts the okra in his bag and pays. What sticks in his mind isn't the whole sentence, but the phrase "with oysters"—he's been cooking for over a decade and never imagined those two things in the same sentence.

On the way...

It was already past ten by the time the wedding banquet broke up, and the streetlights along the highway receded one by one. Yating took off her heels and curled her feet up on the passenger seat. The smell of red wine from the table earlier still lingered in the car. Zhihao drove, the radio turned down low, and neither of them spoke. Back at the venue, relatives had gone table by table asking when it would be their turn to host. Zhihao had laughed it off, and Yating had laughed it off too, smiling until her face went stiff.

"You got asked again, huh," Yating said first. Zhihao grunted in agreement and said he was fine, but she was the one who'd been pulled aside by his third aunt and talked at for nearly ten minutes. Yating said all she remembered from those ten minutes was nodding the whole time. The car came off the exit ramp and stopped at a red light, and Zhihao suddenly said that...

The year Ah-Hong turned forty-one, he got a pair of running shoes for his birthday. They were from his wife, and her reason was simple: he'd been getting winded just climbing three flights of stairs, and at night he'd sit on the couch scrolling his phone until he suddenly fell asleep mid-scroll. He knew something was off too, but couldn't quite put his finger on what. That night he opened the shoebox, the price tag still stuck to the sole, and stared at it for a long time. He thought, maybe I'll just start with walking.

The first time he ran, he picked the riverside path, figuring flat meant easy. Less than eight hundred meters in, his calves started burning, his breathing went haywire, and his heartbeat was so loud it felt like someone was drumming right next to his ear. He stopped and pretended to admire the view. An older man jogged past, glanced at him, and said, "Young man, you're...

When you see a product name you've never heard of on your partner's phone, what's the first thing you should ask? My answer: first ask yourself what you're afraid of, then ask the other person what they were looking for. Not look up what those three words mean, and not screenshot it for evidence. Because what really makes us uneasy usually isn't the word itself—it's "why didn't he tell me?"

Here's what happened. In our seventh year together, we were long past the stage of going through each other's phones. But that day he asked me to reply to a work message for him, and as I swiped the screen, the search history still showed a word I'd never seen before. I didn't tap into it—I just remembered those characters, and then spent the whole night restless. My mind spun out many versions: Is he feeling like something's wrong between us? Is he hiding a purchase from me? Is there something going...