mtbdude

that kill a chicken topic started drifting toward the culinary, which reminded me... if you really want to see a funny movie, check out "god of cookery." steven chow is a hongkong actor who is famous and popular in china. i'm sure your fiances have all heard of him. last october i was on a 4 hour bus ride back to chengdu, hating my life, and this movie comes on, so i figured i had nothing better to do than try to read the subtitles. eventually i was just laughing out loud -- the only one on the bus doing so -- and tears in my eyes. yan zi was more amused with me than the movie, which she had already seen several times anyway. i have about 10 of his movies now, but haven't had a chance to watch all yet. chung king express is another good one, but not comedy or steven chow. faye wong is great in that one.

thanks for the reply, bryan. although i've found cfl to be a great source of information, i certainly don't regard anything i see here as authoritative. on the other hand, with this zero-information waiting game we're in with gz, i find myself clinging hopefully to every bit of speculation that i see here!

or speed

hi gene, yeah, dos will tell you what date your p3 got logged in to their system. hey bryan, i got the impression that the slowdown between p3-p4 was because of the homeland security biometric scanning thing. what i heard here on cfl was that they stopped processing any visas from late april to early june, then focused on student visas. for about the year prior to that it did seem that the p3-p4 interval was something like 4-5 weeks, and interview was another 4-5 weeks after that. i got that from following the timelines on k1k3.com. steve

i think i've talked to that carribbean lady too. seems very nice. being able to recognize these people ain't what i was hoping for, though. i want yan's friggin' visa!!!! with her in chengdu right now, by the way. hopefully come back and pick her up in gz in just a couple more months.

yan zi and i will be there also. were you thinking of keeping a contact list or something like that? steve

wow, how does your preparer do that?

our p3 was sent by chinese ems on may 25, but i never checked to find the date that it was officially received by gz until today. we did follow up on it by ems tracking and emails to gz. ems said gz received it a few days after it was sent, but gz kept saying it wasn't received yet. emailed with gz several times, and twice they said to fax the info again. finally they said they had it. since i'm now calling dos daily henceforth about our interview, this morning i asked and found the p3 was rec'd by them on on jun 4. the first couple of the emails with gz seemed like they were answered by real people, and after that they seemed like the canned responses. so i sent one basically begging them in a follow-up to please look into our matter and see what was going on, and i got a reply that seemed real saying that it was received. i didn't know you could check w/ dos at the time. i guess the moral of the story (oft repeated here) is to promptly & persistently verify every step of the process. if we hadn't kept faxing the p3 to them we'd probably be sitting here thinking our p4 is comng soon, and eventually wondering why it didn't. here's a sad story from 001: yan zi said one girl has an interview on aug 30, but her fiance sent his stuff by regular mail, and it still hasn't arrived. she is really stressing and said she wants to kill him! under the "would be nice" category -- if our gov't resources would automatically give feedback for every action on a case, so you know if you haven't heard from them, something's up. a case tracking website would cure so much unnecessary anxiety. incidentally, dos says yan zi has all of her clearances and is just in queue waiting for an interview. hope this info helps someone. everything i have gotten from you all is so appreciated. maybe if someone has some ideas on how i could have done it better, you could post them for those who haven't gone through this yet. i feel we lost a week in that returning-the-p3 monkey business, and that could mean not being in the nearest p4 batch and having to wait another month.

i hope it's true. and congrats turtle and pj

Same here ... sent original petition 9/10/03 ... still praying for an interview in September ... fingers crossed for an interview in October Yes, waiting a year does suck and it is ridiculous. 8-12-03 here. over a year now. hard to believe. i've been lucky enough to go every 3 or 4 months to see her, though. that's really helped to break up the time. leaving agani on sep 1, and hoping this is the last time i return by myself. next time to gz and bringing her home.

that's great jim! congrats and good luck.

like the rest of you are saying, i send emails weekly and didn't get a response for the past 3 weeks, until monday. "appointment in a few months." they are useless. heading to chengdu to see my baby on tuesday, though! woohoo.

congrats, and the best of everything to you.

wonder how they'll work it with my sep 12 flight out of chengdu?

jeff and sarah, congratulations! may all the rest of your dreams come true. thanks also for telling about your experience in gz. i'm sure everyone here is fascinated with those details. finally, i'm so jealous of you folks who went throught vsc. we spent 7 months in queue in csc. but i'm happy for you, that you haven't had to wait this long. best of luck. steve

welcome, and good luck in this process. also, i'm truly sorry to hear about your loss. internet love is stigmatized, no doubt. but i just laugh about it when people ask how i met her, and then i get "oh, that's nice," and they hurry on to the next topic. the "traditional" method of meeting has produced a 50% divorce rate, which doesn't really speak well for it, imho. i don't know that net relationships will prove to be any more successful, but i doubt the failure rate could be any worse. gonna do my best to help our stats! steve

this is bullshit, man. sorry to hear. hope it gets worked out quickly. steve

hey turtle, you and others have mentioned batches of p4s before, and i'm curious about how we can get info on that. any official channels, or just what we hear word of mouth on these websites? hey jon, i agree with you about coordinating trips over there with gz. i'm going to china every 3-4 months no matter what i hear from them. going again in september, and if i have to turn around and jump on a plane to gz the next month, i'll gladly do it. hey everyone else, hang in, brothers and sisters. steve

them were the days...

hi all, got a message today from a person on g7. he said he contacted his congressman, who contacted gz, about when his fiance would get an interview. she sent the p3 on may 26, the day after yan zi sent ours. gz told the congressman that the interview would likely be around the middle of october, and the p4 would be arriving "in a few weeks." does anyone suppose that the congressman's contact got the case pulled out of queue, or is this logjam finally breaking up? steve

skd, sorry, i hadn't read your last post before writing what i just wrote. i wish you both good luck. steve

skd, if you decide on a chinese wife (which i recommend!), you are going to invest a lot of time and effort and money. yan zi and i have waited a year, now, and i will be making my 5th trip to visit her in sep. you are already making an investment of the most precious thing, time. seriously consider cutting your losses. there are so many beautiful, sweet ladies to meet in china. for my part, i met one beijing woman who started talking about sex and asking me for money early on. met her on kiss.com, and what a turn-on she was! i was still wounded from my divorce, and she was just what i thought i needed. cute, sexy, and needed me. then i saw that her profile remained and was being updated -- after she was supposedly getting serious about me. that was enough for me. since then i've learned that the average chinese woman isn't anything like that. yan zi refused money from me until only recently. that's because i convinced her to quit her job and let me support her when she sent in p-3, so she would be ready to leave china when the visa happens. but we've known each other for over 2 years now. i send flowers every month, and she loves it, but always lectures me a little bit for spending the money. she still hasn't spent most of what i sent for her support. anyway, hope this helps. you already got all sorts of good advice. just adding my $0.02. i hope you find yourself a good woman (like i did). steve

that is the basis of the current administration's campaign for re-election. fear.

congrats! one more step on this long road we find ourselves on.

i have gotten the "hello" in fushun, a small town south of chengdu, where yan's parents live. and the stares, that just seem to be curiosity. in may, yan and i were walking down the street in chengdu, near her apartment, which ain't in the greatest neighborhood, but i was still surprised to hear the "halllooo", so i turned and looked, and there were 3 guys standing there laughing. when i looked one shouted "f--- you!", to which all three laughed uproariously. the guy shouted it several more times as we kept walking away. wasn't quite expecting that in a big city. i don't know what it was ever like there before, but this little anecdotal sure seems to jibe with what we all keep hearing -- the u.s.a. ain't very popular these days. they seem to have their own version of the redneck, but i honestly don't feel unsafe in china.