The Night the Video Call Dropped on My Seventh Business Trip, We Started Looking Into Japan Tengsu Together

That night when the video call dropped, I stared at my own face on the phone screen, with only the hum of the air conditioner left in the room. It was the seventh day of my business trip. I'd stood at the client's office for ten hours during the day, and by the time I got back to the hotel and finished showering, it was already 11:30 p.m. I had to be back in the meeting room at 8 the next morning. My wife asked from the other end when I'd be home. I said I didn't know, the project wasn't wrapped up yet. She went quiet for a few seconds, then said, "You're like this every time you go away." I shot back, "What else am I supposed to do?" Then the screen went black. I tossed my phone onto the bed, sat on the carpet with my back against the edge of the bed, and suddenly felt that this trip wasn't just exhausting—it was that there were things the two of us had never really talked through.

The next morning I woke up and sent her a photo of the hotel breakfast first. She replied with a sticker. During my lunch break I called her. She picked up, her tone still flat. I didn't explain my schedule again—I just said that what I'd said the night before came out wrong. She was quiet for a moment, then said she wasn't angry that I was on a business trip; she was angry that every time the subject of my health came up, I changed the topic. She said that for the past few months, after I got home I'd often go to bed very early, and on weekends I didn't really want to go out. She'd asked if something was wrong, and I always said I was fine. I stood in the hallway outside the meeting room, not knowing how to respond for a moment, because even I couldn't say whether that counted as "something wrong."

Two days before flying home, I was tossing and turning in my hotel room, unable to sleep, and typed a few words into the search bar. What came up was a mess—forum comments, shopping pages, and some articles that looked like content farms. I noticed the same term was described as completely different things in different places. Some people talked about it like an ordinary supplement, some talked about it like a medication, and some were reposting other people's experiences as if they were settled conclusions. I screenshotted a few pages and sent them to my wife, saying I couldn't even make sense of what I'd found. She replied: Then don't buy anything on impulse for now. We'll look at it together when you're back.

When I got home that weekend, we spread those screenshots out on the dining table—one laptop, two phones—and talked while we searched. She was more patient than I was. She'd click into a page to see who wrote it, whether there was a byline, whether the ingredients and sources were listed. I, on the other hand, kept getting pulled along by headlines. Seeing the words "Japan Tengsu" show up on several pages of very different kinds, I assumed they were all talking about the same thing. She pointed out that some of those pages didn't clearly state what category it even was—they just said "DM me if interested"—so we skipped those. We also noticed that some discussions wrote personal experiences as if they were universal conclusions, with no context whatsoever underneath, and we didn't dare use those as references either.

As we searched, I gradually picked up a few steps for judging things. First, confirm what category this thing falls under in Taiwan—food or medication—because the labeling rules and how you obtain them are different. Second, check whether the packaging clearly lists ingredients, manufacturing and expiration dates, and the information of the domestic responsible company. If there's only a nickname or a messaging app account, there's no point reading further. Third, don't treat a single claim on a forum as fact, because everyone's situation is different—someone else writing "it really worked for me" doesn't mean it'll be the same for me. My wife added one more point: if it's actually something that requires a doctor's evaluation to use, then us comparing prices online is completely meaningless.

I also thought back to why I'd suddenly wanted to look this up that night in the hotel. Part of it was that I couldn't sleep, and part of it was that over the past six months I really had felt my energy wasn't what it used to be, but I'd kept brushing it off with "work's been busy." My wife said she wasn't asking me to buy something to fix it—she just wanted me to be willing to talk about what was going on, instead of quietly looking things up on my own. That sentence left me silent for a long time. We later agreed that after I got back, we'd find a time to go to a clinic together, make a list of how I'd been sleeping lately, my daytime energy, and the supplements I usually take, and bring it to a professional to ask about.

It took us half the evening just to finish that list. I realized I had so many bottles in my drawer that had been opened and never finished—some I'd picked up on business trips, some friends had given me—and I couldn't even remember why I'd started taking each one. My wife asked me about them one bottle at a time, and I thought about each one, and some I couldn't even answer for myself. She didn't blame me. She just said: You can't even clearly explain what you're taking, so how could you possibly judge whether you need it? We split the list into two columns—one for things whose ingredients and sources we definitely knew, and one for things of unknown origin or with unclear labeling. We put the latter away for now and would ask a professional before doing anything.

Looking back now, that dropped video call wasn't actually a bad thing. If that call hadn't happened, I probably would have kept searching alone in my hotel room, drawing my own conclusions, and then come home pretending nothing had happened. In the end, we didn't rush to decide whether to use anything. We just agreed to bring the list to my next appointment and let a professional help us see which ones to keep, which to stop, and what someone my age with my schedule should be paying attention to. Business trips will continue, and jet lag and loneliness will still be there, but at least now I know that when I come across something uncertain, talking to the people around me first is far more useful than searching alone in a room until midnight.