Before Deciding to Remarry, He Set That Bottle of Japanese Tengsu Aside

A-Hong is forty-three, divorced for six years, and getting remarried this autumn. The invitations haven't been printed yet, but a small thing has already stopped him in his tracks: his fiancée casually asked whether they should get a health checkup together after the wedding. He said yes out loud, but another thought surfaced in his mind—during the later years of his previous marriage, he always felt he "wasn't in good shape." Back then, he didn't ask anyone about it; he just swallowed the exhaustion, and eventually he couldn't even be bothered to talk. What he feared wasn't the checkup—it was walking down the same road again.

The wedding planning group chat buzzed with messages every day, but at eleven at night he called his old classmate A-Xin. A-Xin had just coaxed his child to sleep and kept his voice low: "You're calling now—is this about the invitations or something else?" A-Hong was silent for three seconds: "I don't know how to bring it up with a doctor." A-Xin didn't laugh at him. He just said, "Then don't ask a doctor yet. First ask yourself what you want to confirm." That sentence stunned A-Hong. He had thought what he wanted was a guarantee that "everything's fine," but what he actually wanted was to know where to go next.

The next day during lunch break, he overheard two coworkers in the office kitchen talking about supplements. One said he'd bought a pile of them, his drawer like a mini pharmacy; the other said more isn't better—his aunt overdid it and got scolded by her doctor instead. A-Hong stood nearby holding his mug and suddenly felt he was exactly that kind of person: "buy first, think later." He remembered the bottle of zinc tablets he'd bought last year, still in his drawer, its label half torn off—he couldn't even remember how many to take a day.

That night he went home and dumped the whole drawer out. Supplements, pain patches, expired cold medicine, and a crumpled shopping list that read "B vitamins, fish oil, zinc." He stared at the list and suddenly laughed—he had no idea what any of it was for, yet he'd bought it all with such confidence. His fiancée walked over, saw the bottles and jars all over the table, and asked just one question: "Are you actually taking any of these?" A-Hong shook his head. She didn't press him. She just picked out the expired ones and lined up the rest. "The ones you want to ask about—put them in this row."

Halfway through sorting, A-Hong remembered someone in the company group chat had forwarded a term, all mysterious, like some kind of password. He looked it up online and realized he couldn't even tell whether "Japanese Tengsu" was a medicine, a food, or just something passed around by word of mouth and made to sound miraculous. He didn't rush to buy it. Instead, he divided what he found into two columns: one for "what I'm sure about," the other for "what I don't know." The first had only one line—read the ingredients and warnings on the packaging carefully. The second filled half a page, including what category it belongs to and whether he should ask a professional first.

He showed the paper to A-Xin. A-Xin said, "Didn't you used to hate waiting in line?" A-Hong said, "This isn't waiting in line—it's listing the questions first." They talked until midnight, and A-Xin suddenly asked, "Are you actually afraid of the checkup, or afraid of being asked 'can you still do it?'" A-Hong didn't answer, but the next morning he did something concrete: he called the pharmacy near his home and asked whether he could bring in his current list of supplements for a consultation. They said yes, and reminded him that if he's been taking something long-term, bringing the packaging along is most accurate.

After hanging up, he also booked a premarital health checkup. When his fiancée found out, she only replied with a sticker, but that evening she cooked an extra dish he loved. A-Hong tucked the list into his wallet and suddenly felt that the term everyone spoke of so mysteriously was no longer pressure, but a reminder: uncertain things should be put somewhere they can be asked about and looked into. He didn't get any "guarantee," but he finally knew who to ask next and what to bring when he asked.

Two weeks before the wedding, the two of them went together to hear the explanation of the test results. Walking out of the clinic, his fiancée asked him, "Still nervous?" A-Hong said, "Yes, but this time I know that when I'm nervous, I need to say so." He thought of that shopping list, that late-night phone call, that row of lined-up bottles and jars—it turned out what he wanted wasn't an answer, but a road they could walk together. As for those terms he still didn't understand, he left them on the list, to ask about clearly at the next follow-up visit, packaging and all.