ABSTRACT
Mrs. Gao and I sit on a short bench under the shopfront awning, discussing her family's ritual activities in her bad Mandarin and my worse Taiwanese. The roar of heavy truck and bus traffic on Roosevelt Road a few feet away punctuates our sentences, giving me time to think. In the back of the shop, her husband, a small man with impish south-Chinese features, monitors us while carefully cutting shapes of deep-toned velvet. These he dexterously attaches to the high white soles of heroic boots destined for folk opera troupes in the Philippines, the south of Taiwan, and here in Taipei. He intersperses unneccessary corrections to his very competent wife with comments on his work, in which she sometimes shares.
