hugazebra

Not sure "most stable" property prices is anything to crow about. Parents bought a house 40 years ago and yes, the price is very stable, to the point it's only appreciated 100% over 40 years. Then again, that's what you get for buying in cheap places like Irondequoit.

Given that your interview is Jan 2011, your window to submit the amendment with W-7 request for ITIN is pretty tight. As part of the ITIN application, you will need to provide notarized or certified copy of wife's proof of identity and foreign status. If you are in China with her, make an appointment with nearest US consulate to make a certified copy of her passport for USD$50. Otherwise she needs to go to a Chinese notary - and then you will have to submit that to your state secretary for notarization/certification in the US, all of which takes time. If you are a frequent traveller to US, you can bring your wife's original documentation to an IRS TAC office to get them back same day. Don't worry about 2010 returns - those aren't due until April 15th 2011 for precisely the reasons you outlined. If you have a strong case, i.e. lived in China with your wife for past year, my personal opinion is not to worry about the tax return. If not, and you are worried about a white slip and are willing to wait, you might consider delaying the interview another couple of months until you have the tax return sorted out, and possibly even have the 2010 returns ready in hand as well.

Thanks for the Xray advice. Friend finally found a company willing to ship it unopened. We received the visa and entry packet this past weekend as according to original timeline. To our surprise, they gave us six months from the latest medical exam date to enter the US. On the call-in letter, the security advisory background check expiration date was four months (2010-Oct-13 to 2011-Feb-13), so fortunately that background check is not the limiting factor in visa expiration. Now comes the final and toughest part - getting the wife to actually let go of the job and friends in China to start over again from scratch... It was easy enough to talk about when it was just a future possibility, but much more angst provoking when it's time to execute.

My turn to announce some good news. While in Guangzhou last week during the Thanksgiving week call-in mess, I had my wife go to a Guangzhou notary to designate a close personal friend to handle the call-in. The notary seemed familiar with this type of letter and had a template document all ready to go. I figured 200rmb was cheap enough to give this a try, and worst case was another flight down to GUZ. The notarized letter was available for pickup this past Monday so our friend promptly took it to the consulate along with call-in letter, new medical exam, and her passport. The consulate promptly gave a pink slip and sent our friend to the EMS desk. Hopefully another couple of days and we'll see what visa expiration date will be. Our next problem is how to get the medical exam X-ray tube back up to Shanghai. None of the kuaidi delivery services were willing to ship it unless they could open it up and inspect the contents. Of course, breaking the seal on the tube invalidates the contents for US customs purposes, so we'll have to wait for someone to bring it via plane.

After looking at the PM10 time series, I think "crazy bad" is still an understatement... AMFIC air quality Anyhow, it's good reason to start smoking heavily. The air coming in through the cigarettes would be much cleaner than trying to breathe the air directly. I gave up on China after five years because I finally developed asthma and started getting fluid in the lungs and coughing like crazy if anyone within a 10m radius lit up... (and that was at Shanghai pollution levels - equivalent only to a C. on the C.R.A.Z.Y. pollution scale)

Nope, didn't find out about this ahead of time... wife physically went to Guangzhou and came back today. That's two people on this board screwed over on the same day.

!^$@^%$#%(!#$^&!)#!*!$#@*!@)%@%#@ I'm ready to fly to Guangzhou and start throwing bricks at the 5th floor window. My wife blew USD $200 on airplane tix to Guangzhou and took days off from work and then found out they decided to do renovations this week. And of course, the website shows they JUST posted this last Wednesday, well after travel plans had been made... Weeklong renovations just don't happen on a dime. A lot of planning goes into renovations of any US consulate, so this is just sheer incompetence on the part of Guangzhou management. This is no longer borderline insane, this is just pure lunacy. Too bad immigration and border security are pretty much unaccountable to nigh anyone. On the plus side, at least the health clinic at Shamian island let my wife get a new medical exam done even though the old one wasn't expired. Just another case of ask enough times and you will get the answer you want...

So now that ACH is cancelled, how do we get straight answers from the GUZ consulate? Every time I've used that infernal web email form, I get a reply back the next day that there is no way they can verify that my email address is tied to the case in question. Darned right there's no way - my case is so old that the NVC forms I used didn't have form fields for email addresses yet. It's not clear whether the new update language now also excludes physical mail and FAXes to their office... BIOTECHS

If you got no income, use somebody elses income :-) I had to get a family memeber who made a respectable salary to come to my rescue with a joint affidavit of support (I-864), and that took care of the unemployed with no income part. Can't help you with overcoming ex's though...

Well, if you happen to be in HK, see if you can find a cheap trebuchet operator to fling you over the border. That counts as travel by air, no? I pick the times nobody else wants to travel. i.e. UA Rochester, NY -> Shanghai Depart 11/24, return 12/3 Price $838 + taxes Of course, if you live in San Francisco, you get screwed for an extra $300 or so. General tips are to plan for at least a 6 day stay, try to travel on Mon-Thur. And of course, Xmas season will be sky high, but sometimes you can find cheap fares towards last minute, especially if you are travelling on 12/25. Good luck

Missing Thanksgiving with the family and haveing to cancel a planned wedding can't be fun. However, assuming your fiance arrives in US before year end, couldn't you just have a civil wedding registration without the ceremony and stuff? It means having to remember two anniversaries every year for rest of your life, but hey, the things some people do to avoid paying taxes...

1 week is just the time between when consulate sent the call-in letter and when EMS actually got it into my wife's hands. She hasn't made the trip back to the consulate to turn in passport yet, so hopefully next update in a few weeks will be pink slip.

Thanks, that sounds like a sensible explanation. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, so I am eagerly waiting to see what your wife's visa expiration date will be. I am very thankful to have found a "visa buddy" on this forum with such a similar situation and interview date. Fortunately, I've banked up a few frequent flier miles over the years, so if she gets a close-in expiration visa, worst case is to bring her to US for a weekend in early Jan...

The Health Center does things according to the directives established by the consulate. Why would you want to do things differently? No one at the POE will be able to accept it - everything must be in the sealed envelope given to you by the consulate. Well, the idea is that since we haven't gone back in to actually get the visa and have not received the sealed envelope yet, that we can submit a new health exam prior to executing the callback visit. Then they can just dump the new health exam in the sealed envelope for the POE, and issue a visa with longer validity. May have to just solve the problem by waiting until last month of medical report validity to force the consulate to issue a new letter requiring updated health exam and then do health exam and revisit consulate a day later to submit results. Don't like cutting it that close, but oh well. It would be nice if we could just frontload things like you can with the NVC step.

Just wanted to add a note about security background check expiration dates for the benefit of any future applicants traveling the same path. Our IR1 call-in letter was dated 2010-Oct-14, and the listed document expirations included medical report, police report, and background report. The medical report had a 6-month expiration, the police report had a 1-year expiration, and the background check expires on 2010-Feb-13. Without knowing the internal processing timeline, I cannot hazard a guess as to what determines the background check expiration date, but since we hope to travel 7 days after Chinese New Year, this will come down to the wire. Probably leave 2 days spare just in case the airplane spits out an engine disc and we have to turn around mid-flight :-)

Argh, why does everything having to do with US immigration visa borderline insane... So our callback letter has an expiration date for our medical report in mid-January, but we want to travel after Chinese New Year in early February. The Guangdong Intl Travel Health Care center said that unless the medical report had expired, they would not be willing to do another medical exam unless the consulate issued a new letter expressly requesting a new medical report. Still trying to get the skinny from other hospitals about this, but so far the answer has been we're not sure, talk to our person in charge, unfortunately he's not available right now.

China domestic airfare from Shanghai to Guangzhou is pretty close to rock bottom for next few weeks, so not sure how busy Guangzhou really is during these Asian Games. I've never heard of the Asian Games before, but then again, I never really heard of World Expos before, and yet 70 million people were willing to queue for hours on end. Plus, this is low season for travel, so at least you don't have to compete with all the students and summer vacationers. Of course, to and from Beijing, there is no such thing as a cheap airplane ticket anymore...

Never trust marketing material. Hong Kong would be my first choice for treatment as well. The doctors there tend to be a cut above those in China, perhaps because they have to do real post graduate medical school training like in the West. I have no firsthand experience with neurology dept, but the two times I went to Huashan clinic, I was not impressed. They may offer some services in English, but the doctors are still local doctors. It they were really trying to make a quick buck off of your relative, I'm sure they would have removed his appendix by now as an adjunct to treating the stroke. If you can pay Western rates, you might check some of the expat oriented clinics like Parkway Health (formerly Worldlink) or Shanghai East International Medical Center to see if they have any relevant specialists or if they can give recommendations. Note that clinics are not hospitals and won't have ICUs, but they have relationships with local hospitals and labs so at least you can might be able to get a Western attending physician. Some hospitals (like Shanghai East regular hospital - ¶«·½Ò½Ôº) have VIP sections to get access to the better local specialists. Not having used those, I'm not sure what size red envelopes you might have to prepare to guarantee better attention and treatment.

My wife's call-in letter indicated that once she turned in her passport, her immigrant visa would only be valid until 2011-Jan. The medical exam was done in 2010-Jul, police reports in 2010-May, so assuming round number expirations like 6-mo or 1-yr, I'm assuming the medical exam may be limiting factor with a presumed 6-month validity. Since we want to travel to US in 2011-Feb, we're planning to get another medical exam before going back in with the call-in letter and passport. Our callback letter also indicates that we can use a notarized power of attorney to authorize someone else to deliver the passport to GUZ, but we're not sure what path we will try simply because there are lots of cheap flights to Guangzhou coming up, and medical exam plus followup vaccinations are much cheaper in Guangzhou than in Shanghai.

A very timely update. I finally got settled into a daylight schedule here in the US and charged up my cellphone for 15 minutes on hold. Nice touch how their hold music is a ringing sound instead of Muzak. They wouldn't tell me anything about my wife's SAO status because the consulate had just put a callback letter in the mail (EMS) yesterday. I assume this means they have already completed processing and are either ready to issue a visa or ready to give us a Bronx cheer and force me to start the waiver process. Either way, that marks almost exactly 3 months since my wife's July 20th interview date. Funny how they sent it out on the exact same day I got around to filling out the "Contact Us" form on the consulate website to ask for an update. I will make sure my wife watches out for those ninja stealth EMS deliveries. Personally, I always had the worst experiences with EMS deliveries not bothering to leave a missed delivery note until many days later...

I picked up one of these visiting relatives visas as well since my wife lives in China. This 1-yr multiple entry unlimited stay Tourist L visa has made me quite lazy since I no longer have to schedule Hong Kong runs every 90 days. On the other hand, I used to be able to count on these runs to bring in duty-free smokes and cosmetics for future bribery guanxi usage. These visas can only be obtained in China - the Chinese consulates abroad can never promise more than the 60-day multiple entry tourist visa, although in the past they usually gave me 90 days. Not sure if this is because I used to work in China or because I am of Chinese descent (but not born in China). Until I tried getting this visa, it was never obvious to me that these visas applied to me. There are several different tourist visas and the language describing them is stilted enough that I couldn't figure out what the differences were and who they applied to. I applied for this visa while staying at a hotel in my wife's residence town, so the hotel does the foreigner temporary residence registration paperwork and uploads it to PSB computer. A lot easier than trying to register yourself if your spouse doesn't already own his/her residence.

First off, a big thank you to all the previous posters on CFL from whom I've garned so much preparatory info from. I've been read-only for a long time, but it looks like I finally made it past the spam filter to have posting rights. Maybe something to do with my screen name? My wife's IR1 interview was on 2010-07-20. A few weeks ago, while preparing documents and getting new notarized everythings, I came across the posts about CCP membership and noticed that my lawyer had checked the NO box on the DS-230 for party membership. I contacted GUZ using web contact form leaving my wife's contact info and my China mobile number. They called me back within the week and told me to prepare Chinese and English versions of: Personal resume including positions, detailed responsibilities, and list of all publications. Statement about CCP involvement answering 8 questions Any supporting documents about CCP membership termination The day before the interview, I attended ACH to ask about DS-230 mistakes. The VO said they could not accept new DS-230's in GUZ at the interview, but could annotate the file with the corrections. I also alerted them to having a new cosponsor, and asked lots of questions until I was the last one left at ACH... On interview day, we got there at 7:00am and ended up about halfway in line by the time they started letting people in for 7:15am appointments. I guess the VOs got some payback because my wife ended up being one of the last ones interviewed . They took the cosponsor I-864 and 2009 tax returns, but didn't take my updated I-864 or 2009 tax return. Also accepted the CCP related documents, and had a quick glance at an annotated color laser printout of family photos from the last 5 years (we were fortunate to have pictures with one or the other family from multiple points in time, and had a full wedding with both sides in attendance). At the end, she got a blue slip with no requests for further documentation, presumably for SAO processing, and was told to expect further updates in three months or so. After the interview, we browsed around TianYu Gardens to check out airplane ticket prices, we talked to some of those visa assistance firms. They said that for people in certain professions, CCP membership is pretty much an automatic blue slip. My wife is a university teacher and has had minimal CCP involvement, so we're crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. She noted that ahead of her, there were plenty of applicants that seemed to be of ordinary background who didn't even get asked the CCP question, but the better dressed ones seemed to always get it. She tried resigning from CCP a few months ago, but apparently it was unheard of for teachers to resign from the party and requires convening meetings and bureaucracies. Instead, the local communist branch said it would be easiest to just immigrate first and party membership would be automatically revoked. We're back in Shanghai now ahead of typhoon Chanthu and ready to start our next ordeal: Visiting the Shanghai Expo 2010. Not sure whether waiting for a visa or waiting for entry into national pavilions will be more painful! Anyhow, My time in China is at an end, so I'm moving back to US next month for some clean air, clean food, and Western salaries while I wait for my wife to get her visa. -Z

Not sure why, but starting this year, I've been receiving email notifications from NVC with a PDF whenever a response is sent. This included a notification that I should get a financial cosponsor even though my liquid assets met the 5x 125% poverty level test, as well as a second notification that my IR1 case had been forwarded to GUZ. Note that I did not go the electronic route as my paper case started at NVC back in 2008. Prior to this, all notifications were in the form of paper mail to the immigration attorney I used as a US agent since I've been living as an unemployed tourist in Shanghai most of the time.