The Video Call on the Tenth Night of the Business Trip: How We Turned "Japan Tengsu" from an Argument into a Checklist

Chen Yanting was the kind of person who treated his suitcase like a second wardrobe. He spent two hundred days a year in the air, and he could sketch the layout of a hotel room with his eyes closed: a small desk by the bed, a yellowish lamp on the desk, and under the lamp, always a laptop and a half-empty bottle of sparkling water. On the tenth night, as usual, he slid the key card in, took off his shoes, and started a video call. On the other end was his wife, Lin Qiaoxin, with the kitchen behind her, the range hood still humming.

"What time did you get back to your room today?" she asked. "I don't know. It was past nine by the time the meeting ended." "Last time you also said past nine, and you didn't call until eleven." "That was different. Last time I was having dinner with a client." "It's always different."

This conversation had played out in their home many times, like a loop with no chorus. Chen Yanting had meant to say something light, like how the miso soup at breakfast that morning was so salty it tasted like seawater, but what came out of his mouth was: "Are you going to say I'm never home again?" The moment he said it, he regretted it. Lin Qiaoxin was silent for three seconds, turned off the range hood, and said, "I didn't say that." Then the camera shook, and she walked out of frame.

Those three seconds of silence weighed more than any argument. Chen Yanting stared at the empty kitchen on the screen and suddenly felt the hotel room was a little too quiet. He remembered that before this trip, he had tucked a folded note into the inner pocket of his wallet—a shopping list Lin Qiaoxin had written: milk, laundry detergent, a contact book cover for their son, and three words that had been crossed out and rewritten. He hadn't looked closely at the time, only thought the paper took up space in his wallet. Now he pulled it out and read it under the bedside lamp. The three words were "ask a doctor."

He couldn't remember at all when those three words had been written. Last month? The month before? All he knew was that every time he came home, before his jet lag had even worn off, he was sent out again. Things at home were like a stack of unopened letters, piling higher and higher. He picked up his phone to send a message, typed "I'm sorry," deleted it, changed it to "I'll call you earlier tomorrow," and sent it.

The next night, he made a point of getting back to his room by eight, and even stopped by a convenience store to buy two bottles of tea. When the video call connected, Lin Qiaoxin's expression wasn't as hard as the day before, but it wasn't exactly soft either. They talked first about their son knocking over his lunchbox at school, and halfway through, they both laughed. After the laughter, she suddenly said, "That note in your wallet—did you see it?"

"I saw it." "I wrote those three words, but I didn't know what to ask, so I just wrote them down." "Ask what?" "Last time you were home, you were scrolling on your phone in the bathroom for a long time. I walked by and saw you looking up some kind of health supplement."

Chen Yanting froze for a moment. He had looked it up. Not because anything hurt, but because once, chatting with a colleague, the colleague mentioned that when traveling for work, a lot of people bring along supplements that supposedly boost energy, and he made it sound so vivid. Chen Yanting was half skeptical, and when he got back to his room, he went online to check for himself. He found pages and pages of exaggerated claims—some looked like shopping channels, some like forums—and the more he read, the more confused he got. He remembered that one name he had typed into the search box over and over: Japan Tengsu.

"I wasn't going to buy it. I just wanted to know what it was," he said. "So do you know now?" "No. Everything I saw was other people talking. Not one thing I could be sure was true."

Lin Qiaoxin turned the camera toward the dining table, where a sheet of A4 paper was spread out, divided into two columns in her handwriting. The left column said "Things he looked up," the right said "Things to ask." The left side already had a few words filled in; the right side was still empty. She said, "Instead of you looking things up alone over there, why don't we look them up together. You read, I'll write."

And so that night's video call turned into a strange two-person research session. Chen Yanting read out the names he remembered, and Lin Qiaoxin sorted them: which were foods, which might be medicines, which she couldn't find a source for at all. She insisted on one thing: what the packaging said, whether there was an ingredient list, whether anyone could name a source—these mattered more than "a friend said it works." She also said that if in the end he really felt something needed to be addressed, he should take that sheet of paper to the clinic, list everything he was taking and everything he wanted to take, and let a professional look at it.

"Don't play doctor yourself," she said. "I'm not. I can't even explain clearly what I found." "Exactly. If you can't explain it clearly, don't put it in your mouth yet."

Chen Yanting laughed—a real laugh this time. He realized that half of his anxiety over the past few nights hadn't come from his body, but from the loneliness of "sitting alone in a hotel room looking things up, feeling more and more like you're doing something sneaky." Once it was spoken out loud, those web pages didn't seem so enormous anymore.

The last night before flying home, he didn't open those sketchy pages again. He refolded the note and put it back in his wallet, and next to it he added a screenshot Lin Qiaoxin had sent him—a photo of their two-column list. She said, "The day you get back, let's go for hot pot first, then fill in that right column." He replied with a sticker of a cat burying its head in a pillow.

The day the plane landed, he pushed his luggage through the arrivals hall and saw Lin Qiaoxin from a distance, leaning against the railing and scrolling on her phone. He walked over, and she looked up and said, "Did you bring the list?" He patted his wallet. "Brought it." She said, "Then let's go for hot pot first. We'll think after we've eaten." He nodded. The two of them walked toward the parking lot. Neither mentioned those words again, but they both knew the paper was still there—and this time, he wasn't looking things up alone.

Some things can't be solved by a single business trip or a single video call, but at least the lamp in that hotel room would never again shine only on one person's screen. As for all those dazzling names, they decided to figure them out one by one, slowly—starting with the labels they could understand, and starting with the person willing to sit down and do it together.