As I sit here in my empty apartment, 36 hours before I depart China and return to the US, I know I need to recount my experiences here. Like all of America, I had some preconceived ideas about what life was going to be like here, but now I have a powerful and informed perspective that I want to share. This will be a long post, but I believe it will be worthwhile.
I was headhunted by Avenues Shenzhen as I was spending a few months in the Dominican Republic, lying on the beach and drinking beers in the early months of 2022. I had spent two years unemployed, the first because of Covid anxiety, the second because I had surgery to treat prostate cancer and needed time to recover, physically and mentally. I had gone down to the DR as there was a retirement account I had left behind when I departed, and I wanted to reclaim it as I had met the criteria for recovery: over 60, possessing a copy of my Dominican ID, and having not worked in the DR for six months. I had been warned that the government was very stingy about releasing that money to expats, so I felt like the odds of getting it were probably low…I had heard stories of people being sent away to find insane documents or the bureaucracy requiring them to hire an attorney. It turns out my fears were entirely unfounded: the bureau released a check to me immediately, the bank next door cashed it, and I was now lazing on the beach spending a pile of money I wasn’t expecting to have.
I was going through the interview process with a couple schools, but neither one really excited me. One was in Guatemala City, which just sounded like a dirty little hellhole, and the other was in SPS…San Pedro Sula, Honduras…which at first seemed attractive (great salt water fly fishing, Spanish speaking so I could work on my language skills, and their website sounded like a nice, tight little community school), but further research showed that SPS was the most dangerous city in Honduras, which was the most dangerous country on Earth. And a YouTube video of the city streets showed endless miles of trash and dirt…something I had grown tired of in Africa. So I wasn’t too inspired for either of those, but had no other options on the table and time was running out.
Then an email came through from Avenues Shenzhen; they had seen my resume somewhere and had headhunted me. I had visited Shenzhen many times in the past, when I was living in Hong Kong. It was a dirty little fishing village with a big dreary building right at the border filled with shops selling cheap Chinese knockoffs of everything in the world…handbags, clothes, DVDs, electronics, fishing gear. Lauren and I used to go there to get gifts for friends, or tailor-made clothes, cheap pedicures and good food, but soon tired of the squalor. But, similar to the DR, I had left some unfinished banking in HK that needed to be attended to, and I needed to go to HK to close it out and send the money to the states, as well as visit to refresh my permanent ID status (you have to cross into HK once every three years). Plus, the school sounded kind of interesting. Although the interview process had lots of little red flags, I had no other good options and I needed to be in the region for my HK banking, so I figured I’d take the chance and accept.
Once I accepted, things started MOVING. Their HR personnel contacted me immediately with a very long list of things I needed to provide ASAP. One of the major logistical hurdles we had to overcome was that the actual maximum age to get a work permit for China was 60, and I was already 63 and would turn 64 within weeks of arriving, so they were bringing me in as a ‘highly trained specialist in a desirable field’. Additionally, the strategy was to get me into the country with a single-visit Visa, then obtain a Work Permit once I was there….and these two items had their own required documents (and I was unclear what was for which, although it didn’t matter…I had to get them all). So I cut my time in the DR short and started doing the paper chase.
I had only a few short months to do things like:
-get an apostilled original copy of my birth certificate (which was potentially a challenge as I was born in Japan in a now-defunct Air Force base)
-provide original transcripts from all colleges I attended (I went to three universities to get my two degrees and teaching certificate)
-provide notarized and apostilled copies of all of my teaching credentials (I have two, one for Arizona and one for Maine). But these needed to be notarized at the Chinese embassy in the US…in Chinese!
-apostilled copies of police clearances from the US. Most schools want them for every country you have ever lived in…which would be about 10 for me and they are impossible to get once you leave that country
-Official letters from my last three schools explaining what my duties were and how I was highly-skilled to provide these duties
-official documents from the hospital where I had my Covid shots and boosters (three of them)
-fill in a 5 page application form for my China visa, send it to the embassy in NY to get pre-approval, then return it with my passport to get the official visa before I left the US.
There were a few other items, and while each one seemed insurmountable, I was able to get them all done through some good luck and foresight. For example, I already had an extra copy of my birth certificate because I had lost the original years before and had already paid the military for a replacement. Likewise, years earlier I had asked Lauren (in her role as the Associate Principal at HKIS) to apply for official copies of my transcripts from all of my schools, so I already had those on hand. As I was already in DR, it was easy to ask the school to provide the official letter (and to give them a draft of what it should say) and they were happy to oblige…and I collected it while on my way to the airport the day I left. For many of the others, it was too crazy to do on my own so the school provided the info for an expediter in Colorado who could guide me through it and submit everything to the Chinese embassy for pre-approval. For the police report, I was stymied as I did not have a street address in Maine (I use a PO box, which is unacceptable) so I could not get one. No problem, the expediter knew that China didn’t care about ‘states’….so they got one for me from the Denver Police Department, which was (of course) clean because I had not been to Colorado in more than 40 years!
My takeaway from this process was that China had an immense love of bureaucracy, but actually didn’t seem to care much about the validity of the process…as long as you jumped through the hoops, no one asked anything or worried about the details.
In the end, after about 3 months of frantic activity, all the paperwork was prepared and submitted and I was clear to start my journey to China. There was, however, one massive glitch: we were so close to the deadline of my departure date that I could not wait in Maine for my passport and visa to be returned from the Chinese embassy…I had to get it delivered to my hotel in SF so it would arrive while I was there…otherwise I would be stranded in SF as I’d not be able to board my flight!
The flight itself came with massive logistical issues. Because of Zero Covid, China only had a small handful of cities where overseas travelers could arrive, as these cities had quarantine facilities so you could get off the plane and instantly go do your required 14-day quarantine before continuing on to your final destination. Also, you could not have a transit connection on your flight to China…it had to be direct, nonstop. So I had to fly from Maine to San Francisco, stay three days in a hotel there, then book a ‘direct’ flight to China. And within 24 hours of that flight, I had to get a PCR test from one of the China-recognized labs with an official report in Chinese saying I was clean.
To add to the complications, because there were so few flights from outside China to the arrival cities (I think there were only 5 arrival cities in the entire country, and only two flights to each city per day), they were massively overbooked months in advance. I originally wanted to depart from Seattle where my mom lives, but that was impossible as there were no available seats for almost six months.
And if a case of Covid was discovered on any of the flights, China would instantly cancel that flight for the next few weeks, so all itineraries were subject to unannounced changes. You heard plenty of stories of businessmen who had their flights cancelled and were delayed for months before they could get to China, stuck in their ‘departure city’ in an expensive hotel, calling the airlines every day for a cancellation, and hopping to a different city if an opening arose. I decided to have the most flexibility, I would travel as light as I could, so I packed only two suitcases and set off to SF.
Just a few days before I left Maine, China changed their protocol so I only needed to stay 24 hours in SF instead of three days, so I got to delay my departure from Maine by a few days. When I arrived in SF, I was put up in a fantastic 5-star hotel, and was overjoyed to have the receptionist hand me my passport with my China visa inside when I arrived! However, the rush was on to get my PCR test in time. While my hotel was right in the city, north of SFO, the official testing facility was in San Jose, 50 miles south of me! So I rented a (very expensive) car and drove down that afternoon after I arrived, with my online prepayment form in hand, found the clinic, and got in the line of several hundred people (almost all Asians) waiting to get their test. I think the cost of the test was several hundred dollars, fortunately paid by the school, but not the car or parking which was hundreds of dollars. I was told it would take 4 hours to get the report (assuming I passed the test), so I went and explored San Jose before I went back and collected my report…which was negative, so I was good to go.
Funny side note: the very next day (when I was on the airplane), China decided it was no longer required to use the testing facility in San Jose and they opened a new one only one block from my hotel!
My takeaway from this was that when China made their bureaucratic rules, they had no situational awareness of the logistics it might take to achieve. I called this “the Dobby Rule” after that scene in the Harry Potter movie were Harry was locked in a dungeon, having tried for hours to escape, and Dobby appears, tells him “meet me at the top of the stairs in 15 seconds” and disappears again, without any thought of how Harry could possibly do that.
I drove myself to the airport the next morning and discovered that the boarding gate was at the very far end of the terminal, way past about 5 empty gates. I’m sure this was a covid-safety protocol, just how El Al flights to Israel always seem to be in very distant locations where they are easier to secure. When I got there, the line consisted of all Chinese people, chatting away noisily in Mandarin. All the signboards were in Chinese, and there was general sense of chaos. As much as I have flown extensively for decades, I felt totally lost and overwhelmed. When I asked people things like “which line is for getting our boarding passes?” or “where do we go?”, I was surprised to discover that pretty much NO ONE spoke english. In fact, I was the only westerner in line…about 250 people for the flight to Shanghai and I was the only white guy. I stood in line for about an hour marveling at this. I sort of expected it in foreign countries, but not San Francisco!
An official-looking Chinese woman was walking down the line, briefly talking to each person who showed her the screen on their phones. I had no idea what was going on, and when she came to me I just smiled and shrugged. She gruffly grabbed my trolley and dragged me out of line, then kept moving down the line. I had no idea what had just happened or what I was supposed to do, but just then an official-looking Chinese man came by and I asked him what I was supposed to do. He asked if I had ‘the app’ and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He ran off, then returned with a little signboard with a QR code on it. He said I had to scan it with my phone, but it didn’t open anything. He asked if I had WeChat, and I remembered that I had installed it a month or so earlier, so I opened that and he showed me how to scan with it. I scanned the code, and a form popped up with an English option. It was asking all sorts of things like my passport number, birthday, address in China, address in the US, phone number in China, etc. It was going to take some time to fill it out, and he explained that I needed to show a Customs Code on my phone, but before WeChat would grant me the code, I had to register with WeChat with that form. So I found a seat and went through the massively cumbersome process of filling out this data field. It was incredibly frustrating, as the form ‘knew’ who I was (I was accessing it through my WeChat) but it would reject my inputs if I got my name wrong (things like the order of my first/middle/last, if things were capitalized wrong, etc), or I input the date wrong (M/D/Y vs D/M/Y), or if I forgot the little ‘+’ sign before the country code in the phone number, and I’d have to redo the entire form again. Eventually, I got it right and it gave me a nice little QR code. I showed it to the woman who originally dragged me out of line, and she gruffly dragged me back into the end of the line and moved on.
My takeaway from that was twofold: Chinese bureaucrats can be incredibly cranky, but that’s just their way. And there was a love for doing things digitally that seemed like could be done much easier with pen and paper, but the pen and paper option simply does not exist.
Finally, I got to the counter where they tagged my bags, threw them on the belt, and I was hustled to the boarding gate as the plane was being loaded. I was one of the last people on (since I had to do that WeChat form) and absolutely everyone stared at me as I walked to my seat. EVERYONE…all the passengers, the kids, the stewardesses…everyone. And they were silent until I passed by, then all started talking. I had no idea what was going on, but as soon as I took my seat, a woman who was sitting right behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to CHINA?? You are SO BRAVE!” I told her, no…not brave, I have a job that I am going to and she commented “Do you see that there are no westerners on this plane? NO ONE other than Chinese are going to China now…it is all locked down! How did you get a visa? Do you even speak Chinese? You are SO BRAVE!”
She was kind of gushy about me being so brave, but quickly we settled into a good chat. She had been born and raised in China but had relocated to the US for grad school and never left. She hated China, and had no desire to ever return but she had to go visit her ailing mother in Beijing, and was not looking forward to it. As someone with a family grievance, she had been given a seat on my flight, probably bumping someone else who was now in a world of panic, but because there were so few flights, her roundtrip fare from SF to Shanghai was about twelve thousand dollars! Leaving China was pretty cheap, but getting there was very expensive.
She was actually pretty great to chat with, and helped me understand things immensely…like the faceless intolerant Chinese bureaucracy, how crucial WeChat was going to be (the Customs form was just the tip of the iceberg), how things worked in China, the necessity of getting a covid test EVERY SINGLE DAY (I had no idea how do to that, and hoped it didn’t involve an expensive 50 mile drive in a rented car!) and other things. I really appreciated her support and insights, but it didn’t really prepare me for what was to come.
The Wandering Sole 