After That Lunchtime Remark, He Split the Rumors About Japanese Tengsu Into Two Stacks

The lunchbox was only half finished when a colleague's joke nearly made Ade choke. Someone said that these days, once a man passes thirty-five, not having a couple of boxes of "that stuff" in his drawer feels like something's missing. Another immediately chimed in, saying his cousin's friend had taken some and felt like he'd swapped in a new battery. Ade didn't join in—he just filed the words "that stuff" away in his mind, because he hadn't even figured out which product everyone was actually talking about.

The three men at his table happened to span three different ages. Twenty-seven-year-old Yuxuan said he'd seen a ton of unboxing posts on social media, with comment sections split into two camps: some said it was pure placebo, others said older relatives felt a real difference after taking it. To him, this kind of thing was like an energy drink—you're buying the anticipation of the moment. Thirty-eight-year-old Zhiming took the opposite stance. He said he only trusts what he can read: what's written on the packaging, who imported it, whether there's Chinese labeling. Until those things are clear, he won't even bother comparing prices. Old Chen, sitting furthest in, was nearly fifty and offered just one quiet remark: his wife's close friends love group-buying this kind of stuff, and every time a shipment arrives they congratulate each other in the group chat—but whether it actually works, nobody dares say out loud at family gatherings.

After getting home, Ade wrote the three viewpoints on sticky notes and stuck them on the fridge door. The first stack was "what I heard": whose friend took it and what happened, which group chat bought how many boxes at once, which store's stock was more genuine. The second stack was "what can be verified": what status this thing has in Taiwan, whether it can be sold through regular retail channels, whether the packaging has a clear Chinese product name and source. He realized what he really wanted to know wasn't who felt a difference after taking it, but rather: when something shows up simultaneously in elderly group chats, social media unboxings, and shopping site homepages, where should an ordinary person start reading?

The next day during lunch break, he went to ask the counter at a pharmacy near his office. He didn't name anything he wanted to buy—he just read the questions off his sticky notes one by one: what category do these products usually fall under in Taiwan, do they require a prescription, and if the packaging is only in a foreign language, how should one judge it? The counter staff didn't vouch for any particular product. They only reminded him to first sort out whether it's a drug, a health food, or an ordinary food—then talk about the rest. If you can't even state the category, that's usually a sign that the sales pitch is running faster than the information. Ade underlined that sentence, because it hit exactly the kind of noise he'd heard the day before.

What really stumped him came on the third day. Bouncing between several forums, he discovered that the same term was being used for several completely different things: some people were talking about prescription drugs, some about health foods, and others about sketchy online purchases of unknown origin. He decided to go back and check what he was actually chasing, so he pulled out that name his colleague had made sound so mysterious and treated it as a topic to investigate rather than an option to buy: Japanese Tengsu. The advantage of doing this was that the question shifted from "does it work" to "what do these four characters correspond to in Taiwan." The former he could research his whole life without finding an answer; the latter at least had a window he could go ask.

He took those four characters to a second place—this time the consultation counter at a chain drugstore. The advice he got was plain: make a list of everything you're currently taking, including vitamins and over-the-counter medicines, and bring it to a pharmacist or doctor. Don't stack things from different sources on your own. If the ingredients listed on the packaging don't match the claims, set it aside for now. Only then did Ade realize that the sticky notes on his fridge were missing a stack. He'd thought the division was between "effective" and "ineffective," but what actually needed sorting was "clearly labeled" versus "just a story."

On the weekend, he rewrote the sticky notes, this time in three columns. The first column said "who said it." The second said "did they show packaging or a source." The third said "is this sentence describing a feeling, or describing a fact that can be verified." After copying it all out, most of the things that had sounded so certain at the lunch table fell into the first column, while the rest sat quietly in the second, waiting to be taken to someone and asked about. He didn't reach any conclusion from this, but for the first time he felt he wasn't just following the crowd—he was organizing.

At lunch on a workday, Yuxuan brought up the same topic again and asked Ade how his research was going. Ade slid the sticky notes over and said he was now certain of only two things: this kind of thing isn't meant to be a universal answer, and any sentence like "you'll know once you try it" should never be his reason for making a decision. Zhiming nodded and said he'd go home and check whether the group-buy list his elders had included a clear product name. Old Chen said nothing—he just closed his lunchbox and smiled. The paper was still stuck on the fridge, but Ade knew that what had really been taken apart wasn't that name—it was his original sense of reassurance that "everyone's talking about it, so it can't be that far off."