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.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
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.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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.
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.
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