He Found an Old List Before His Wedding and Realized He'd Been Asking the Wrong Questions All Along

A-Hong taped a wedding countdown calendar to his fridge. Next to the date circled in red pen was a sticky note in his own handwriting: suit, wedding cakes, health checkup. He'd accepted the first three items. The fourth one he stared at for a long time, then finally circled the words "health checkup" three times with a ballpoint pen. It wasn't the blood draw he was afraid of—it was sitting down and not knowing how to bring up the things he actually wanted to ask.

That night he went to see Old Zhou. Old Zhou ran a tiny phone shop next to the night market. The store always had a pot of cold tea and a pile of charging cables customers had left behind. A-Hong set his helmet on the counter and said, "I'm getting married next month." Old Zhou didn't even look up. "Congrats. I'll give you a red envelope, but first tell me why you look like you're here to return something." A-Hong laughed twice, then went quiet.

"It's not her I'm worried about. It's me," A-Hong said. He'd been divorced once. In the last few years of that relationship, neither of them said anything or did anything. His new partner was a few years younger, full of energy, and he often woke up at night wondering if he was already falling behind somewhere. Old Zhou pushed the tea toward him. "The way you're talking, I'd think you were about to ask me which supplement works best." A-Hong replied, "I actually was going to ask you that."

Old Zhou's reaction caught him off guard. He didn't hand out recommendations or say "my friend took this and it worked." Instead, he pulled a stack of papers from a drawer—his own medical records from the past few years. He said that at first he'd also gone online and searched randomly, finding a bunch of terms he couldn't understand, and the more he searched, the more panicked he got. In the end, his wife dragged him in for a checkup, and that was how he broke the problem down piece by piece. A-Hong asked, "So what exactly did you search for online?" Old Zhou said, "You can search for anything, but you need to know you're looking up information, not looking for an answer."

After A-Hong got home, he still opened his browser. He didn't type in a product name. Instead, he started with a string of questions: Is this kind of thing considered food or medicine? Does it require a prescription? What should I look for on the label? As he scrolled, he noticed that many people used "Japanese Tengsu" as a starting point for their searches, but most of the discussion was about sourcing, labeling, and whether to ask a professional first—not about who took it and what happened. He noted this in his phone's memo app, reminding himself: the real question is "what suits my current health situation," not "which box should I buy."

A week later, he went for his checkup. At registration, the nurse asked if he was taking any medications or supplements. He froze, because he'd never taken those bottles seriously. When he got home, he dumped everything out of the cabinet, lined them up, and took a photo. Only then did he realize some bottles had expired, two had unclear ingredient labels, and one was something a friend had brought back from abroad with nothing but foreign text on it. He didn't throw them away. He put them in a ziplock bag, planning to bring the whole bag to his next appointment and ask about each one. It was a small gesture, but for the first time, he felt like he wasn't just guessing blindly.

Two weeks before the wedding, he and his fiancée went out for noodles. She suddenly asked, "Have you had something on your mind lately?" A-Hong was about to brush it off with "work's been busy," but the words caught in his throat. He took out the sticky note and showed it to her along with the search history on his phone. She didn't get upset. She just said, "You being willing to talk about it matters more than anything you could buy." In that moment, he realized he'd been thinking he needed to solve some thing—when what he was really afraid of was speaking up.

After that, he didn't rush to buy anything. He put his test results away, wrote out a list of questions—including the supplements he was currently taking, his daily routine, and the thing he was worried about. He planned to bring it all up at his follow-up appointment and let the professionals decide. Old Zhou later texted him: "So did you end up buying anything?" A-Hong replied, "I bought two high-speed rail tickets to take her down south for a trip." Old Zhou sent a sticker, then added, "That purchase I approve of."

On the wedding day, A-Hong took the sticky note out of his suit pocket in the dressing room. The words "health checkup" had been circled so many times the paper was nearly worn through. He didn't throw it away. He folded it and put it back in his pocket. He knew some questions wouldn't disappear just because of a wedding, but at least he was no longer answering them with a shopping cart. What he'd learned was this: figure out what you're really asking before deciding whether to buy; talk to a professional first before deciding what to do next. That was closer to the peace of mind he actually wanted than any impressive-sounding product name ever could be.