He Spread His Search History Across the Table and Realized the Question Itself Was the Problem

When Ah-Hong turned his laptop around, there were over a dozen tabs lined up neatly on the screen. Each URL looked a little different, but the titles were almost identical. His wife glanced at it and said only one thing: "Are you trying to buy something, or write a thesis?"

The whole thing started simply enough. Old Zhou, a guy Ah-Hong knew from the gym, had casually mentioned one day by the lockers that he'd been looking into so-called men's health supplements, and that they were getting a lot of buzz online. Ah-Hong went home without giving it much thought and typed a few words into the search bar. He figured it would be a five-minute job. Instead, he ended up researching until one in the morning, and the more he looked, the stranger it all seemed.

The first thing that made him stop was seeing the same product photo on four different storefronts. The angle of the packaging, the position of the glare, even the wrinkles in the tablecloth beside it—all identical. Yet the prices across the four stores varied by nearly double, and two of them had "limited stock" countdowns. He clicked into the reviews and noticed the tone of the comments was eerily similar too—short lines like "fast shipping" and "packaging intact." Nobody mentioned why they were looking for this kind of thing in the first place.

He brought it up with Old Zhou. Old Zhou's reaction was something else. He went quiet for three seconds, then said: "You're still reading reviews? I check whether they offer a receipt." Ah-Hong blinked and asked why. Old Zhou explained that he'd once bought something else, and the listing had been full of grand claims. When it arrived, the outer packaging didn't even have Chinese labeling. He tried to return it, and the seller replied with just one line: "Personal hygiene products are non-returnable and non-exchangeable." After that, he wised up. Any page that couldn't clearly explain where it came from, he closed immediately.

That conversation sent Ah-Hong in a different direction. He stopped fixating on price and reviews and started reading what the pages actually said. He noticed some storefronts photographed the ingredient list so blurrily you couldn't read it, while others cropped out half the label, leaving only the product name. Stranger still, several pages never once explained how this type of product is classified in Taiwan—they just kept repeating phrases like "made in Japan" and "limited edition."

Ah-Hong then did something he found a little ridiculous. He copied all the URLs into a notepad and annotated them one by one: this one has an address, this one only has a customer service email, this one doesn't even have return rules. His wife walked by and asked what he was doing. He said, "I'm making a spreadsheet." She replied, "Last time you made a spreadsheet, it was for your taxes."

What really stumped him was that none of these pages answered one basic question. What he originally wanted to know was simply how to verify information like where to buy Japanese tengsu—what channels to check. But all he found was "buy here" and "buy there." Nobody told him how to judge whether a source was trustworthy. He later came across a forum where someone mentioned that you should first confirm how this type of product is actually classified in Taiwan—whether it's a food, a health food, or something requiring a separate permit—because the classification determines what claims can be made and which regulations apply.

He followed that thread and realized he'd spent the previous few hours going in circles. He started paying attention to the information that should be on the packaging: product name, contents, net weight, storage instructions, responsible manufacturer's name and address, country of origin. He also noticed that some pages made the word "Japan" huge, but where the company actually shipping the product was located could not be found anywhere.

The next day at noon, he showed the notepad to Old Zhou. Old Zhou flipped through two pages and laughed: "This spreadsheet of yours is more thorough than my health check report." Ah-Hong said he'd decided not to buy—at least not for now. He planned to list out what he normally takes, and next time he went to a pharmacy or clinic, he'd casually ask a professional whether there was anything to watch out for between this type of product and what he was already using.

Old Zhou nodded and said he wanted to make a list too. The two of them sat on a bench outside the gym, typing item by item into their phone notes. Halfway through, Old Zhou forgot what he'd been taking, and Ah-Hong gave him a hard time about it.

That night, before closing the notepad, Ah-Hong added one last line: Figure out what you're actually asking before deciding whether to buy. He felt it sounded like a platitude, but for him, those dozen-plus tabs that night were messy precisely because he hadn't figured that out from the start.

He later sent the spreadsheet to another friend, who replied with a sticker saying, "If you keep researching like this, you'll never buy anything." Ah-Hong replied that it didn't matter—at least he knew why he wasn't buying. To him, that was more real than any purchase.