The Video Call on the Seventh Night of My Business Trip: The First Time We Looked Into Japan Tengsu Together

On the seventh night of my business trip, the view outside my hotel room window was a whole row of office buildings with their lights still on. I closed my laptop, propped my phone on the nightstand, and waited for my wife to pick up the video call. The trip was originally ten days, but three more were added at the last minute. I had downplayed it on the phone, and she was silent for a few seconds on the other end before saying only, "You figure it out yourself." Those few seconds of silence weighed heavier than any challenge in the conference room.

When the video call connected, she first asked what I had for dinner. I said a convenience store rice ball. She frowned and said that if I kept this up, my health would fall apart. I shot back, "It's not like this is the only time," in a sharper tone than I expected. She paused and asked if I was looking up weird stuff again. I froze for a moment, then remembered that two nights earlier, when I couldn't sleep, I had searched some health-related terms on my phone, and the search history had probably synced to our shared account. In that moment I was actually a little annoyed, feeling watched, but more than that, I felt guilty, because I myself couldn't clearly explain what those pages were even saying.

She didn't press for details. She only said something that left me unable to respond: "If you can't even explain what you're looking up, how are you going to judge it?" I wanted to talk back, to say it was just a look, but the words reached my lips and I swallowed them. Because she was right. These past few days in the hotel room, facing the screen alone, I clicked whatever I saw, opened a pile of tabs, and when I closed them, nothing was left. That kind of loneliness makes you want to grab onto a simple answer, even if that answer hasn't actually been verified.

The next night, I called her on my own. This time I didn't beat around the bush. I directly said that one of the keywords I was searching was Japan Tengsu, but most of what I found were store pages, and the claims contradicted each other. Some were very exaggerated, and some didn't even explain the basic information clearly. After hearing me out, she wasn't angry. She only asked, "So can you tell which ones are ads and which ones are information?" I said I couldn't really tell. She said she didn't understand it either, but she was willing to look at it with me. So we agreed that the next night, we would each spend half an hour, screenshot what we saw, and then discuss it together.

During that half hour, the first thing I learned was this: first check what category this thing falls under in Taiwan. I found that some items are labeled as health foods on the packaging, while others involve drug regulation, and the rules and ways of obtaining them are different. I don't have the ability to judge ingredients or effects, and I don't intend to draw any conclusions here, but at least I could confirm one thing: if you can't even figure out what category it belongs to, yet rush to ask where to buy it and how much it costs, the order is backwards. The second thing was that store pages often turn "many people ask" into "many people use," and "customer service says" into "professional advice." The gap between those two is huge.

I told my wife these thoughts, and she added, "Then why don't you just write the questions down and ask a professional directly when you get back to Taiwan?" I thought that suggestion was more practical than continuing to circle around online. Together we listed a few questions: What is the positioning of this kind of product in Taiwan, does it require a specific process to obtain, would my current daily routine and diet affect my judgment, and if I still have other health foods on hand, should I bring them along so the other person knows. These questions don't have standard answers, but at least they are concrete and askable.

Halfway through, she suddenly laughed and said that the two of us, across a strait, in a hotel room and at a kitchen table, were like holding a small reading group. I laughed too. That video call lasted nearly fifty minutes, longer than the previous few days combined. Before hanging up, she said, "The day you come back, let's go to the clinic together and ask clearly. Don't look it up alone." I said okay. In that moment I realized that what I thought I was looking for was a product, but what I was actually looking for was a way to feel at ease, and that way should not be provided by store pages.

On the last night before returning home, I closed those tabs one by one, leaving only the list of questions we had organized together. I didn't buy anything, and I didn't make any judgments. The day the plane landed, my wife came to pick me up. In the car she asked how I was adjusting to the time difference, and I said it was okay. We didn't go to the clinic right away. Instead, we went home first and had a hot meal. The following week, we really made time, took that list and the health foods we already had at home, and went to consult professionals. When I walked out of the consultation room, the thing hanging over my heart eased a little, not because I had gotten some magical answer, but because I finally knew what I was asking, and I also knew someone beside me was willing to ask together with me.

If you have also been in a hotel room late at night, checking page after page on a screen, getting more confused the more you look, what I want to say is this: stop first, and write down clearly what you are looking up, why you are looking it up, and what category the things you find belong to. Then find someone you trust and spread the list out to look at together. Many times, the problem isn't that there are too few answers, but that we haven't asked the question correctly yet. As for those dazzling pages, just leave them in the search results. There's no need to rush to turn them into an item in your shopping cart.