A millions hands. A million feet. Yet no one saw him. Or seemed to see. Their eyes rolled over the produce. Hands touched and squeezed. The old ones in their shapeless clothes, their two-dollar shoes, they stepped aside, but they did not see him, white ghost, all but invisible. They had learned the trick of this, the lesson, passed on long ago, by those who had survived. The Anglos, the Euros—they were not real. If you did not look at them, if you did not see them, if your eyes did not meet their eyes, then they could not hurt you. The younger Chinese, in their sharp clothes, it was the same thing, only different. For them, it was not a matter of superstition. They did not see him, because he was unimportant. The white man, he did not exist. The clerk at the Chinese Historical Society fulfilled his request without speaking, guiding him to Special Collections, where he could examine the manifest. The list describing the objects in the collection contained only the most cursory of information, but he found Ru Shen’s name there, in the itemization of artifacts for “Across the Water.”
