He said Hongmei had changed her mind at the supermarket entrance, taking a step back after the automatic doors had opened for her, turning right and heading into Starbucks instead. There was an eight-foot-long bulletin board there, where people put up notes advertising rooms for rent, secondhand goods, or private classes. Lamps from the forties were being sold as antiques. He saw Hongmei reach out to grab a slip of paper with a landlord’s phone number on it, but soon after that she stuck it back, turning to another ad. This one was right at the bottom, not very noticeable. It had a picture of a hunting dog, so he thought it must be for a pet obedience school. Hongmei knelt down, her hand resting against the wall, to see the text more clearly. The words were jammed together, a dense black mass covering half the paper.

He had seen Hongmei rip off the last little paper tag hanging from the bottom—the other nineteen were already gone. She held it in her palm and studied it, head tilted to one side. When a gust of wind blew it away, she took a couple of steps after it, then stopped, watching it twist and turn, flying far away. When he had looked back at her face, it seemed she’d had a new thought.

After she left, he’d gone over to look at the hunting dog ad. It wasn’t anything to do with animals, it turned out, but an advertisement for a retired private investigator. He or she taught a method of vanishing from the people who knew you. Anyone with a past they wanted to leave behind could use this tactic to start anew. And if you were tired of your marriage or your profession, this was also the cheapest, least harmful way to leave. If you were tired of yourself and wanted a brand-new personality, this gave you the best chance of achieving that. And of course, it made life a lot easier for men who wanted to become women, or vice versa. An eight-week course (an hour and a half per week) and a thousand dollars in fees was all you needed to end your previous identity and start all over again.

He told Hongmei that in 1992, the San Francisco Chronicle had run an article about the phenomenon of people vanishing, mentioning several books that told you how to do it. By 1993, more than seventy thousand people had disappeared nationwide. Some had been in debt, some had committed murder, some had been accused of a crime with no way to prove their innocence, some had been enmeshed in affairs they couldn’t free themselves from. These people had carefully planned every step of their disappearance, acquiring new birth certificates, IDs, and Social Security numbers, then one night or one early morning, they had vanished forever. Some had faked their own suicide or murder; others had left behind sincere goodbye letters.