The Irony

     Thursday afternoon we went to the ferry terminal in Hong Kong to meet 3 of Leah's friends who came over from Shenzhen to say good-bye.  While we were waiting, Leah reflected on the irony of being confined to the Hong Kong side of the border.  Many Chinese people want to go to Hong Kong, but they can't get a HK visa.  We were stuck in Hong Kong, for lack of a CH visa, which Chinese people would probably think was an enviable position.
     Madeline, Fiona and Sidney came through the arrivals door carrying a huge pink construction paper "yearbook", since Leah won't be there to pick up the official one.   They had passed this around in school for classmates and teachers to write messages to Leah.  On the way to the ferry they'd also stopped to pick up Leah one last piece of her favorite flatbread from a street vendor.  What nice friends!  These 4 girls fully expect to see each other in the not-too-distant future, either in Asia or the U.S.
      Right now we're in the Tokyo airport, absorbing radioactive this and that, I suppose.  Might as well add that to our adventures over the last 12 days.

Visas Denied, Headed Back to MN

     Last week while Leah had a break from school, we traveled to Vientiane, Laos.  We stopped in Hong Kong on our way back, where Leah and I applied for new visas to re-enter China.  Our applications were rejected.  The official reason was because of the overstay on our previous visas during February.  We had attached 10 pages of documentation to our application to help explain that our overstay was a simple misunderstanding during the process of getting a temporary residence permit;  that we had followed all the required procedures regarding the overstay at the Public Security Bureau (where the police had said that getting a new visa should not be a problem);   and that we'd paid the maximum fine.  But that didn't matter.  Terry showed the agent his own residence permit, proving that he--the member of the household employed in China--has already been thoroughly checked out.  That didn't matter, either.  The agent wouldn't even look at it.  Leah and I were told that we have to return to the U.S. and that we can re-apply for visas in 90 days.  Needless to say, we weren't expecting this.
     We have booked a flight back to Minneapolis on Friday.  While Leah and I are hunkered down here in Hong Kong, Terry has gone back to our apartment in Shenzhen, where he is packing up Leah's and my things.  (Curiously, he said there were new security procedures in place at our apartment complex since we left 10 days ago:  the front gate was locked and he had to present ID in order to get in.)  Later today Terry has a meeting at Leah's school to discuss how she can complete her coursework and graduate.  She may have to give up her International Baccalaureate Diploma, which would be a disappointment now that she's within 6 weeks of completing all the requirements she's been working to fulfill for the last 2 years.
     Several of Leah's friends from school have made plans to take the ferry here to Hong Kong this afternoon and meet up with Leah so that they can say good-bye.  After the initial shock passed, Leah has summoned a positive outlook.  "Things always work out," she says.
     Even though we're very frustrated and sad about this turn of events, the situation could certainly be worse.  We have a home to return to in Minneapolis, and Terry will be able to continue his work.
    
 

Disruptions

     We've been closely following the news about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan 8 days ago.  Several people in the U.S. have emailed us to ask if we felt any effects.  We did not.  We live more than 1,500 miles from the epicenter of last Friday’s quake.  The closest connection we had was that a person from the Levi Strauss company, who toured a textile factory near Guangzhou last week with Terry, was in Tokyo Narita Airport during the earthquake.  He ended up being stuck at or near the airport for 3 ½ days before being able to go home to San Francisco—a major inconvenience, but inconsequential compared to the devastating losses experienced by the Japanese.

     A couple days ago I was subbing in a middle school art class, where the students’ assignment was to view PowerPoint files of photos from the disaster in Japan and the protests in the Middle East, and then to pick one of the images to draw in their sketchbook.  Most of the students focused on the Japanese photos.  But it took some of them a long time to settle into actually drawing, as they pondered the unimaginable destruction and hardship portrayed in the photos.

     The recent disruptions in our lives here in Shenzhen have been far less dramatic than those in Japan, and they have human rather than natural causes.  One source of disruption is the government’s concern about the possibility of unrest in other parts of the world affecting the Chinese citizenry.  We wondered if the 6 a.m.-6 p.m. power outage a couple Sundays ago could have been a government effort to slow down organizing activity. There also has been an increased police presence at times, particularly right after there was a crackdown on electric scooter use a two weeks ago.  Without warning, police were stopping scooters and impounding them, citing new government regulations.  The day Leah stopped riding and started walking to school, the police formed a barricade around her school in an attempt to catch the scooter-riders as they left at 4:00.   The “new regulations” were perhaps meant to slow down and intimidate mobile organizers, but they've also slowed down and intimidated a 17-year-old American high school student who's just trying to get to classes and home again.  Last week we discovered that all VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, were suddenly blocked.  Expats use VPNs to access internet information from certain sources, such as blogs and Facebook, that’s censored here in China.  It didn’t take Terry too long to find a way around this, but it did eat up a lot of time.  Today as he went about setting up this next level of beat-the-censor on my computer, he discovered that there was a new block around what had worked last Friday when he worked on his own computer.  4 hours later, he again found a way around it.  The Chinese censors know what we’re doing.  We don't think they're nearly so concerned about our benign and rather boring internet use as they are about Chinese activists accessing prohibited information.  It's frustrating to get caught up in this cat and mouse game. 

     This recent increased government wariness made Leah’s and my messy visa situation even more…uncomfortable, shall we say.  After 4 visits and a lot of time sitting around getting nervous in Public Security Bureau offices the last few weeks, I finally got our passports back Thursday.  Terry and I nearly made ourselves sick, worrying that there would be yet more complications.  But there in our passports were our 10-day temporary visas, just as we’d been promised.  When I thanked the officer who handed over our passports, he responded, “My pleasure.”  Yes, I’m sure.  Visa problems like ours mean job security for him.  We also enriched the Chinese treasury by $1,800, not counting the fees we’ll pay for our regular visas.  Which Terry intended to get for us yesterday while he was in Hong Kong.  But of course, there was indeed yet another complication.  It turns out that Leah and I need to actually go through Hong Kong immigration with our temporary visas before our new regular visas can be processed.  This will slightly disrupt some upcoming travel plans.  Are you tired of reading about our visa travails?  We’re tired of dealing with visas, that’s for sure. 

     One more disruption to daily life here is all the recent construction.  There’s a huge new Hilton complex going up along my route to school, which creates lots of lumbering truck traffic and lots of dust.  Some older, forlorn-looking buildings are getting facelifts.  Many sidewalks are torn up, sometimes to replace pipes underneath and sometimes to replace the walk itself.  There seems to be some new ordinance about walls, stipulating concrete bricks with a skim coat.  So the long stretches of blue metal walls around some hibernating apartment construction projects have been replaced.  There’s a new wall around a park near us.  And the gigantic wall around what looked like a city bus staging area was replaced and a lively sea-themed mural was painted on it.

      A crummy old wall was torn down right here earlier this winter, exposing an even crummier boat salvage area and dump, right next to the harbor.  A new wall with black iron bars was put up.  Less than 2 months later, I was surprised one day to see that the brand new wall had been torn down and was lying on the sidewalk.  Here they’re digging footings for what I’m guessing will be the regulation concrete brick wall. 

     The wall construction on this stretch goes on for about 3 blocks.  All kinds of things sprawl across the sidewalk while they're working:  parked vehicles like this truck, big piles of sand or rubble, stacks of bricks, cargo bikes loading up debris, skip loaders moving at a crawl.  So I should just ride on the other side of the street, right?  Well, I tried that one day.  The sidewalk there was completely torn up for several blocks.  

     In mid-August Shenzhen is hosting the 2011 Universiade games.  This upcoming event probably explains some of the recent construction activity, and also some of the government’s heightened concern about security, given the coming influx of international athletes, spectators and the media.

Visa Problems

     Tomorrow morning I have to show up at the Public Security Bureau in our district to sign my "punishment documents", as they were described over the phone to me, and pay a 10,000 RMB penalty.  That's a little over $1500.  My crime?  Actually, it's Leah's crime, too.  We overstayed our visas by a month.  It's our fault, no question, and we should have been paying closer attention.  We originally had visas that were good until this summer, but we more or less forgot that we surrendered them to get a different type of visa that we thought was necessary to get our temporary Chinese residence permit.
     The elusive residence permit.  This is the residence permit that Terry's been working on for about 8 months now.  We thought we'd have it by the end of January.  Actually, Terry got his on Feb. 1, but Leah and I are still waiting for ours.  If the two of us had gotten our permit at the expected time, it would have replaced the visas that have expired.  The reason that the residence permit has been held up is that the official copy of Terry's and my marriage certificate wasn't official enough.  Terry was told at the end of January that it need to be certified by the Minnesota Secretary of State.  Getting the certification would run $1200 or so, he was told, if initiated from here in China.  Fortunately, Terry was headed back to Minnesota in early February and could drive over to St. Paul and get the required certification for less than $10.  He did this and sent the paperwork to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago.  Two days before he was due to leave Minneapolis to fly back to China, he was told that he didn't have the correct seal from the Secretary of State's office.  So he made a second trip to St. Paul and that time was assured he had the real deal seal.  He sent the paperwork back to Chicago.  It was approved and eventually got sent back to China, at which point the expired visa problem was discovered.
     That was last week.  I had to go to the Public Security Bureau last Wednesday and sit on a most uncomfortable stool for 1 1/2 hours in the immigration office and answer questions posed by Constable Wei about my visa overstay.  Actually there weren't all that many questions.  Mostly I watched her type information from our passports on and on and on into her computer.  I had a book to read in my bag and thought several times about taking it out because I was bored.  Also I was feeling just a bit anxious about  the consequences of my visa screw-up.  It didn't help that I'd watched some of the other officers, who'd changed into what I assumed were their undercover cop street clothes, open up a cabinet and take out flashlights and handcuffs and a few other pieces of equipment that they stuffed in their shoulder bags on their way out the door.  No, reading a book would most definitely not be a good idea.  Much better to look properly worried and regretful about my transgression, especially since Officer Wei was rather ill-humored.  She looked and moved as if she'd stayed out too late the night before.
     Finally she had a document prepared.  She didn't know how to translate everything into English, so sometimes she just said, "Answer 'yes' here" or "Write 'no' here." Yikes.  I signed and dated many statements.  And then she brought out a red inkpad and had me affix my fingerprint in dozens and dozens of places on the document, in the four corners of copies of passport and visa pages, over signatures and dates and at the beginning and ending of statements.  These 50-some fingerprints didn't strike only me as being a little over the top--it even made the Chinese civilian watching nearby shake his head and smile.  When I was done, the officer kept our passports and told me she'd call me within two days to let me know the outcome of my interview, which turned out to be a 10,000 RBM fine.
     That seems like a steep fine, considering our situation.  It's not like we're sneaking around here, doing a bunch of illicit business deals.  But I've been told that everybody gets treated equally if you don't follow the visa rules.  If it's true, I'm glad that there's fair and strict enforcement.  The U.S. has strict visa rules, too.  In fact, as I understand current U.S. law, foreigners overstaying their visa in the U.S. have to return to their home country to re-apply for a new visa.   If we were in the U.S. under circumstances like ours, however, with documents showing that we're trying in earnest to follow the rules for getting the proper permit for temporarily working and living there, we would most likely not be penalized.

Ayi Shortage

     Recently I discovered that the school library gets a local English language newspaper, the Shenzhen Daily.  I've been stopping in regularly during my lunch break to see what the Daily can tell me about this place where we live.  Among other things, Friday's edition reported on testing for heavy metals in locally-sold Chinese rice and a crackdown on another illegal milk additive to boost the protein content, not melamine this time but a toxic by-product from leather processing.  I read that Shenzhen's 5-year recycling plan calls for the upscale hotels to stop providing disposable bottles of toiletries after 2015.  And I read that there's a shortage of an estimated 150,000 ayis in the city!

     An ayi (pronounced "eye-ee") is a housekeeper, who can also be a child minder.  Many, if not most, expat households have an ayi.  I have friends here from India and Pakistan who are used to having domestic help, so it's only natural that they'd engage help similarly here.  Westerners who probably wouldn't have household help at home are delighted to find that it's very affordable here.   Leah's friends' families all have ayis.  A teacher who has a toddler told me that one of the reasons she and her husband like working here is that they'd never be able to afford their lifestyle if they lived and worked as a teacher couple in the U.S.  By "lifestyle" I think she mostly was referring to having an ayi to nanny their child and to also clean their apartment, do some cooking, take care of the laundry and run errands.  Another factor in hiring an ayi is that there's a little more of certain kinds of tedious work to maintaining a household here.  For one thing, there are a lot more particulates in the air and surfaces get dirty much faster than at home.  Floors, tables and chairs, the balconies, everything seems to collect a fine coat of dust, sometimes in a single afternoon.  So some extra time is needed just to keep ahead of the dust.

     The newspaper article reported that the average starting salary for full-time ayis is now up to 2000 yuan/month, which is about $300, and experienced ayis' average pay is 2300-2500/month.  Ayis who speak English and who have more demanding duties can earn up to 4500/month (close to $700).  Ayis usually work 10-hour days, Monday through Friday, though this can vary.

     Many ayis went home for Chinese New Year.  A number of those who went home chose not to return to Shenzhen after the holiday, which explains a good part of the shortage. These women have been able to find work in their home cities that pays nearly as well, and now they can be with their children.  When young parents migrate to cities like Shenzhen to find work, they usually leave behind their children to be cared for by grandparents or other relatives in their home city.

     A couple weeks ago I had afternoon tea with my Indian and Pakistani friends.  One of the topics of conversation was how stressed they felt having their ayis gone for a week or two over Chinese New Year and how eager they were for their ayis to return to work.  One of them said that since her family was gone to New Zealand for a couple weeks over the Christmas break and her ayi had most of that time off, she felt it was excessive for the ayi to take off another chunk of time.  But she didn't dare tell her ayi that she couldn't take 2 weeks off for Chinese New Year, because my friend knew that the ayi's husband would still insist on going home for the whole 15 days of the new year celebration.  He'd just tell his wife to quit her job and then find a new job after the holiday.
     After hearing these women talk about how inconvenienced they were without their ayis,  I confess to having felt a little smug about not having to deal with that dependence.  For a variety of reasons, Terry and I do not have an ayi. 

     

Friday After 5

I guess I must have had a good week at school.  Even at 5:00 on Friday afternoon, after 5 days full of kids, I wasn't so tired of them that I could ignore some cute ones playing on the sidewalk.   I couldn't resist stopping to watch this threesome.  Each had reached through a hole in this blue metal wall and picked two long stems of grass, one for each hand--they looked like peacock feathers from a distance.  They were chasing around trying to tickle each other, they were dipping the feathery end in a puddle and doing some very satisfying splattering, and the two boys were using them as weapons for a growling kung fu battle.  No translation necessary for their imaginative play!
     This was taken just a few minutes from our apartment complex, along a 2-block stretch that some might call rundown.        But the action here is way more interesting than in the spiffier areas.
    
     That's the only photo for today, so now you'll have to use your imagination.  Right after school today, I met Leah at the shop where she bought her scooter only a couple weeks ago.  She's been plagued by battery charger problems for a few days, and this was her 3rd trip back to the shop in 3 days.  The first day she thought there was something wrong with the charger, so she took  it back and got a replacement.  That didn't work, so the next day she got yet another charger, which did seem to work.  Great, we thought the problem was solved.  But this morning she discovered that someone seemed to have stolen her new charger from the bike/scooter parking area under our building and had left a bum charger in its place.  So today we had get a new charger, this time paying for it because it wasn't the shop's problem.  That's why I showed up:  Leah didn't leave home this morning with enough cash for this.  Now tonight it appeared that this 3rd replacement charger wasn't working, either, but when she wheeled over to the parking area under the next building, it did work.  So we seem to have a power supply problem, as well as a security problem, and possibly a quality control problem, too.  I'm afraid that my enthusiasm for scooter transport is fading.  Give me my low tech bike any day.
     On my way into our apartment building tonight, I saw that the red garland-y Christmas/New Year's tree that's been up in the middle of the plaza since early December was in the last stages of being taken down and packed away.  Yesterday was the 15th day of Chinese New Year, the very last day.  The Lantern Festival is a traditional celebration on the last day.  Karen, the young Chinese teacher who shared a work area at school with me this week, said that the Lantern Festival isn't celebrated very much anymore.  But when she was a young girl growing up in a small city several hours away from here, families would go to a nearby park on the Lantern Festival night.  In the park hanging next to each lantern was a riddle, for example, asking the meaning of a written Chinese character.  If a child answered the riddle correctly, s/he was given the lantern to keep.  There would be food for sale in the park, such as round dumplings with a "smashed" bean filling, as she called it.  The Lantern Festival is always on the night of a full moon, and the roundness of the moon as well as the round shape of dumplings and other foods symbolizes family continuity and togetherness.  Karen also said that the weather in southern China changes around the time of the new year, as spring begins--that's why Chinese New Year is also called Spring Festival.  Sure enough, the weather did change about a week ago.  There's more humidity in the air,  it's been cloudy for a week straight, and we've had several days with light rain, after nearly 4 months of very little precipitation.  I'm remembering that last fall a Chinese person told me that February was her least favorite month because it's so gloomy.  Now I understand.
     I have one last Chinese New Year anecdote.  Tonight about 10 I was walking home by way of the waterfront here on the apartment complex grounds.  Suddenly fireworks began shooting up in the air, exploding away in colorful showers.  I hadn't ever been so close to the actual staging of all these fireworks that we've been watching from  our apartment window for the last few weeks and was curious to see how this all worked.  There were a few dozen ordinary people standing around and a handful who seemed to be managing the display.
     After a couple of minutes, a very agitated Anglo man appeared on the scene, waving his arms, and repeating a couple phrases in Chinese, which I took to mean something like "Chinese New Year is done!"   Then he proceeded to rant in English:  "You need to pack up and leave now!  GO!  Chinese New Year is over!  I'm sick of this noise--this has been going on for 2 weeks and my family can't sleep--I haven't said anything until now, but last night was the end, the LAST night of Chinese New Year, so now I'm telling you that this is it, you are DONE!   You don't live here, but I do!  Go home!  Take this stuff and leave now or I'm going to call the police!"  Then he hurled an obscenity or two.  But it didn't appear that any of the Chinese people standing around understood at all what he was saying.  Which made him even angrier.  He picked up one of the big boxes of unexploded fireworks, walked over to the fence at the water, and threw the whole thing in the bay.  Then he strode back.  "OK, what next?  Do you hear me?  You need to leave!  NOW!"  Everyone was still standing there, absolutely quiet.  They probably thought this guy was deranged:  it's Chinese New Year, after all--fireworks are how Chinese people celebrate--it's traditional--how can a normal person not understand that?
     At this point I walked away.  This was too ugly a scene for me.  If this guy had an apartment right there facing the water, I can see how he'd be tired of the noise, which really is awfully loud.  But this was a ridiculously ineffective way to get what he wanted, not to mention extremely patronizing.  This was not a group of hoodlums and they themselves weren't raucous.  I don't know how he could assume that none of them lived here in these apartments.
     I was glad that, judging from this man's accent, he was most likely not an American.  But still, this little scenario didn't do much to promote international relations between westerners and Chinese.

1.3 Billion in the U.S.

     James Fallows recently blogged about what the U.S. would be like with a population the size of China's.  First, about geographic size:  the U.S. has about the same land area as China, although China has less arable land.  Next, Fallows used strategic planner Thomas Barnett's image:  if you took the population of the entire American Hemisphere--that's Canada, down through the U.S., Mexico, Central America and South America--and also added in the people living in Japan and Nigeria, that would be about 1.3 billion, slightly fewer than China's current population.  Imagine all of these additional people coming to live with us in the U.S. and sharing our space with them.  That's over 4 times as many people as currently live in our country.  Growing enough food for everyone would be a significant challenge.  There would be many more challenges, trying to take care of 1.3 billion people:  providing clean water, decent housing, electricity, transportation and communication systems--not to mention education, jobs, healthcare, and services for the poor and vulnerable, and on and on.  And we think we're stretched now, taking care of a mere 300 million people in the U.S.!
     Barnett's point was that these imagined challenges for the U.S. are what China is currently dealing with.       Although China has come far in the last 30 years, many people here still live in poverty, without basics that we take for granted in the U.S.   Providing for all 1.3 billion Chinese people will be an incredible challenge.  On the other hand, China's huge workforce wields tremendous power and potential.