That was when David's entire family moved from Cincinnati, Ohio to Vancouver of BC Canada for a speedier process to obtain freedom of travel to most part of the world.

At that time, David no longer held grudge against his mother land China for so called "Tian An Men Massacre". After witnessing the degradation of people's lives in Eastern Europe and Russia, David believed what Chinese government said about his country was true in 1989: "stability trumps everything". He still mourned for people who lost their lives in that tragic event and sympathized with his friends who were traumatized by it, but more painfully, he regretted his hotheadedness in those years. After all, young people are often the sacrificial lambs to the "ideas and isms". His generation simply took their turn to sacrifice and now it's their turn to disappear into the darkness as a natural process of human history. Now that he became a little older and probably a little wiser, he started admiring how the even older generation of "communist" Chinese leaders had silently and tactfully corrected mistakes before 1989.

China is now a country with "Chinese style socialism", which is the equivalent of "Chinese style capitalism". Half of the black is the same color as half of the white, if you ask any web designer. Although very impressive and important in the development process, Chinese government can not take all of the credits for the country's rapid economical advancements. More importantly, Chinese people completely lost interests in "ideas and isms" and only focused on economy in the last decade and a half. That is the biggest change about China from David's observation and probably the most important one. The 1960's Chinese style "Culture revolution" and "ideological struggle" had definitely moved out of China to places like Taiwan and to a certain degree -- US and other parts of the world.

Like any investments in life, the investment of a citizenship could be a success or a failure. David remembered one of his former colleagues, Miodrag Puacavici, once told him the story about the Yugoslavia passport. "When I was a child, the Yugoslavian passport was the best to have in Europe. We could travel to Eastern block of the continent or the Western block. People in Yugoslavia were among the happiest in Europe. But then Tito died . . ." The guy was clearly missing "totalitarianism regime" and showed no love for democracy and freedom enjoyed by current broken apart former Yugoslavian republics. But who could blame him, how much does the struggle of "ideas and isms" have anything to do with the life of common mortals?

For David himself, he found unimaginable in his childhood era to cast away "isms" including "patriotism". But now, simply because holding a Chinese passport can not travel to Sweden or buy a British Airway ticket without a visa, he was quite happy to trade his superficial "ism" and loyalty for a different color on the cover of his passport. The trade was at a price of best years of his life and a sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II.

It's been real, it's been fun and it's been real fun, but fun has to stop for real work to be underway. Now that David can travel with his new found freedom, the other problem is money. After citizenship, the other thing preventing David from buying tickets to Europe or US is a big enough paycheck.

"Why do corporations go into business?" The economic professor Chuck Berry asked the class. One young student answered timidly: "to make money"? The economic professor replied loudly and scornfully: "No, to make a PROFIT, not money! Money is something you can make in your basement with a printer -- and it's illegal".

Why do immigrants go through their troubles to immigrate? "Economics" whispered mountains and oceans in the wind.