Now in another emergency and distress situation of his own, David decided to call Eric to seek his advice. "Eric, you worked with a lot of ENS customers and went to many technical conferences before, who are the competitors of ENS and where do I find them?" After a surprise "Wo wo wo . . . slow down, slow down, what happened", David described to Eric about how "I was laid off by ENS" and added "I say I was 'laid off' by ENS, but I preferred to leave the 'off' out of the sentence, do you get the poetic humor in it?" Then David told Eric as to how Ankur show him "trust" by taking away his severance pay. Eric laughed without guilt this time and said: "Oh, Ankur did kick you in the groin, didn't him?" "Yes he did, indeed he did" David gave an almost inaudible laugh while cutting off the phrase "and Geenick stabbed me in the back". "This reminded me of how much I took from him after testifying for Dr. Shahabi in the court" continued Eric. He then gave David a list of ENS competitors and a list of professional associations in transportation industry. But before hanging up the phone, he said: "Oh David, one more thing, on a second thought, forgive me for being 'sage' and all, do you really want to get even with Ankur in transportation industry? Aren't you tired of it all? There are way more businesses than just vehicles and drivers, you know. Remember, 'an eye for an eye, the whole world would go blind' -- Muhandus K. Ghandi".

But David had the excuse that he was not as morally sublime as Eric. He even thought of asking Eric to take Ankur to the court for the dispute of severance pay. He thought Eric would have helped testifying that his performance was at least as good as other previously axed managers, if not better, since Eric once said: "David, you often appear clueless, but eventually always get the job done" -- highest form of praises coming from the mouth of Eric. David originally thought that with equal performance and worse treatment -- without getting escorted out of the building and then taking 2 weeks of severance pay -- he could win in the court. But now, he decided to save the trouble for him and good 'O Eric, by not going through the legal proceedings dragging Ankur, Geenick and Eric into it. In fact, David decided that 2 week worth of pay is too little to waste time over. The root problem is just that Canadian employers are too poor to pay for better packages after getting rid of their employees comparing to their US counterparts. Worsen the scenario, there are employers like Ankur's family owned "publicly traded" ENS, that were always trying to short change employees intentionally whenever other people are not looking. He would half forgive Ankur and Geenick by not taking them to the court. But he would half not forgive them by staying in the industry to compete with them, if getting the opportunities.

David started contacting companies on the list that he received from Eric. The first thorny thing that David ran into was many of the colleagues in the same trade started asking him about NDA, the "none disclosure agreement" that he might have signed with ENS. David could vaguely remember that he did sign an NDA with ENS, but could not remember its content. He had to ask Jenny Lee for a copy and found several companies listed in the NDA as employers that he "can not work for" within 2 years after leaving ENS.

This angered David even more, since majority of the companies that he worked for before ENS did not ask him to sign the so called "none disclosure agreement". And when he interviewed with ENS, nobody mentioned this to him, then when he signed the NDA at the first day of employment, he thought of it as just another form along with tax, address, social insurance forms, which could be signed but never affect the life of an average Joe. It suddenly hit him that there are always the struggle of "good and evil" in small details and fine prints. The struggles won't be apparent most of the time, until some defining moments of one's life.

David's sister once taught him: "Don't be discouraged by problems because they are everywhere. People live to solve problems. If you don't have problems, you don't have a life to live and you are probably dead". To overcome this problem, David had to only contact employers not on his NDA list and avoid competing employers that provide similar products as those of ENS. The NDA filtered out many opportunities for David. Then he found that most of the employers in Eric's transportation associations list are in U.S. In order to work for them, he would need to go through the nightmare immigration process in U.S. again starting from an H-1B visa. Many U.S. employers do not want to sponsor H-1B visa for people they are not familiar with, unless they really need to get someone exceptional or urgently. This "immigration status" filtered out another large portion of David's opportunities.

Now David is pinning his last hope on getting Canadian citizenship, so he can access a much bigger job market in U.S. via NAFTA trade agreement's TN-1 (Trade NAFTA 1) visa, specifically devised for Canadians wanting to work in U.S. In fact, David's entire journey to Canada is for the purpose of getting a Canadian citizenship so he could travel and work around the world with reasonable convenience. People everywhere in the world, especially those in the West, like to advertise themselves as champions of the equality for all human being. And almost always, this is not totally false and not totally true. In reality there are many inequalities littered all over almost every downtown streets of every major city.

First, there is racism. Right in front of David's eyes, in a university campus, after a false fire alarm, when students getting back to their classrooms, black students would be asked for IDs by police, while students of other races would be let in without questions. In the 1990's, David also witnessed in graduate school that it was still possible for blonde-haired, blue-eyed travelers to cross country borders into Europe and North America without passport. In the meantime, he was one hundred percent sure he would not be allowed to cross borders of those countries without his passport.

One day, David sat in his study and received a phone call from another caller titling himself as "Detective Lansky from INS". He told David that his team as identified David as a member of the "Korean Gang". David answered: "are you kidding me? I am a Chinese, I don't know any Korean and can not be part of a Korean gang". The other party said: "who said Korean Gang? I said you are part of Ko Li Gong mafia group. We will come to your house tomorrow". David was really scared, so he reported the call to the local police department. After he went in and out of the house several times, he found a voice mail message on his answering machine: "Hello, this is Detective Lansky from INS, we have definitely confirmed that you are a member of the Koligong. We will come to visit your house tomorrow afternoon at 2 o'clock". Then at the end of the message, he heard laughs and a teenager's voice saying "I was like, I was like. . ." to others, then the voices stopped. While the prank didn't mount to anything, but it was quite annoying to David, and even wasted several police officers' visits too as a result. One police officer called the pranksters "idiots" pointing out that "detective" is a title for people working in police departments, and the proper title for an officer from Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) should be "Agent Lansky".

David love to listen to conservative radio talk shows when he lived in and later visited United States. Some of the non-conservative talk shows are too difficult for him to understand, with his limited vocabulary in English, that he had to resort to rap-dictionaries or ask friends in order to comprehend. Therefore it is easier to just tune in to the conservatives. In fact, David always credited Rush Limbaugh as his most important English teacher. After 911, it seemed more and more conservative talk show hosts started jamming conservative radio stations that Rush's EIB network used to be hosted on, some even go further to the "right of Rush". This is someone who labeled himself "to the right of Rush and to the left of God". Mike Savage, the host of Savage Nation is advocating "terrorist profiling" at the borders and in the airport. He repeated again and again, "This is not racial profiling I am talking about, but terrorist profiling. When you stop an 80 year old Norwegian granny at the airport, don't you think it's ridiculous to spend the same amount of time searching her as other passengers . . .". David grimed and shook his head amusingly: "why didn't he just say it makes perfect sense to do racial profiling at the airport? Why did he keep on mentioning the word 'Norwegian'? Would an 80 year old 'non-Norwegian' granny be profiled differently from a 'Norwegian' granny in his system? In fact, if terrorists really want to plant a bomb in the suitcase of an 80 year old Granny, do you think they would plant it in an 80 year old 'Norwegian' granny or an 80 year old 'non-Norwegian' granny?"

Set aside the discussions of racism or "reverse discrimination", racism is at least denounced in official documents in most countries and in most corporations all over the world. On the other hand "citizenshipism" by "citizenshipists", as David called it, is another form of absurd inequality becoming more and more conspicuous in the new era of global economy, and gets officially sanctioned by countries and corporations everywhere.

It is half understandable that EU (European Union) would allow citizens of EU to work among EU countries with little restrictions. After all, those countries are geographically close like one village adjacent to another in the old times. But it is quite illogical when people are treated differently simply because they are holding a passport of People's Republic of China, and most countries think it is normal. When David wanted to travel to Sweden, most of his colleagues could pick up and go, as long as they are Canadian, Belgium or Singapore citizens, while he had to get some additional documents for every business trip.

And the fun doesn't stop there. "In criminal justice system, police are in the law enforcement branch and judges are in judiciary branch, and here are their stories" -- Law and Order opening statement. But in immigration system, every border agent, every consular officer is the legislative branch plus the executive branch plus the judiciary branch. Therefore for David's business trips -- to Sweden -- for instance, he had been dealt with different types of treatments depending on whom he was going to run into at any particular time. One agent would say, "You should apply for a visitor's visa, because your stay would only be two weeks" and another would say "you should get a work permit, because you are going to work in Sweden". When asked by David what the definition of "work" is, some agent would say "physically moving boxes from one place to another" some would say "any type of paper work, programming, word processing".

David sometimes would ask about the definition of "work" and say: "Then what about interviewing with customers, listening to their complaints, onsite support, managing projects, trying to make a sale to potential customers". The officer would reply: "hmm… that is a grey area" while making a mental note inside "this guy is really testing my limits, what would I do to show him who's in charge around here". When it is being the right place at the right time, an officer would tell David: "Do you know every officer at the border has the right to check the luggage of every passenger? We normally choose not to do so, but we can always do that. Now come with me and let me check your suitcases".

Sometimes the sun would shine in the immigration office briefly and there would be a nice officer saying: "please fill out this form, I don't know why Swedish government wants to know the names of your sister in law and brother in law, but there are blank spaces there, so you've got to fill them out". That is about as bright a moment as it gets in an immigration office.