That Afternoon in the Break Room When Three Generations Talked Past Each Other About Japanese Vine Essence

At three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, the office break room smelled of instant coffee. Ajia was rinsing his mug, the water rushing noisily, when Lao Zhou from the neighboring department leaned over with his thermos and suddenly lowered his voice: "Do you young people still buy that stuff? You know, that... Japanese Vine Essence." Ajia froze, nearly dropping his cup, and asked, "What's that? A health supplement?" Lao Zhou didn't answer, just smiled mysteriously and said they'd talk about it that evening. The scene was witnessed by A-Hong from sales, who had just walked in. Tearing open a tea bag, he chimed in: "I've heard of that stuff, but everyone tells it differently. Some say it's for energy, some say it's something else. By the end I couldn't figure it out either."

The three men stood by the water dispenser, each pulling out his own version of understanding. Lao Zhou, fifty-seven, said he'd heard elders mention it when he was young, calling it "a man's thing," but he never asked for details, because back then such topics couldn't be brought up at the dinner table. A-Hong, thirty-four, said he'd once scrolled past products with similar names on an online shopping platform. The page was full of elaborate writing, but not a single line made sense to him, so he just closed it. Ajia, twenty-seven, had never heard of it at all. He only felt the term sounded like some kind of medicine, yet also like some kind of supplement, and the blurry line made him uneasy. None of the three could convince the others. Finally Lao Zhou tossed out, "Anyway, go look it up yourselves," and then it was time for a meeting, and the topic dissolved into the steam of the break room.

Ajia returned to his seat, but that fragment of a sentence stuck with him. He didn't particularly care about health supplements, but the feeling that "everyone says it differently" bothered him. He opened a search bar and typed in a few keywords. The results confused him even more: some pages described it as miraculous, some reminded readers to pay attention to sources and labeling, and some forums focused on "where to ask" rather than "whether it works." Staring at the screen, Ajia thought: if even the name itself makes it hard to tell whether it's a food or a drug, then the first thing to confirm probably isn't its efficacy, but which category it actually falls under.

At noon the next day, A-Hong came to find Ajia on his own. He said he'd gotten curious the night before and looked it up, and realized the pages he'd seen earlier actually mixed together several different types of products. Some were foods, some might fall under drug regulation, and the labeling rules and ways of obtaining them were completely different. A-Hong said, "I used to think they were all pretty much the same, but it turns out just whether you can understand the ingredients and warnings on the packaging makes a huge difference." That remark gave Ajia a concrete idea: instead of being led around by all the various claims online, why not list every version he'd heard and ask himself, one by one, "Who said this?" "Is there labeling I can check?" "Does this need a professional to confirm?" He took out a sticky note, wrote rumors on the left, verifiable clues on the right, and drew a line down the middle.

That sticky note was later seen by Lao Zhou. He had only been passing by, saw Ajia writing something, and came over to ask what he was busy with. Ajia pushed the note toward him and said, "I'm sorting out which parts are what people say and which parts I can actually verify." Lao Zhou was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly said, "Actually, the reason I asked that day is that my wife brought a box home a while ago, saying a friend recommended it. I looked at it for a long time and couldn't tell what it was, but I was too embarrassed to ask her, so I thought I'd ask you young people first." This turn made Ajia freeze. So Lao Zhou hadn't been asking because he understood, but because he didn't know either. The three of them then went through the items on the sticky note again and found that the truly certain information was pitifully little. Most claims stopped at the level of "I heard."

A-Hong suggested that instead of continuing to guess, they should make the question concrete: if this kind of product is labeled as food on the packaging, then it isn't a drug; if the labeling or source is incomprehensible, they should ask a professional first rather than rely on word of mouth among friends. Ajia added that while researching, he'd seen a very practical reminder: bring a list of all the other supplements or medications you're taking when you ask, because looking at just one item makes it easy to miss possible interactions. None of this was any profound conclusion, yet for the first time the three of them felt that "not knowing" could actually be organized into a list, instead of just being met with an awkward smile.

That evening, Lao Zhou actually brought the box to the office. The print on the outer packaging was tiny. He put on his reading glasses and read it out character by character. Ajia helped him look up the product category indicated on the packaging, while A-Hong was in charge of circling the technical terms they couldn't understand. The three of them were like solving a not-very-interesting puzzle, and along the way they even laughed over whether a certain word should be read in Japanese or Chinese. In the end they decided to take the circled questions to a nearby pharmacy and ask, at least to first confirm which category the box belonged to before deciding whether to keep discussing it. As Lao Zhou put the box back in the bag, he said, "So after asking for so long, the answer is to go ask a person, not a friend."

Ajia later put that sticky note away in a drawer. He hadn't reached any astonishing conclusion, nor had his lifestyle changed because of it, but he vaguely felt that this experience was more useful than any online article. Because what he learned wasn't the name of some product, but a sequence for dealing with unfamiliar health information: first confirm the category, then look at the labeling, and finally take the uncertain parts to a professional. As for that keyword mentioned in the break room, when he later organized his notes, he only lightly wrote the four characters "Japanese Vine Essence" beside the title, reminding himself that this matter had started with a joke and ended with three people walking into a pharmacy together to ask the question clearly.

This piece isn't trying to tell anyone what to buy or not buy. On Ajia's sticky note, the left column still had quite a few blanks in the end, because some claims simply can't be answered by friends. The only thing he was sure of was that when a term appears at the same time in jokes, rumors, and shopping pages, the easiest thing to do is join in the noise, and the hardest thing is to stop and ask, "What exactly is this?" The break room had returned to quiet that afternoon, the water dispenser running as usual, but the way the three of them dealt with this kind of topic was indeed a little different from before.