The first time I saw him I realized I had seen him before ,though exactly why I had not really seen him before this "first time", I do not know.

Probably I was too busy with the plot of the story I was writing or a line in a poem I was composing. Yet I had noted generally all the others—with their caps askew and their school satchels hanging at various lengths from their shoulders. I had heard them too – the laughing, the whispering, the compressed exuberance of youth in a too small space, the carriage of a bus.

It was the year I was living in Nanjing. Every day I would go back and forth from home to school by bus. The journey took about half an hour each way. Every morning a group of schoolboys would board the bus and ride for fifteen to twenty minutes. I was aware of them, but not acutely so. In the beginning they seemed but a noisy blur. Other passengers on the bus did not seem to doze, look out the windows or bury themselves in their favorite newspapers.

Then one day I saw him, a tiny figure bundle up warmly against the city's autumn weather. I realized immediately that I had seen him many times before, always in the same place, the seat directly opposite my own. I smiled at him, having looked up, momentarily from the poem which I was trying to write. His wide, dark eyes blinked in shyness, and he turned his head to gaze out the window for the rest of the journey.

The next day I found myself waiting for him to get on the bus. At last he came with the others, yet seemingly apart from them. He was surrounded by them, yet divorced from them. He seemed to carry his own special world with him—a world of one, a world of silence, or so I mused as I watched. The others jostled and poked on another. Their behavior toward him was gentle when they noticed him. Quietly and deliberately he made his way to his usual seat. I kept my eyes on him.

"Hello," I said brightly, "I have been waiting for you."