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For the interplay between Mao and Zhou Enlai and a historical perspective on the rise and continuation of comunism in China read: Zhou Enlai, The Last Perfect Revolutionary. Can be a little difficult to get through though.

EPA report on U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 2006 = U.S. emitted 6 billion metric tons of GHG. 1990 - 2006 Total GHG emissions by the U.S. increased by 14.1%. Not all bad news as from 2005 - 2006 there was an actual decrease of 1.5% in GHG. Reason for the decline given as switching some coal fired power plants to natural gas. Message to the politicians "Its the coal stupid."

"I am one of those that sit on the fence about this. We can argue this from many angles. Such as: America puts out more CO2 / person vs. China has 4 times the number of people. Brown smog is gone from USA (except LA) vs. sorry I would not wish to breath the air in Beijing. If you remove cars for the discussion America is very efficient at using energy and has very tough laws on what comes out of them." Yes America has very tough environmental laws. Unfortunately those laws do not curb CO2. We still burn a lot of coal in this country. In fact coal is still King when it comes to power. Regulations take out particulates and some other nasties that burning coal creates. However, we have still not found a way to remove CO2 from coal burning plants. Burning coal produces the highest amount of CO2 of any energy source. It goes Coal, Oil and Natural Gas in terms of CO2 output per kilowatt of power produced. We should be looking at tripling our solar energy production each year along with wind power. This should not only be done on the large scale. There are currently better designs for wind turbines which do not use the large towers and blades. These newer turbines can actually be placed on buildings and produce power at even low wind speeds. We should also be encouraging the use of solar panels all over the SW for individual homes. We need to make it extremely conducive to companies to do this. I am not a big fan of taxes. However, I do believe that an incentive could be made on oil companies to invest very heavily in alternate fuels. A threat of a windfall profits tax unless a certain amount of money is invested each year might be a good carrot. In the event that they pay the tax then those dollars should only be earmarked for energy production or building a new infrastructure to go to an alternative fuel like hydrogen. The infrastructure could be built by letting contracts to companies that want to build and operate the new system. They would then pay taxes once a profit is being made.

Maybe they looked at the population during the winter. I first met my wife in Chongqing during January. No interior heating other than a space heater. Everyone was wearing their longjohns and several layers of clothes. People looked heavier than they were. People probably stay thin in the winter by shivering most of the day. Of course not having heat makes them get out and move around the city in order to keep warm. I am pretty fit as I run a lot of miles. A lot of people commented to my wife that I was in good shape. Either that or she just didn't want me to know what they really thought. My wife does not like American food very well so she has stayed pretty thin.

I mailed the I-751 into the TX Service Center on May 17, 2008. USPS said that they delivered it on May 20th. Today we received two I-797C's. One for receipt of the I-751 and extending her greencard. Second one setting her date for biometrics (6/17/08). I am a happy camper right now and am sure my wife will be as well when she gets home from work. I am not even going to mind the drive from Las Cruces to El Paso for the appointment. I expect we will have to hit the Asian Markets up while we are there.

Sent my wife's I-751 in on the 17th of May and sent it to TX in accordance with the instructions on the form. They received it on the 20th. I guess it will be making the trip to Vermont since we live in New Mexico. It seems the documents we file travel more miles than we ever will.

I believe that not shaving is less common with younger ladies. My wife is 41 years old and does not shave her legs/underarms and has indicated that it is common for her friends and I assume generation. However, she has almost no hair visible on her legs anyway. I find that I don't mind the underarm hair as it is fairly fine. She is from Chongqing which is a large metropolitan area so I don't think it has much to do with where they live.

I file the I-751 for my wife tomorrow. As I recall, there is no problem sending a personal check as long as it is drawn on a U.S. Bank. The instructions do not say otherwise. Just want to make sure this is right so that I do not have to resubmit it. Thanks

I went onto the USCIS web site today to download the I-751 that I will be submitting next weekend to remove conditions for my wife. I noticed that they had the following: "Naturalization Interviews to be Conducted on Saturdays, Sundays and After Normal Business Hours on Weekdays. USCIS is expanding work hours and adding staff to complete Naturalization applications within our processing time goals." This may be old news to most everyone except me. Hopefully we will all benefit from this.

Glad to hear that you were successful in bringing your son here. I know my wife was ecstatic when we received notice of our daughter's interview. The three of us have been together since September of last year and it is a true blessing to see mother and daughter interacting with each other as well as with me. I am sure it will be the same for you.

Eight Taels of Gold is a good movie, but I don't know that it will teach you much about Chinese life. It is not a Kungfu movie but does star Sammo Hung. He is a Chinese man who lives in the U.S. and works as a taxi driver and goes back to China to visit his family.

We went to two Asian Markets in El Paso yesterday. We bought a bag of Jasmine rice at 20 lbs for $13. They both had a variety of rice ranging in price from $10 - $18 per 20 lb bag. My wife scored some Chinese noodles on sale as well and she was pretty happy. I bought about 40 lbs of Chinese Style noodles on line a month ago. They are made by an American Chinese owned factory in CA. She does not like them. Feels that they are harder and was not impressed when I told her to just cook them longer. The ones we got yesterday were made in China.

They have to accept the date it was stamped in at the office. That is the official date of receipt. That is the standard that all U.S. government offices use. I know this since I am employed by the U.S. government and have considerable experience with this. Should they deny based on the later date they would lose in an appeal situation.

I would recommend having your husband file to bring the son over as his child. This is what I did for my daughter. It took just slightly less than a year from the filing of the I-130 for her to get her interview and visa. The process went fairly smoothly especially since we had to get the supporting documents sent to us from China. You will be in a good position to bring what you need back with you for the filing. Good luck.

Yes, if he gets the IR category visa he will get a ten year. This happened for our daughter when she entered the country. I still have to file for the 10 year GC for my wife in May though as she has a two year card.

It took my wife six months to find a job when we lived in Las Vegas. I helped her a lot in looking for one and I kept telling her that her English was better than she thought. She ended up taking a housekeeping job at the Flamingo Hotel (I had told her that I would pay for her to go to school but she said it would take to long). Interestingly the Flamingo had a large contingent of Chinese who spoke very little English. They relied on my wife to interpret for them so that the staff could figure out what they were supposed to do. They told her that they were going to make her a floor supervisor but we left Vegas since I took another job with the governmental agency that I work for. She found another housekeeping job here in Las Cruces after 4 months. She tried to get into some other jobs but they did not want to hire someone who did not speak Spanish. It really gets to my wife when she sees a bilingual requirement on a job advertisement.

Had a pleasant surprise in the mail today. Our daughter's permanent resident card came. She entered the country 9/8/07 on an I-130 that I had filed for her in August of 06. There was a slight delay in her getting the card since we moved seven days after she arrived. They actually sent the card to our old address the first time. This was even though I had updated the address online within the 10 day paeriod that is required. No harm no foul however. Now all we have to do is get my wife her permanent resident card. Get to file to remove her conditions in May. Had to tease her today about her daughter being in a higher status. She took it well.

You might want to send the papers to your lady ahead of time and have her work on the Chinese translations. I sent the papers to my wife to be and she had a lawyer that her family knew take care of them. That way all we had to do was go to the Bureau and and show them what we had and sign on the dotted line. They took the photo for the little red book and the rest is history. Of course after the actual marriage we went through a traditional Chinese wedding two days later in the old town part of Chongqing. It was interesting to say the least. As to why to marry in China, there are any number of reasons. For us it was cheaper, helped me meet her family and friends and made her feel safe that I was seriously committing to her. We will be at three years on January 21st. I don't see divorce in the future. However, remember if it quacks like a duck.................

My wife and I talked about her using an American name but never came up with one that was suitable. I love her Chinese name any way and would not use something else. Minghua means "Sun and Moon of China" and she is my sun and moon. It does give some people trouble and they will shorten it to Ming.

My wife Minghua fits into the thrifty category. We were married in Chongqing where she is from. While we were waiting for her visa we met in Beijing for a little more than a week. She complained about how much more expensive Beijing was compared to Chongqing. I would just laugh and tell her that it did not seem expensive to me and she should wait to see how much things were in America. I am not someone who will spend a lot of money. However, if there is something that I need I am willing to spend what it takes to get a good product. When my wife first got here we would go to the department stores together shopping. This was before she got her job. She is a small woman so it is hard for her to find things that fit here. She would try on clothes and when she found something that would fit I would tell her to buy it. Usually she would look at me and say "No Discount." So after hours we would walk out with nothing. I got to dread hearing "No Discount." About a month and a half before her first birthday here she tried on a dress in Dillards (cost $250). Fit her rather well and she looked beautiful in it. I told her that I would buy it for her, for her birthday. But she said "No Discount." As the days counted down to her birthday she kept going back and trying on the dress. The price progressively got less. First 25%, then 30% and finally 50% off. Each time she would still say that it cost too much. Any way, when it got down to 50% off I left work early one day and went back and bought the dress and hid it at work. This was about a week and a half before her birthday. We went back to Dillards one more time and she was crushed that the dress was no longer on the rack. I told her that if she saw something she wanted badly she should get it. I wrapped the dress up in birthday paper so that she could not tell what it was. The night before her birthday I placed it next to her on a little stand we have next to the bed. I told her she could open it after midnight when it was officially her birthday. Later I got up to use the facilities and she asked me what time it was. It was after midnight so I hear the package rustling without the light even being turned on. My wife let out a little squeal and turned the light on to confirm it was the dress. She was so excited and had to try it on right then. She does look beautiful in it and the only bad thing is that if she wears it she gets a lot of men staring at her. Even though she works she is still very thrifty. She is good at sewing so she will sometimes buy things on discount and then spend the day altering them to fit her. She is amazing with a needle and thread and you can't tell that she has altered something. Interestingly enough she will spare no expense on me. There have been a number of times when she has demanded that she be allowed to buy me something even while I am protesting the expense. Right now she is in Chongqing and when we talked on the phone last she was excited about going shopping for things to bring back for me, our house and my family back in Ohio. Oh, and somebody mentioned about bedclothes. That is something that she said she was definitely bringing back. She believes that sheets and other items for the bed are way to expensive here. Ed

Yes, I filed the I-130 for my daughter. We adjusted my wife's staus from the I-129 before we found out that we would be able to get our daughter here. I believe that as long as one of you are there it is okay. I could not leave because of our moving in mid September. I am stuck getting our house ready for sale and coordinating our travel to NM. I had a very hard time convincing my wife that she needed to be at the interview. She did not want to spend the money on the flight. A friend of hers has her daughter's interview next week so my wife was wanting to have her daughter come back with them. I finally just told her that if she expected to get her daughter here she had to go and bought her a ticket. I spoke to my wife today and they are safely back in Chongqing and her daughter has her visa in hand. My wife sounds so happy that I feel really good about getting this completed. Now, if they just get their tickets to come back before the movers actually pack and load us up. ed

If you are located far from a Chinatown here in the U.S. try going online to: www.shengkee.com Bakery located in California that you can order from online. Has what looks to be a wide variety of mooncakes to choose from. Since I will be moving my family to Las Cruces, NM in mid September I may be ordering from them instead of buying from the Chinatown here in Las Vegas. Although there may be something in El Paso if I am lucky.

My stepdaughter had her interview on 8/22/07. According to my wife everything went well and she will get her visa Friday. Altogether it took almost exactly one year to bring a 16 year old to the U.S. That includes a 4 month period when the paperwork was at the Consulate till the interview date was scheduled. For a short time I thought we might have to reschedule the interview. I left my wife at LAX on Friday waiting to board her plane that was to leave at 1:15 p.m. They loaded and then sat for 4 hours before leaving. That meant she missed a connecting flight in Hong Kong. That did not matter as the plane ended up being diverted to Taipei due to a typhoon. She finally made it to Hong Kong only to sit in the airport waiting for a plane to Guangzhou the next morning. She finally made it there at 11:40 a.m. where she found that her bag would not arrive till 3 p.m. Good news was her daughter was flying in at 3:30 p.m. so she was able to pick up her bag and daughter almost together. She ended up spending about 20 hours in airports, much longer than the total flight time. However, we are very happy that things worked out and our daughter will be with us.

A good site for Chinese videos is: www.yesasia.com They also have a side for clothing which I have not used. I have purchased a number of Chinese movies at reasonable prices. Every so often my wife and I have a Chinese video night. It is really enjoyable for the both of us. I have found that Chinese cinema can be as good or better than anything put out by Hollywood. I have found the comedies to be pretty funny.

You can file for the child under the I-130. It will take approximately one year. I have a similar situation to yours. My wife's ex would not let her daughter come with us on the I-129 that I filed for my wife (we married in China prior to starting the visa process). Shortly after my wife came to America in April of 2006, she found out that her ex had changed his mind. I filed the I-130 for our daughter in August of 2006 after I had a certified/translated document from her father stating that he would let her come to America. She was 15 when I filed and is now 16. Everything went quickly at first. NVC sent the papers to the Consulate in March of 2007. They languished there until last week. Our daughter was sent the P4 with an interview date of August 22nd. I am in the process of making sure that she has everything for the interview. Hopefully she will get the visa and we can bring her here shortly after the interview. Your wife can also file if she has had AOS completed. My wife had her AOS completed just after I submitted the papers. Since she had received an interview date for her AOS we could not use the K-2. Hope this helps.