That Note in My Father's Drawer with "Priligy" Written on It—I Looked It Up All Night

Lin Yanting found the note while helping his father look for a seal.

That afternoon he had gone back to his hometown. His father had asked him to grab a photocopy of his ID from the second drawer on the right side of the desk, saying he needed it to apply for some senior citizen transit subsidy. When he pulled the drawer open, the seal, paper clips, and a few expired registered mail slips were scattered together. He reached in and sifted through them, and his fingertip touched a folded piece of notepaper. It was an ordinary slip—the kind you buy for twenty dollars a pack at any stationery store—with three characters written in his father's characteristic right-slanting handwriting, plus a line of smaller text, as if jotted down casually. He froze there, still holding the note, until his father called from the living room asking whether he'd found it or not.

He stuffed the note back where it was, took the seal, and went out. He said nothing.

On the high-speed train back to Taipei, he kept thinking about those three characters. His father was seventy-three. He'd seen last year's health check report—slightly high blood pressure, nothing else seriously wrong. His mother had passed away four years ago, and his father lived alone. Every morning at 5:30 he went to the park to walk the track, in the afternoon he watched the stock market, and by nine at night he was asleep. What kind of problem could arise from a life like that? He couldn't imagine. His first thought was: was his father hiding something from him? His second thought was harder to bear: who could his father even talk to about something like this?

For the next three days, he was like an amateur detective. First he went through his own phone's search history, trying to recall whether his father had mentioned any discomfort recently. Nothing. He called home, pretending to make small talk, and asked whether his father had been to the clinic lately. His father said he'd picked up blood pressure medication last month, and that was it. He asked again whether anything felt off, and his father asked in return whether he was too tired from work, talking all muddled like that.

He didn't dare ask directly. He was afraid that if he asked, his father would feel offended—or worse, his father would go silent. Their father-son relationship wasn't the kind where they could talk about things like this. He knew that clearly. When his mother was alive, she translated all the difficult things the family couldn't say out loud. After she passed, many things lost their outlet.

On the fourth day, he took half a day off and went to a pharmacy near his home. He wasn't there to buy anything—he just wanted to ask. The pharmacist was a middle-aged woman. After listening to him stammer through it for a while, she said calmly that this kind of thing was a prescription drug in Taiwan, not something you could just grab off the shelf. It depended on how a doctor evaluated you, and everyone's situation was different. She added that many older people came in asking about it after seeing it online or hearing about it from friends, and their family members usually had no idea. Lin Yanting asked what family members should do if they found out. The pharmacist said: don't scare yourself first, and don't confront them with it either. Just treat it as a topic that needs to be discussed sitting down.

He nodded, but his heart was still hanging. On the way home he scrolled through his phone and typed in those three characters. Most of what popped up he couldn't understand, and he wasn't sure which sources he could trust. Only then did he realize that he had no idea where to even look for this kind of information, or who to ask.

That night, he sat at his desk, closing the pages on his screen one by one, until he finally landed on the simplest question: what exactly is Priligy, and why was it in his father's drawer? He wasn't going to buy it, and he wasn't going to recommend it to anyone. He just wanted to know whether his father was dealing with something he hadn't noticed.

On the weekend he went back to his hometown again. This time he didn't go through the drawer. Instead he sat in the living room and waited for his father to finish watching the post-market news, then spoke up himself. He said, Dad, when I was helping you find the seal last time, I saw a note in the drawer. His father's hand paused on the remote control. He didn't answer right away. After a few seconds, his father said it was from Old Zhou.

Old Zhou was his father's friend from walking in the park, two years older than him. His father said Old Zhou had handed him a note a while back, saying his son had bought this thing online and asking whether his father wanted to try it too. His father said he hadn't bought it and didn't plan to—he'd just kept the note, thinking he might ask about it someday. His father paused, then added: it wasn't that something was wrong with his body. It was that these past few years he felt like he couldn't get motivated about anything, and he couldn't even be bothered to talk to people. He hadn't wanted to tell his son because he was afraid his son would think he was old and useless.

After hearing all this, Lin Yanting didn't feel relieved. Instead he felt a bit ashamed. He'd thought he was investigating his father's secret, but really he was avoiding a simpler question: how long had it been since he'd properly asked his father how he was doing lately?

They ended up talking for a long time after that—from Old Zhou to the banyan tree in the park, to how his mother used to complain that his father walked too fast. His father said he wasn't really looking for anything special; he just wanted to confirm that he was still okay. Lin Yanting said, then next time you go back to the clinic, bring this note along with your regular blood pressure medication and ask the doctor or pharmacist about it together. Don't guess on your own, and don't listen to Old Zhou's son. His father laughed a little and said, you're more long-winded than your mother.

The note was later put away by his father himself in another drawer, together with his health insurance card. Lin Yanting never asked where it went. He knew it wasn't a clue that needed solving—it was an opening.

On the way back to Taipei, he thought of what the pharmacist had said: don't scare yourself first. He felt like he'd spent the past few days chasing a suspect who didn't exist, only to realize at the end that the suspect was his own habit of thinking "this kind of thing shouldn't be asked about." His father hadn't changed. What changed was that he was finally willing to sit down and open that drawer to talk.