Passport Please

Part of moving to China is getting residency with the government.  This will allow us to move freely in and out of China for the year.  This is especially important since we border Hong Kong. 

Some of you are thinking - but Hong Kong is China.  This is a misconception American's often have.  Hong Kong is Hong Kong, the rest of what people think of as China is China.  Hong Kong was under British rule from the 1950s until 1997. After it was turned back over the Chinese they opted to leave in place the "freer" rules than the rest of China has. So Hong Kong is a lot more "western" than other parts of China - find more products, more English, unrestricted use of the internet, etc.  As part of this arrangement though, to go to Hong Kong there is a border where one must present their passport/ visa (if required).  If you're American you don't need a visa to go to Hong Kong, but if you are Chinese, you must have a visa to visit HK.  I'm guessing this controls what mainland China is exposed to some degree. 

So back to my point - we need to have residency so that we can go into Hong Kong and not have a limited number of times we can get back into China where our apartment.

The process for getting residency involves a bunch of paperwork, pictures and questions.  This is all done through the police.  If you are wise you hire an agent or at least take someone who can speak Chinese because they don't really speak English and it's a complicated, sometimes lengthy process. Fortunately the office manager here made arrangements for both her and an agent to help us.

Waiting for our turn to be interviewed

The office manager and an agent

We made our first attempt the first Monday we were here.  We packed up snacks, ipads, and other entertainment in case it took a long time. The station we needed to visit was about 45 minutes away from our home so either way it was going to be a bit.

When we arrived they had this picture chart showing examples of what types of passport photos  they would accept (you had to leave several for them).  It was pretty amusing - Can you spot the problems? Can't figure out what's wrong in the last picture in the fourth row on either column...

We were there for about 30 minutes and were told they were rejecting us because they wanted to check out Stan's office first to make sure it was legit. 

We returned a different day for another attempt.  This time took about an hour and a half in the station.  Stan and I each had different times to go to different desks and answer questions, sign papers, smile, not smile and nod.  At one desk they asked me to write Stan's company name on three different documents in Mandarin...  I looked at Stan's office manager and said " they want me to write that?!" She said yes and showed me on a piece of paper what I needed to write - must have been about 18 characters.  I laughed.  This was a bad joke.  Just like in English you are taught certain strokes to write letters, there were ways to write the characters, but I had no idea.  I tried to start - okay let's see that looks like a power line tower with three short lines across, then there's one to the side, a little line poking out of that, now make a bench next to that one... It was ridiculous. We were going to be there for an hour just from me trying to copy correctly what I saw.  Fortunately both the officer and manager realized it was going to take forever so they let the manager write it out for me and I just got to sign it.

Waiting...

This Chinese lady opted to read the Bible while waiting

While in the station there was another western family with small children. I went and introduced myself. Turns out they are from the Midwest and were just moving down from Beijing.  Their kids were happy to see my kid's Ipads and visit.  The lady gave me a few helpful websites and tips for the area as they had been here a bit longer than us. 

When all was done we were told it would take until the end of the year (about 2 weeks) to process and get our passports back.  This was a bit of a bummer because this meant we can't go anywhere outside of China for Christmas/New Year, enroll Cole in school yet, visit HK, get my sim card for my newly returned Iphone, etc. because all of these things require your passport.  So we shall enjoy our time at the apartment until they come back.  Kind of strange thinking we can't leave even if we wanted to...