That Beer Before the Remarriage: He Finally Said the Words "Japanese Tengsu" Out Loud

A-Hong is forty-three, divorced for seven years, and getting remarried this autumn. The invitations are printed, the date is set, yet a month before the wedding he suddenly became restless. It wasn't that he didn't love her—if anything, he cared too much. He cared so much that he went and flipped through his calendar, counting how many weekend invitations he'd turned down since they met, how many times he'd said he was too tired and wanted to sleep early. He didn't tell his fiancée. He just swung by his old friend A-Zheng's place after work, saying he was returning a movie DVD he'd borrowed half a year ago.

A-Zheng opened the door with chopsticks still in his mouth, two bowls of instant noodles on the table. A-Hong sat down and started drinking beer. It wasn't until his second can that he spoke up: "You think once a guy hits his forties, he's just supposed to accept his lot?" A-Zheng nearly spat out his noodles, thinking he meant work. They talked past each other for ten minutes before A-Zheng finally understood: A-Hong was worried his "condition isn't what it used to be," afraid he'd let his new wife down after the wedding. A-Zheng didn't laugh at him. He just said, "You come to me with something like this, all I can do is drink with you. I can't make the decision for you."

That night A-Zheng told him about something from a few years back. He'd been Googling everything too, wanting to try whatever he came across. In the end he bought a pile of stuff that sat in the back of a drawer until it expired. A-Zheng said, "My biggest problem back then wasn't my body—it was that I didn't dare tell anyone, so I just guessed on my own." A-Hong went quiet for a long time. He said he'd come across some keywords online too, one of them being Japanese Tengsu. He'd searched for ages and found the sources were all over the place—some looked like product pages, some like forum comments. The more he read, the less sure he was whether he should even keep asking. A-Zheng replied, "What are you trying to find out by looking this up? Are you trying to buy something, or trying to figure out what's actually going on with you?"

That question stopped A-Hong cold. He'd thought he was looking for answers, but really he was looking for something that would put his mind at ease. They put the beer away and pulled out A-Zheng's old laptop to look together. They didn't order anything. They just did three things: first, they wrote down the words that tend to appear on packaging, to sort out what's a label and what's marketing talk; second, they made a list of the supplements A-Hong takes regularly and the medications he takes occasionally; third, they decided to go ask a professional first, instead of looking for people who'd tell him what he wanted to hear. A-Zheng also reminded him to bring the list—don't just go by memory.

The next week, A-Hong actually went to a pharmacy near his home. He'd been so nervous he'd rehearsed what to say, but when he walked in and saw the pharmacist helping an older woman find stomach medicine, he stood there waiting for five minutes, palms sweating. When it was his turn, he stumbled through his words. The pharmacist didn't pry into anything private—just asked him to take out the list and went through it item by item, explaining which were prescription drugs and which were just food products, and that the two can't be lumped together. That's when A-Hong realized: he'd been cramming all these different things into the same drawer in his mind. No wonder the more he searched, the more confused he got.

What actually put him at ease wasn't some miraculous piece of information—it was that he finally said the problem out loud. That day he went home and came clean to his fiancée about what had been worrying him. She was stunned at first, then laughed, saying she'd assumed he was stressing over the wedding budget. She said, "If you'd told me earlier, we could have gone to ask together. You didn't have to hide and search alone." They agreed to get their health checkups done before the wedding and to go see professionals together whenever they had questions, instead of each hunting for answers online.

A-Hong later taped that list to the fridge, with a line written next to it: Ask first, then decide. He didn't treat any single product as a lifeline, and he didn't rush to "fix" anything before the wedding. He told A-Zheng his biggest takeaway was understanding one thing: the anxiety itself isn't the problem. Hiding it and trying to soothe yourself with search results—that's the problem. A-Zheng laughed and said he'd finally said something worthwhile, then pressed the movie DVD from that night back into his hands, saying next time he owed him a wedding invitation, not a DVD.

On the wedding day, A-Hong stood in the dressing room adjusting his tie in the mirror, taking two deep breaths. He hadn't become a different person, and he hadn't suddenly gone back to his twenties. But he knew what he'd done that month was right: he took his questions to a place that could answer them, he prepared his list, and he talked things through with the person who needed to hear it. None of that could be done through a shopping cart, yet it let him walk onto that aisle feeling, for the first time, truly grounded.

Later a friend asked him how he'd decided which online information to trust. A-Hong's answer was simple: first, check whether it tells you to skip the professionals and make the decision yourself; second, check whether it treats food products and medications as the same thing; and last, check whether it tells you to bring your list and go ask. If it fails those three tests, set it aside. As for all those flashy keywords, he now asks himself one question first: Am I looking for information, or am I looking for reassurance? If it's the latter, he closes the laptop and goes to talk to someone.