October 11, 2007 5:29

Welcome to America!

The first thing to understand is that my wife, a Shanghai native, looks nothing at all like Osama Bin Laden or your basic Islamo-facist, nutball suicide bomber. I think all of our friends would attest to that. But on September 11, 2007, at immigration at Kennedy Airport in New York, that didn’t matter. We were at the start of a long delayed, much needed vacation, one that took us from New York to Hawaii and a couple of places in between. It turned out to be a great trip, but thanks to the inimitable Bureau of Homeland Security (now the parent of the INS) it got off to a very rocky start.
I had enough miles on United Airlines for one free round trip ticket from Shanghai. I priced two other seats on the United flight, and my wife comparison shopped on the internet and at discount travel agencies here in Shanghai. The result: she was able to get two tickets on Air China for a price considerably below United’s, on a flight that left about 12 hours later than mine. So we decided to take the different flights, saving more than $1500, even though that meant she would take care of Abby, our three and half year old daughter, by herself on the long flight to NY.
Big mistake. The flight, as my wife Joyce describes it, was uneventful, and Abby endured it pretty well. But upon arrival at Kennedy, as I waited outside for them, they confronted a lengthy line at immigration, and after close to an hour of waiting, Abby got cranky and started to lose it, refusing to sit in the stroller, running around a bit crazily in the immigration hall, and finally throwing your basic I'm three-and-half-years-old-and- I'm- not-gonna-take-it -anymore fit
They were in the line for foreign citizens at Kennedy, because my wife is a Chinese passport holder, and after fours years now of extraordinarily frustrating dealings with the INS—and man, is that an understatement--she still doesn’t have the green card (or even any precursor document) that would enable her to go into the shorter line for Americans whenever we return to the States.
After close to an hour and a half in line, with Joyce trying to control Abby (with decreasing success as time went by), they got to the interview window. Joyce had been given a multiple entry visa by the consulate here in Shanghai—as she had before—and Abby has an American passport. The immigration officer looked at their documents, asked my wife the purpose of the trip, called Abby’s name to see if she responded (she did, Joyce says) and then things went off the rails. Instead of stamping her passport and saying have a nice vacation, the officer behind the glass told my wife and daughter, after an hour and half in line, to go to a ``question room” and wait.
Perplexed, exhausted and angry, Joyce did so. And, as she describes it, you can imagine the scene in that “question room” six years to the day after September 11, 2001: my wife (a 34 year old Chinese woman) my three and half year old daughter (American), and about a dozen other folks who, unfortunately for them on this day, looked as if, as Joyce later put it, “they could have been from somewhere in the Islamic world."
I was out in the waiting area for arriving passengers, meanwhile, wondering what the hell was going on, as person after person from the Air China flight streamed out after immigration. But of course I couldn’t call Joyce on her cell, because cell phones must be shut off when your going through immigration. So she sat there, trying to control Abby, for half an hour, and finally asked an immigration officer coming in and out of the “question room” that they needed to ask their questions, now, or else she needed to go. The officer left the room for about ten minutes, came back, and said ok, you can go.
Just like that. No questions. No indication as to what the point was of forcing them into the “question room” and making the two of them—an exhausted Chinese mother and her cranky three and half year old-- sit for more than half an hour after a grueling 14 hour flight. Nothing.
Friends in New York later told us that Immigration might have been concerned about child kidnapping, given that Joyce’s passport is Chinese and Abby’s is American, and Abby had been acting up. So by this theory, I said, Joyce had kidnapped Abby in China and was bringing her to the US? Couldn’t they check both passports and see that they had made the same trip about 18 months earlier—Shanghai-New York? Whatever the guy at the window was thinking, wouldn’t that have been, as the lawyers say,dispositive? Joyce could have explained that on that day, we had all traveled together, so Abby came through the American line with me. She could have mentioned that I was in the waiting area outside and given the officer my cell phone number.
Whatever. For us, married for five years, dealing with Homeland security and the immigration bureaucrats continues to be an absolute, unfettered, ongoing nightmare. Any Chinese readers of this blog who have tried to get a visa to the US have a different experience? I’d love to hear about it if so, just so I know that for some people out there the U.S. immigration process can approach sanity.
Oh and by the way, when we returned to Shanghai, we all sailed through immigration, no muss, no fuss.

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October 11, 2007 5:17

Bush to attend Dalai Lama award ceremony

The U.S. Congress plans to give the Dalai Lama its highest award bestowed upon a civilian, and the Chinese government has condemned the move. Adding to the potential sources of ire for Beijing is the fact the U.S. President George W. Bush and his wife will be present when the honor is handed out at the Capitol next week. Given the official displeasure that was expressed after German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the Tibetan spiritual leader last month, Bush's move will mean more remonstrations from Beijing are likely to follow.

It seems like the official sensitivity in Beijing to the Dalai Lama, who is always a fairly touchy subject here, has been heightened in recent days. There was a piece yesterday in the China Daily about the Dalai Lama linking him to the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, and the People's Daily overseas edition ran an op-ed accusing him of betraying Buddhism. Reuters also reports on an internal Communist Party document that questions the loyalty of ethnic Tibetans who are members of the Communist Party.

The Communist Party's five-year meeting, at which the top level of leadership will be named, kicks off Monday. The Chinese capital is preoccupied with the intense political maneuvering, which makes the timing another ingredient in this diplomatic storm. Stay tuned.

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October 11, 2007 3:07

Foreigners in Beijing

Jonathan Ansfield, who runs one of Beijing's most pleasant bars and also writes for a big American newsweekly that isn't TIME, has a nice piece out this week about life as a foreigner in Beijing.

He writes about, among other things, the increasing vigilance with which the police are checking out foreigners' visas. I had my own experience with these dutiful officers about a week and a half ago, when I came home to find a neighbor waiting at my door with a helpful card from the police. Along with an ad for car repair and reminders to not gamble, use drugs, prostitute myself or pay for sex (so many rules!), the card told me to hurry up and register with the man. Apparently I had exceeded the 24-hour registration window by about 864 hours.

The next morning an officer banged on my door at 8:30. Not being so coherent at that hour on a weekend, I didn't get up in time to make the constable's acquaintance, but there was another card. So I walked down to the station and registered. There was no unpleasantness or $65 fine. But unlike a friend who had to register recently, I wasn't asked out by the desk officer either. Alas.

The back of card....

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October 10, 2007 8:31

Du Haibin’s "Umbrella"

The 4th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival ends today. Luckily, I had the chance to see a couple films, including Umbrella, the latest from Chinese documentary filmmaker Du Haibin. The film just premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it screened alongside the documentary Useless, by Jia Zhangke (who won the Golden Lion last year for his docudrama Still Life). Not surprisingly, Umbrella opens in an umbrella factory. We see workers in the various stages of assembly, but Du underlines his message by mixing in a sign listing the meager compensation employees earn for each task completed, and a close-up of a young girl’s coarse, cracking hands as she sews umbrella spokes to fabric. Workers wear puffy down jackets, gloves and winter boots as they perform these monotonous tasks--the audience can almost feel the chill of the factory floor. One of the most interesting scenes is of the wealthy factory owner, sitting at her umbrella store in a shopping mall. She and several other women sit idly in the store, chatting about what kinds of cars to buy. “Money is for spending,” she tells the other women. Meanwhile, just outside, several women compete to shine the shoes of well-heeled shoppers for 1-2 RMB. In the second half of the film, Du profiles university students in the city and aging farmers in the desolate countryside. With its slow pace, Umbrella is not a sensational exposé of the dark side of China’s growth. Du does make a strong statement about urban China leaving behind its rural past, but unlike other recent documentaries about Chinese factories such as China Blue and Mardi Gras: Made in China, sparse dialogue and a limited range of emotions in Umbrella do little to humanize the rich spectrum of characters he brings together in the film. For a video interview with Du Haibin, watch Joshua Fisher's very interesting Frontline/WORLD documentary, which discusses the work and challenges of documentary filmmakers in China.

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October 10, 2007 5:32

Record Prices for China's Heritage

Sotheby's auctioned off a collection of items linked to Qing dynasty palaces on Tuesday, and Chinese collectors paid sky high prices to snap them up. That follows Stanley Ho's purchase last month of a sculpture that had been looted from Beijing's old Summer Palace. The Macau gambling tycoon paid $8.84 million for a bronze horse's head--a record for a Qing dynasty sculpture--and announced he was donating it to the Chinese state.

The piece was originally scheduled to be part of Tuesday's auction, which was criticized for the way it forced rich Chinese collectors to pay for their country's stolen heritage. But if price is any measure, they didn't seem to mind spending. The controversy probably helped fuel the sums, which included $5.9 million for an imperial seal, a record for white jade at auction. As Reuters notes, the piece was sold earlier this year in France for about one fourth of what it went for in Hong Kong.

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