On the Ride Home from the Wedding Banquet, Who Sent That Screenshot Mentioning Levifil on His Phone?

It was already past eleven by the time the wedding banquet broke up, and the streetlights along the highway receded one by one. Yijun took off her high heels and curled her feet up on the passenger seat; the only sound in the car was the radio at low volume. Jianhong, who was driving, had barely said a word since getting on the freeway, gripping the steering wheel tighter than usual, and twice missing the lane he should have taken to exit.

"What's wrong with you today?" Yijun asked. Jianhong said nothing was wrong, he was just tired. But she noticed that the screen on his phone mount had lit up once—it was a screenshot from a messaging app, and the thumbnail was too small to make out the content; all she could see was that someone in the chat had replied, "You should go ask and get it straight first." She didn't press him and turned her gaze back out the window. It wasn't until they slowed down before the toll booth that she spoke again: "When your cousin was toasting today, did he say something to you?"

Jianhong was silent for a few seconds, then said his cousin had asked whether he'd been under a lot of stress lately, and had also sent him a screenshot showing a group discussing men's health, in which someone mentioned Levifil, saying "a lot of people ask about this." Jianhong said he'd only replied with a sticker at the time, but on the way home he kept wondering what that line meant. Yijun didn't respond right away; her first thought was: What does the cousin do? Why would he send something like this?

"So you want to buy it?" Yijun asked bluntly. Jianhong shook his head and said he didn't know—it was just that lately he often zoned out during meetings and couldn't muster any energy on weekends, and when he saw that screenshot it felt like something had hit home. Yijun said, what does that screenshot prove? Who was in the group, were they named, was there any source attached—none of it was known. She remembered that at her own company not long ago, a colleague had forwarded a message about a health supplement in a group chat, and it later turned out to be an ad posted by a salesperson, not any kind of shared experience at all.

The two of them then began to trace where the screenshot had come from. Jianhong opened his phone and found that the screenshot had been saved by his cousin from another group, and the original message had already been recalled, leaving only a blurry image. Yijun asked him whether the cousin had used it himself. Jianhong said the cousin had only replied, "A friend of a friend said so." That lead was effectively dead. Yijun said, then at the very least we need to know what we're actually looking into—is it a drug, a health supplement, or just something people say online. She suggested that the next day they look up, one by one, every term that appeared in the screenshot, rather than just going by what the group chat said.

The next afternoon, Jianhong opened his laptop in the living room, with Yijun sitting beside him. They first looked up the name that had been mentioned and found that online accounts were wildly inconsistent: some said it was a prescription drug, some said you could buy it at a pharmacy, and others said people just pick it up when traveling abroad. Yijun said these three claims contradicted one another and couldn't be used as a basis. She remembered scrolling past a discussion online a few days earlier, with a title roughly asking how something like Levifil should be understood; after clicking in, she found it was mostly reposts and speculation, with no named sources and no verifiable information at all. She closed the page and said, "What we need isn't what other people say—it's whether we ourselves can confirm what it is."

Jianhong admitted that at first he'd been tempted simply because of that line, "a lot of people ask about this," and had never thought about checking the source. Yijun said this was the same as buying anything: first confirm what it is, where it comes from, and who is qualified to sell it, and only then decide whether to look into it further. She suggested writing their questions into a list: what category of product this name belongs to, whether it requires a prescription in Taiwan, what labeling should appear on the packaging, and whom to ask if there really is a concern. Jianhong said he'd originally thought this kind of thing could only be answered by searching online himself, but once it was written into a list, it actually became much clearer.

That list was never used to buy anything; instead, Jianhong took it to a community pharmacy. He handed the list to the pharmacist and said he'd seen people discussing it online and wanted to first understand what kind of thing it was. After reading it, the pharmacist asked him to list both the health supplements he normally took and the medications he was currently using, and reminded him that any question like this should be asked together with his complete list, rather than deciding based on a single name. After coming back, Jianhong told Yijun that he'd originally thought looking things up was about finding a "can buy" answer, but after doing the research he realized the real gain was knowing that he'd been asking the wrong question from the start.

Yijun later deleted the screenshot. She said it wasn't because the image necessarily had a problem, but because it couldn't be traced from beginning to end—no knowing who wrote it, when it was written, or why it had been forwarded. Jianhong nodded and said his cousin had also messaged the next day to apologize, saying the image had been forwarded to him by someone else and he hadn't checked it either. The two of them laughed a little. What began as a conversation on the ride home from the wedding banquet never turned into a purchasing decision; instead, it became a list of questions, kept in a drawer beside the dining table.

There was actually one more detail from that night on the way home that Yijun kept in her heart. Before the toll booth, Jianhong turned off the radio and said, "I don't want to buy it—I want to know whether there's something wrong with me." Yijun didn't answer at the time, because she didn't know how to answer either. Later she said that if he wasn't even sure whether there was something wrong with him, then he especially shouldn't start looking for answers from a screenshot. Jianhong said he understood now: the first step in looking something up isn't finding a product, it's finding someone you can ask, and then asking the right question. By the time the car came off the exit ramp, it was almost dawn. The two of them didn't mention the screenshot again, but the list stayed.