EPT
Hero
I step off the train into the brisk morning air, which burns not with frost but with sunlight. Amazingly, the cold snap has broken and the sun lays once more its rays on our sidewalks before noon. Not bad for December in San Francisco. The massed throngs of people leave, some heading east, some heading north. As always in these crowds, I do my best to be distinctly aware of the feeling of my wallet in my pocket. I don't touch it with my hand-- I don't want to give its location away. If there is ever a place for a pickpocket, it's in a train station. Uncle Wonil often told me to wrap rubber bands around my wallet, so that it slides out of my pocket only with great difficulty. At times I wonder if he's right to be so cautious, even here. He has lived in and travelled to more cities than I have.
Wonil is a businessman, perhaps the kind of businessman that you think of when people say the word: he travels and makes deals and wears a fancy watch at a nice suit. His firm sends him to Korea, to China, to Japan. He eats on the company's dime, he sees the world, and he makes more money than God and his two sisters. When he's abroad, he's often staying at the Hyatt in Seoul. They recently threw him a party for having stayed there for a cumulative 365 nights. Wonil is 50 years old; he has spend 2% of his life so far living in that Hyatt. It's not all glamour. He's in poorer cities from time to time, since his territory includes most of South-East Asia. Decades of travel in poor areas have given him instincts I will probably never have. My life has been too sheltered, too soft to do what he does, and know what he knows.
Even so, I notice as the shouting starts, I see the commotion before others near me do. Behind me-- probably about 100 meters. The purse-snatcher picked the wrong target. He (male, as they always seem to be) thought the short Asian woman with the black purse would not put up much of a fight. He was wrong. His initial yank isn't good enough to unseat her grip. Her response is immediate: she shouts at the top of her lungs. She kicks him in the leg, hard. He loses his grip and staggers away. She is already shouting, "he tried to steal my purse!" as he turns and sprints down the sidewalk, weaving through the crowd. A siren can be heard in the distance, but it's not for him. Too fast for that.
The people around me don't see him coming. They don't know who he is or what he did. They aren't aware. He's 200 feet away, then 100, then he's running towards me from 50 feet away, and I watch him as he does. Everyone is still walking, still oblivious, but I see him. He's like me. He's in his mid 20s, dark jacket, blue jeans, sneakers. He's not sagging, he doesn't have his hood up, he's just running. I can see him panting, feel his exertion as he tries to put distance between him and the people who know what he did. His hair is cut short, stylish in the way short hair can be only on young people.
The people around me are confused, not concerned, annoyed, not angry, as he pushes through them, passing them. . They don't know what I know. They haven't seen what I have. He gets closer, and we make eye contact. Nobody else has bothered to turn around, to see him. He's moving through a crowd of faceless, oblivious strangers. All but one of the pedestrians don't know who he is or care. All save me. He draws closer, and eye contact breaks as he navigates around one last clump of people. He's close to me now. I can stick my leg out and trip him, he's going too fast to dodge. I can stop him. He's not even armed-- if he had a knife he'd have cut that purse's strap and gotten away clean.
He runs past me, and I watch him go.
I alone could have intervened. I know what I saw. And as he came by, I did nothing. Not because I was too slow to react, or because I was too weak, or didn't know what was going on. I could have really stopped him, too. Tripping him would have done it. Hell, I could have even taken a photo. It would have been so easy, so trivial. There were people chasing him. All they needed was a little edge to catch up.
My fellow travellers didn't know, they didn't have the awareness to see him coming. It wasn't until the shouts got closer that they started looking around for him, and by then he was long gone. His actions are bad for society. If I stopped him, I'd be a hero. If I even tried to inconvenience him, people would admire me for it. He was alone. Unarmed. A criminal. I had a chance here, to be something other than a pedestrian, a faceless member of the crowd.
I had a chance to do something good.
I stood by and did nothing.
