CHAPTER 36

Original (Published in "Lun's World"): 2005-12-30

Rewritten: 2025-11-11

One of the side effects of cough syrup, it turns out, was that Lun spent his days endlessly opening and closing a tent—over and over again without end.

For our family, there’s an unwritten rule for peace at home: when Lun is well, everyone is well.

As mentioned earlier, once the apartment’s swimming pool was repaired, we immediately took Lun there to have some fun and give him more recreational activities. He swam for two nights in a row. A few days later, he began to cough. After checking him carefully—no fever, no runny nose, appetite and spirits as usual—I gave him some over-the-counter cough syrup, and his symptoms were brought under control. For safety’s sake, we still took him to see our family doctor, Dr. Shih, but he didn’t find anything unusual either.

Around the same time, while I was tidying up the house, Lun discovered a small beach tent that I had bought from the supermarket years ago for about twenty dollars. It was big enough for one person to curl up inside for a nap. To him, it was a treasure, and he insisted on setting it up right in the living room.

Once opened, the tent took up most of the living room space. That was fine—but the real trouble began when, right after “opening,” he insisted on “closing” it again, disassembling the entire frame.

He knew how to open it, but not how to fold it back up. Yet he stubbornly wanted to try. When he failed, he would call for me or my wife to “help finish the job.” So it became an endless cycle of setting up and tearing down.

The worst part was that every night, near midnight, he would demand that we help him “close the show.” By the time he finally settled down and went to bed, it was already 2 a.m.—and we still had to work the next morning.

When morning came and we were just about to leave for work, Lun would grab the tent poles again and want to “open” it once more. Though we were fuming inside, we dared not refuse. If he became upset after we left, and the school had to send him home, it would cause even more trouble.

So we hurriedly helped him pitch the tent in under five minutes. Once he was satisfied, everyone could finally head out to work or school. After all that, my wife still ended up being ten minutes late.

Lun’s cough did not improve. Every night after “closing the tent,” as soon as he lay down, he began coughing violently. For several nights in a row, none of us slept well. On Monday, we took him again to see Dr. Shih and mentioned his strange “open–close” behavior. The doctor asked which cough medicine we had given him, and after checking, he told us that one of its side effects was causing agitation. We immediately switched to another medicine. Sure enough, the next day Lun completely ignored the tent. I quickly packed it up and hid it somewhere he couldn’t find it.

When my wife and I took that same brand of cough syrup, it just made our hearts race—but with Lun, it turned him into a “little tent monster.” How odd! The new medicine was milder, but his coughing got worse at night, so we still couldn’t sleep.

Most people become irritable when they cough. Lun, however, would laugh after coughing until he broke into a sweat, as if he found it amusing. When his chest hurt from coughing, he asked me to massage it—and then he laughed again. His laughter eased our worries somewhat. In the end, we still had to give him antibiotics before the cough finally subsided.

Lun stayed home on sick leave for two weeks. After he recovered, I caught it, then his younger brother, and finally my wife. The four of us coughed our way through more than a month before the skies finally cleared.