kodeicharityh

When Ah-Hong turned his laptop around, there were over a dozen tabs lined up neatly on the screen. Each URL looked a little different, but the titles were almost identical. His wife glanced at it and said only one thing: "Are you trying to buy something, or write a thesis?"

The whole thing started simply enough. Old Zhou, a guy Ah-Hong knew from the gym, had casually mentioned one day by the lockers that he'd been looking into so-called men's health supplements, and that they were getting a lot of buzz online. Ah-Hong went home without giving it much thought and typed a few words into the search bar. He figured it would be a five-minute job. Instead, he ended up researching until one in the morning, and the more he looked, the stranger it all seemed.

The first thing that made him stop was seeing the same product photo on four different storefronts. The angle of the packaging, the posit...

That night the wedding banquet ended late. The parking lot lights went out one by one, until only our car was still lit. A-Zhe tossed his jacket into the back seat, started the engine, and the heater slowly began to blow warm air. I took off my heels and rested my feet on the floor mat. I'd meant to talk about how hard the groom cried during his speech, but he spoke first, saying that during the toasts tonight, two of his seniors had asked if he'd been really tired lately.

"I said I was fine." He gripped the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the traffic light ahead. "But they could tell. Can you tell?"

I didn't answer. The truth is, I could tell—I just didn't know where to begin. For the past six months he'd been coming home later and later, and on weekends he often said he needed to catch up on sleep. Our conversations had shrunk from renovation plans, travel, whether to get a new car nex...

Ah-Hong had barely opened his lunchbox when he elbowed Chien-Chih next to him, saying he'd been looking "really healthy" lately—was he secretly taking something good? Chien-Chih, mouth still full of rice, mumbled back, "No way, I can't even remember to swallow my vitamins." Old Chou, sitting across from them, set down his chopsticks and said slowly that he'd heard this kind of talk plenty of times. Every so often in the office, someone would bring up a certain name, and then everyone would chime in, each talking as if they all knew a "friend who really understands this stuff."

Ah-Hong was the first to offer his take. He said his cousin, who works in sales and has lots of business dinners and little sleep, had recently gotten all secretive about researching something from Japan. The packaging was covered in dense text, and his cousin could only make out a few Chinese characters before dr...

That day at lunch, the department ordered boxed meals, and everyone crowded into the break room. Lao Chen took two bites of rice and suddenly blurted out, "Have you guys ever heard of that Japanese health supplement, the one with a name that sounds like Chinese medicine?" He didn't say the full name, just made a gesture. A-hao, sitting across from him, immediately chimed in, saying his cousin had seen a whole shelf of them at a drugstore in Japan, with dense writing all over the packaging. His cousin couldn't read Japanese, so he took a photo and came back to ask around, but even after asking three group chats, no one could say for sure. The youngest intern, Xiao Jie, said he'd scrolled past quite a few unboxing posts on social media, and the comment sections were a mess—some said their elders had taken it for a long time, others said it was just a scam. After reading, he only felt there...

It was already past eleven by the time the wedding banquet broke up, and the streetlights along the highway receded one by one. Yijun took off her high heels and curled her feet up on the passenger seat; the only sound in the car was the radio at low volume. Jianhong, who was driving, had barely said a word since getting on the freeway, gripping the steering wheel tighter than usual, and twice missing the lane he should have taken to exit.

"What's wrong with you today?" Yijun asked. Jianhong said nothing was wrong, he was just tired. But she noticed that the screen on his phone mount had lit up once—it was a screenshot from a messaging app, and the thumbnail was too small to make out the content; all she could see was that someone in the chat had replied, "You should go ask and get it straight first." She didn't press him and turned her gaze back out the window. It wasn't until they slo...

On a weekend afternoon, while tidying his wallet, A-Cheng came across a gym membership card that had expired two years ago. He stared at it for a few seconds, and instead of throwing it away, he set it on the edge of the desk. After his fortieth birthday, he had started running—at first just to feel a bit more energetic. But after his first three-kilometer run, he woke up the next day with knees so sore they felt like someone else's. He told his wife that back in college he could run five thousand meters without a problem, and now even crossing the street made his legs feel heavy. She didn't respond, just swapped his breakfast milk tea for soy milk.

He decided to start with the simplest thing: keeping records. For two weeks straight, he wrote down in a notebook what time he went to bed, what time he woke up, how long he ran, and what he ate. The first week, he assumed the problem was th...

Many people assume that taking more supplements, or stacking several kinds, will multiply the benefits—but that's a common misunderstanding. The real question isn't "How many pills do I need to take?" but "What exactly am I supplementing, why am I supplementing it, and have I asked a professional first?" This issue is especially obvious with men's health supplements, because most people aren't unwilling to ask—they just don't know how to bring it up, so they end up randomly searching online.

A recent news story about hair-growth supplements highlighted this blind spot: someone trying to regrow hair took large amounts of a certain trace element, and ended up with anemia and recurring fevers instead. This isn't to say supplements are terrifying—it's a reminder that dosage and need are two different things, and what works for someone else doesn't mean it suits you. The same logic applies t...

When Yating set the thermos on my desk, steam was still curling off it. She said her boyfriend had spent a whole afternoon shopping with her last weekend, and they ended up arguing in the car—all because she stood in front of the shelf scrolling on her phone for twenty minutes and wouldn't put anything in the basket.

"He asked me what I was hesitating about, and I couldn't explain it." Yating pulled her hands into her sleeves, her fingertips as cold as a metal spoon just out of the fridge. "He said it's just a tub of powder, how hard can it be."

I understood that inability to explain. It's not that she didn't want to buy it—it's that she didn't know what she'd tell herself to justify it afterward. Her boyfriend's logic was: if you want to take care of your skin, buy it; if you want to stay warm, wear more clothes—two separate things. Yating's logic was: if I can't even explain what I'm...

After winter set in, the office air conditioning teamed up with the cold snap outside, and my fingers were often so cold that my typing lagged half a beat. At night when I looked in the mirror, my face seemed drier and duller than it had in summer. During that stretch I was being chased by two things at once: I wanted my hands and feet to feel warm, and I wanted my skin to not look so tired. While scrolling on my phone, all kinds of edible beauty supplements kept popping up, and I almost placed an order. Then I thought about it—these two things really shouldn't be solved from the same drawer.

I started with a very dumb but useful categorization. The first path was "warmth and daily routine": soaking my feet before bed, wearing an extra layer, swapping dinner soup for something hot, lying down before eleven. The second path was "diet and supplements": adding more protein, vegetables, and...

It was already past eleven by the time the wedding banquet broke up, and the highway streetlights slid past one by one. She took off her heels and set them on the floor mat, then tilted her seat back a little. He kept his hands on the wheel, and the only sounds in the car were the air conditioning and the occasional chime from the navigation. Their classmates at that table had talked all night—who had changed jobs, who had bought a house, whose partner had just been promoted. The laughter had been full, but after everyone left, it got especially quiet. She spoke first: "You barely talked today." He said he hadn't, he was just a little tired. She didn't answer, just looked out the window, but what she was really thinking about was something else—for the past six months, he had often scrolled on his phone for a long time before bed, the screen's glow hitting the ceiling, and whenever she t...