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scanner.  His cell phone conversation with the abrasive Mr. Wang caused him to apologize in succession.  The two at the scanner felt a hint of pity for Mr. Li whose voice and words began to become increasingly submissive to the dominant Mr. Wang.  Mr. Li picked his shoulder bag as it came out of the scanner and walked away.  As soon as he was out of earshot of the uniformed officials, his conversation with Mr. Wang abruptly ended.  Mr. Li glanced up at a red-on-black electronic sign board to get his track assignment.  He joined the queue of people lined up to proceed onto the train platform.  After waiting five minutes in the queue, he handed his ticket to a woman clad in a navy suit jacket, her hair neat—done up.   She punched a single hole in his ticket and he moved to the right, pass her and through a turn style.  Down a flight of steps, a landing, and another flight of steps was the platform.  Mr. Li made his way to Track 4 to Car 22 of a dark green train.  A uniformed man, complete with officer’s hat, stood at the door of Car 22.  He took one look at Mr. Li’s ticket and let him board the train.  Mr. Li made his way to the back of the car pass a dozen rows of wooden seats.  There were already several people standing at the back of the train.  Mr. Li glanced at every face as he passed each row.  He could be sure that he knew no one on the train.  He found room against the wall, just behind the last row of wooden seats.  His mind began to ‘run the room’.  He had a subconscious habit. Mr. Li instinctively picked the pockets of everyone around and he did it with his senses.  He used his eyes to size up everyone.  He noticed:  clothing—expensive or cheap; fingernails—dirty or neat; hair—managed or not.  He would absorb any noticeable smells.  Perfumes were trying to impress.  Sweat could care less.  And, he eavesdropped.  He would fine tune accents, colloquialisms, grammar and language.  He could guess whether a person was educated or not and where they were from.  Based on the stress in a voice, he could usually tell if someone was telling the truth.  He was particularly interested in a middle-aged woman sitting in an adjacent wooden seat.  The woman shared the seat with an adolescent girl and they were having a conversation with personal touches.  They kept their voices low.  Mr. Li focused on them because, unlike everyone else on the train, they weren’t speaking Mandarin.  They were speaking Minnanhua —non-locals.  The train was in Hebei Province, bound for Beijing.  It was the North. Mandarin was spoken in the North.  Minnanhua was spoken in Zhejiang Province and other parts of the South.  It was also spoken around Shanghai.  Mr. Li had a hard time placing their accents.  He hadn’t spent much time in the South Mainland, making him unfamiliar with Minnanhua .  To make it more complicated, there was one other place Minnanhua was spoken, Taiwan.

Chapter Four   Taiwan
     
    The sun was high but bent low against an industrial sky.  The air carried its own color—not infected from other sources.  It was a fair weathered afternoon.  Outside was a perfect combination of people and their influences.  Buildings were stoutly grown along the banks of wide avenues in the city.  Buses like whales dominated the lanes of Bitan Bridge and cars like dolphins swam leisurely in their jet stream.  Buses and cars weren’t the only species swimming in the sea lanes of Taipei.  There were bicycles, motorcycles and motorized scooters, thousands of them.  They swam in schools on the sides of roads.  Like fish in Tanshui River, they were safer if they travelled together. 
    There were also sharks, sporty low-lying beasts.  They were flashy pieces of American muscle, fond of showing teeth called horse-power.  They would pierce up and down the streets of Taipei gobbling up road and space alike.  Loud engines showed their predatory nature.  Their presence was slightly