shanghaigale

About 3 weeks ago we tried to buy the Costco Thai rice and it was totally out of stock. Went back last Friday and it was fully stocked again at $10.99 for a 25 pound bag. There was a limit of 5 bags. My wife bought 2. Gale

Congradulations! Gale

Congrats!!!! Kind of takes me back to what we felt like about 8 years ago when we got CR-1 and CR-2 on a DCF. Gale

You are not that much younger than I am, although my wife is quite a bit older than your wife. We have a daughter that was born when I was 58. I would think it would still be possible for you but it really depends on how healthy you are and what your wifes wishes are to. Definitely you need to give it a lot of deep thought before you decide. Its a long term commitment, but as far as I am concerned it was well worth it to us and it has turned us into a real family. I have no regrets. Gale

Definitely an interesting topic! I don't quite fit your age range up to 55. I will be 65 in a few more months. My wife is now 41. We had a daughter when I was 58. So our daughter is 6 (going on 7) now and just finishing up kindergarden. So I will be almost 78 when she graduates from high school. She is really the light of our life now. We wouldn't trade her for anything. So much fun to be around. always a smile on her face. I haven't worked a regular job since I returned from China when I was 58 and instead my wife and I picked a home business we could do that pays quite well but allows us to spend the time with our daugher and also be together virtually all the time. We work about 70 hours a week but its the hours we pick to work, not somebody elses hours, and its a business that we both truly enjoy. My wife soemtimes starts talking about having another baby but I am not sure I would want to start over again at this time. I have a 31 year old daughter and a 28 year old son that I am putting through college now and a son from my wifes first marriage that is almost 16 and will go off to college in another 3 years. So I figure by the time I finish with the daughter through college at about 82, I will be ready to stop working. Its different for everybody though. I am in great health and both me and my wife love working hard, so continuing to work is not a chore to us. We truly enjoy it. Some people don't feel the same way so its really an individual choice as to what to do. I do worry that I will die before my daughter is fully grown but my wife is much younger so she should be safe with her. Money shouldn't be a problem because we are careful and have saved it pretty well. Gale

I know that if your wife enters the USA for the first time, after you have married over 2 years then your wife should be issued a 10 year green card. I have been told that this is also true if AOS is applied for but not granted until two years after marriage. I assume this is true but was wondering if anybody could point me to the actual USCIS regulation that points this out. I looked for a while on the USCIS website and never could find it. If someone could point me to it, I would appreciate it. Gale

I agree with both of Lee and Tine, but my wife still insisted that we get the citizenship paper for our son. First of all she has no interest in going back to china at all so we haven't applied for passports at all. Second she was worried that sometime in the future, he might move away and even if he had a passport he might accidently lose it and something might happen to us. etc. She figured that if we filed for and recieved the citizenship paper, the USCIS would always have a record of it and we could always make sure we protected the paper for him, etc. Basically she just wanted double protection I guess. Luckily we got it before the prices went up last summer so the cost wasn't near as high as it is now. It was worth it to me just to make sure my wife had total piece of mind. Gale

I also used FEDEX but that was a long time ago and I was working in Shanghai. I never had a problem but I also always had my stuff sent directly to my work place. I know at least back then in 2000 that FEDEX did not deliver all over China. So you would want to know for sure before you sent it by FEDEX if delivery could be made to the address you want to send it. Gale

Just a few things you need to be careful on with this. First of all you can't take the exclusion until you have resided a full calender year in the foreign country. Then you also need to make sure that you don't spend to much time in the USA during the year either. Make sure you are not back in the states over 30 days during the calender year (or a rolling 12 month period). If you are, then you can't take the exclusion. In my case, I was out exactly 29 days the first full calender year I was there. I planned my home vacation to make sure that I didn't exceed the 30 day limit. As I remember after you have been there a full calender year you can file for that year, then if you want you can also go back amend the prior year on the rolling 12 month rule to. I chose not to do that since it only involved a few months. At the end of your stay after you have had the first full calender year you can file for the partial final year up until the time you exit the country. So the portion of income you made while out of the country before you returned permanently will not be taxed but any income after that when you are back in the USA will. I did this way back in 1998-2002 so my memory is a bit rusty on all the details now. However, I was able to basically exclude all my income in China because the other income I had from investments and all was low enough that the standard deduction plus regular exemptions still didn't require me to pay taxes at all. It was really nice. I lived strickly on the per diem the USA company paid me and never even saw my regular paycheck. It went straight to my bank account in the USA and I didn't touch it at all while I was in China. As I remember the IRS form you need to check is the 2555, it will give you all the correct information that is currently correct. Gale Gale

We did this back in 2000, so our information is really old but I was living in Shanghai at the time and was able to file the paperwork there. However, we found out after we interviewed in Beijing that we could have filed it directly up there and would have saved ourselves a months worth of time because it had to go by special consular packet to get to Beijing and they only sent the packet every month or so. The INS officer that interviewed us there said that he could have told us where to send it and wouldn't have had to make a special trip to do it. As long as you have a Z-visa I would think you could file right away in Shanghai since you have lived in china all that time but you would probably want to check with the consulate there to be sure. Rules have a tendency to change and it was a long time ago since we did it. Gale

My information is really old (2000) but it may help because I think the procedure is still pretty much the same. We did exactly the same as you and actually interviewed first in Beijing. We were approved right away at the interview in Beijing by the INS officer posted there though and the file was forwarded to Guangzhou (this took about 4 weeks because he said it had to go by special consulate mail) where we got the P3 and P4 and was scheduled for an interview just like a K-1, K3, or CR1 from the states would do. So you will still probably have a few months to go before ater Guangzhou gets the paperwork before you have the interview there. Gale

I saw this happen with regularity in Shanghai when I lived there for almost 5 years. It almost happened to my wife. She was out riding my bike there and a policeman tried to confiscate it about 50 yards from our building grounds entrance, claiming it hadn't been properly registered (this was a common trick the police used that happened in the area every couple of months). She tricked the policeman by saying she would call up to our apartment and have me pay money to keep the bike but she would have to call from the front entrance of our building grounds. He wanted money more than the bike so he agreed. The minute she reached our gate she immediately rushed through it with the bike. The policeman tried to follow her and the building gate guards stopped him and wouldn't let him come into the grounds. There was only one policeman but 3 gate guards. He was angry but gave up and she brought the bike back to our apartment. Gale

My wife worked in Singapore for 2 years before I met her. They insisted on calling her an English name. She was allowed to pick it and picked Catherine. From the first day I met her in 1998 until now she has answered to that name. I didn't even know her Chinese name for several weeks and she didn't want to be called by it. When we moved to the USA and she obtained citizenship about a year ago she officially Changed her name to Catherine Ye Diener (Ye was her chinese family name) and Diener is my last name. She likes the name Catherine. Even though Hong her first name is quite easy to pronounce she prefers Catherine. When our daughter was born in China in 2001 we named her Rosemary and my wife wanted her to have an English name also. Gale

My wife likes the Thailand rice the best to. She has tried many varieties and always comes back to the Thailand rice. It is usually the most expensive but we get a 25 pound bag at Costco for about $9 now. Gale You mean Jasmine rice (with elephants design on the bag). Yep, thats the one. She goes through a 25 pound bag about every two months. We have tried the other kinds of rice at Costco to but she doesn't like any of them. The rices at the Asia markets here are much more expensive than at Costco. It also appears that all Costco stores don't have the Jasmine rice. We went to the Store in CDA, ID once and they didn't stock it. Went back to the one in Spokane and it was still there. Gale

My wife likes the Thailand rice the best to. She has tried many varieties and always comes back to the Thailand rice. It is usually the most expensive but we get a 25 pound bag at Costco for about $9 now. Gale

I will second you on this. My wife did exactly the same thing. She just uses a covered stainless steel pot to and as far as I can tell she get perfect rice every time. She said the rice cooker was way to much trouble. She cooks rice virtually every day to. Gale

On the name change. If you have to go to court to get your name changed, then most probably you will have to pay a fee for it. However, if your wife files for citizenship and gets approved, she can request that the name change be performed at the swearing in ceremony on the original N-400 and the cost is zero. That is what my wife chose to do. We then took the naturalization certificate down to the SS office and had her name changed on her card which was relatively painless. Gale

There are alot of DCF timelines in the DCF FAQ... that would give some historical idea. Have the original paper with original signature on hand. This will get turned in at the Interview 'check-in'... The next step: -your wife getting mailed the p3 papers... return what is required ASAP -your wife getting the P4 papers... get the medical exam; bring all P4 papers to that; pay for the visa (you'll need the receipt to be put into the medical pickup... so do this before pickup). - go to the interview; she does a check-in and then talks to a VO... - if passed, she can pick up the visa in two working days at the post office. Hi David, Just wondering, did they change it for a DCF so that you pay prior to the interview and have it included in the medical paperwork? I thought that was only true for a K-1 or K-3 not a DCF CR-1. Since this is a DCF as I remember the payment was made right after the interview was approved a the consulate. I know that back when we did it we paid at the interview after it was approved. I think this was because the cost was so high (I think it was like 2940 RMB back then but it is probably more now). We interviewed way back in 2000 but I hadn't heard that this had been changed since then, if you know that this has been changed I would like to know so I don't pass on incorrect information in the future. Gale

Maybe they have changed things in China since I left over 5 years ago. However, in our case, I tried to set up a joint bank account with my wife and I with the bank of china and it wasn't possible. They didn't recognize joint bank accounts. I lived there for over 4 years and had money transferred to my bank account in the USA to my China Bank account every month. Gale What about a joint bank account with deposits coming from the US (for her interview part I guess?). While I'm here I can add her to my bank account or she add me to hers. Would this provide any weight?

Well my information is getting pretty old. However when me and my wife interviewed in Beijing back in 2000 we were both interviewed separately. We weren't at the consulate but at a high rise building near by. I don't know if the location is still the same or not. The INS officer there was very nice and talkative. We talked about a lot of other things as well as the visa. Hong my wife was interviewed first, then they called me in second. She said he was very friendly also. He did ask a few personal questions, but I only remember one. He asked her if I used a regular razor or an electric razor when I shaved and if I shaved at night or in the morning. I do remember that none of the questions were trick questions. She knew the right answers to the personal questions because we had been living together for over a year before we filed for the DCF and we knew each other very well by then. They then asked me the same questions so they could verify that we agreed on the answers. They spent more time talking to me than they did to my wife. I also showed a couple full albums of photos we had taken together at different locations and explained where we were at in all of them. All in all it was an easy interview and he told us we had passed before we left. The approval was then forwarded by courior to Guangzhow which took about a month where the interview of my wife was completed again with her only, for the I-130. She had to go through the P3 and P4 just like everybody else from that time on. The only possible problem we almost had was proving residence in the USA since I had been living in China for a couple of years prior to the visa issuance. I was actually called into the interviewing room from where I was waiting out in the yard at the old consulate. The guy I talked with was the infamous "glasses man". This was easy for me though because I still had my main residence in the USA and worked for an american company in China and was paid in USA dollars with the money directly deposited into my USA bank account. I even had current copies of my mortgage payments as well as current utility bills to show. Gale

I am a little late getting in on this discussion but I will reinforce what the posters here have said. I married a gal from Shanghai almost 10 years ago now and she had a 5 year old son at the time who lived with the grandmother and father on the fathers side. They actually took care of our son from the time he was just a baby until my wife asked for custody when we got married. She couldn't afford to or legally get him until she could prove she could support him to. She didn't make enough money before that. In any case, we came to the USA with him when he was in the fourth grade, we also have a 5 year old daughter that just started school and after almost 10 years I think I can safely say there is no hidden agenda in our marriage. My wife now has citizenship and if she wanted to leave, she would have left long ago. We are still as close as we were the day we got married and I have never worried or even thought about locking up any of my assets from before into a trust even though I do have two grown children from a previous marriage. The situation with your wife is quite common in China. I lived there for 5 years and worked at an electronics factory where I met and became good friends with many chinese couples. Let me assure you that her situation is about as common as they get. I would reinforce what Don said and say that your friend is just concerned about you but just doesn't understand the chinese culture at all. Gale

I started out working on a Intel 4004 four bit machine that we built up at the University of New Hampshire in 1971 or 72. It was interfaced with a Digital PDB 8 and all the instructions had to be toggled in manually with the PDP front address and data switches. What a pain, one of my main projects was generating a computer generated pic of Snoppy on his doghouse that played on a analog o-scope. Used a paper tape reader to store the program. Actually it was pretty easy to do but required a lot of time. My next computer was a Cramer Kit, does anybody remember that one. It also used a series of dip switchs on a wire wrapped motherboard to toggle the Machine language instructions into the memory. It was then burned into 2708 Eprom memories. Remember when those cost $100 each. After a week of dip switch toggling, I went down to radio shack bought a keyboard mother board with a 8 bit output with an 8 bit bus and interfaced it to the dip switches so I could type in the characters. Also had to write the code to make it work OK. Had the most fun with that machine of all the computers I owned afterward. I even used it to design autoranging Capacitor tester for the fun of it. It actually worked quite well and used an LED readout. I should have finished it completely and patented it. One similar to it came out on the market about 2 years later. I still have the original prototype I built along with the schematics. One day I will have to pull it out and see if it still works. I actually hated DOS and Windows. They made things so much slower and much more difficult to work with. They were extremely wasteful of memory and you couldn't use them at all if you needed real time control. I liked working with the machine language. I still remember hand assembling all the programs I wrote. Eventually I started working with Assemblers and it definitely made it easier but sometimes caused problems. I worked with DOS and windows after that and always hated them. Gale The Commodore 64 was a really good gaming platform.

We did a DCF in China back in 2000 for my wife and I know I didn't need a police report on myself the petitioner. Only my wife required the police checks because she was the one that needed the visa. She needed two checks because she also lived in Singapore for 2 years prior to our marriage. So unless the rules have changed since 2000, there is no need for you to furnish a police check on yourself because you can go back to the USA regardless of the results since you are a USA citizen. I actually kind of doubt if the Chinese govt would issue one on you anyway since you aren't a chinese citzen. Gale

Just thought I would let the group know that I filed the N-600 for our sons "naturalization certificate" on the 24th of July and just received the final certificate in the mail today via USPS certified mail. We submitted the paperwork at the local office here in Spokane, Wa. and they processed it and sent it in. We only spent about 15 minutes in the office before we were finished. We got the paperwork submitted just before the July 30th deadline so the cost was $255. We never received an NOA of any kind but today the final certificate showed up. No interview or additional information was required. It only took 29 days from beginning to end. This was the most painless (except for the cost) set of paperwork we processed!! We are now totally done except for getting US passports for everybody. I kind of hated putting out the money for the N-600 because we were told that our son automatically received citizenship when my wife was sworn in back in Febuary. We discussed not getting the certificate but in the end decided that it was best to go ahead and get it anyway for peace of mind. You just never know when it may be needed in the future. Who knows maybe there would be another mass shedding of paperwork. We decided it was worth the extra money. Gale

One other thing I think there would be a much better chance of getting the CR1 approved in Hong Kong then getting the K-3 approved in China due to the fact that he has already been white slipped on the K-1 in China. Gale