lhp

My wife had her second interview today and was approved. Her first interview was in late June, 2013. That's 492 days (16+ months), for those of you keeping score at home. My wife's first interview was at the old GZ consulate. The new one is even easier to get to. Take exit B1 from Pearl River New Town stop. The Consulate is literally across the street. If you're looking for a place to grab a bite beforehand, or a cafe to wait in while your own SO is in the consulate, turn right out of exit B1 and walk a block. There are a number of cafes and restaurants. Glad this whole experience is coming to an end, and glad to have some good news to share.

Oh the ten photos that Shanghai require…we turned in ten photos and got four back when I picked up the completed forms. When you get the results I wonder if you'll get any photos back.

My wife did her medical in Shanghai on Oct 17, and we weren't able to get the results until the 23rd. (She was assigned a pickup date.) Seems like GZ is the only place with one day turnaround.

Physical in Shanghai done. I've got to make a trip to Shanghai this week to pick up the results. The Canton Trade Fair is going on at the same time as my wife's interview, so hotels in GZ are expensive. We're going to stay out by the airport…the better to catch our 8 am flight back home. Got a pretty good rate via Booking.com. In other news, there's a Dengue fever outbreak in Guangzhou. So the sites of GZ might be a little different than usual: http://www.thenanfang.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/fumigation-gz-dengue-fever-02.jpg

It seems much more possible for you to move to China for a year or two than it would be for her to move to the States. As the others have said, she'd either need a job offer and visa sponsorship or be accepted to an American university. Job + visa is hard to get. Universities are happy to accept Chinese students, but given that the cost of a year of school would probably be $30k+, CBA might indicate that you going to China makes more economic sense.

Thanks guys, we're keeping out fingers crossed. Just finished filling out the DS-260, and have an appointment for the physical. We celebrated our third anniversary last week. The original plan was to enter in October of last year, just after the second anniversary. Ha, ha, ha.

We received an email today calling my wife back in for another interview. She was told to bring her passport, a new medical report, a valid police report, and two recent photos. We also have to fill out a DS-260, which wasn't a requirement when she had her interview way back in 2013. Another couple who have also been waiting for AP since last year got the same email a week or so ago. The interview is at the end of October (in the afternoon, not the morning), 16 months after her original interview. Hoping that she'll leave this interview with good news, but we'll see.

I would go. Be upfront with your employer, offer to reschedule the classes on another day. If they're not understanding, they're not worth working for.

If you're going to China anytime soon, you can get them from Amazon China (z.cn). The Chinese title is 冰与火之歌.

It's interesting to compare those number to how much you need to earn to be middle class in China. According to McKinsey, RMB 60,000-229,000 of household disposable income per annum puts you in China's middle class.

We've got some of these Geely models in Ningbo, and they are very nice – much nicer than an old VW Santana. It'd be great if they were adopted nationwide.

I'd recommend your wife get on the QQ group (271182035) for people waiting in AP. When joining, just say that you're in AP and waiting for P5. We're still waiting.

More on the same story: Plane turns back to Dulles so FBI can arrest mom in parental kidnapping case Interesting that the child is reporting as having 'dual citizenship'; I thought China doesn't allow it. If I were the father, I'd make sure to contact the Chinese Embassy and get the kid's Chinese passport (and citizenship) cancelled. I'm very glad the father didn't lose his child. Seems like you hear about so many of these cases; when I talked to my wife about it she mentioned how common this sort of thing is in China (wives running away with the children) because they 'have no other alternative'.

I submitted copies of bank statements and credit card bills addresse to me in the US. I'd also renewed my driver's license recently so submitted copies of the old and new cards.

I bought the Mandarin Companion book The Monkey's Paw. It's good; I think it's a little easier than the level one Chinese Breeze books, but it's really too bad it doesn't have audio.

Very impressive. In 2007 I visited the Jin Mao Tower, at which point the Shanghai World Financial Center was nearing completion. A few months back my wife and I went to the SWFC's observation deck, and checked out the almost-finished Shanghai Tower. I guess I'll have to wait to visit the Shanghai Tower until the next super skyscraper is almost done. Standing at the bottom of any of the three buildings and looking up is an incredible site…and it gave me a case of vertigo.

I got a kick out of reading comments on this slashdot thread about the computer problems. Sounds like USCIS's computer people are just incompetent. What a shocker.

If you have a long commute, the China History Podcast is great. Sterling Seagrave wrote some interesting books about Chinese history. Dragon Lady is a pretty interesting look at Cixi (the last emperor's grandmother) and at China at the turn of the 20th century/end of its imperial line. Not the lightest of reading, though.

Xinjiang is fantastic, probably my favorite place we've traveled "in China". It was unreal to be in a residential neighborhood three or four blocks away from a tourist site in Urumqi and realize that almost all the women were in burqas. And it was fun being in a "Chinese" city where my terrible Putonghua was better than many of the locals'!

I very rarely get 100%. Usually forget some tones or don't get a definition exactly right. I think the proof is in the pudding…try doing some reading! From Amazon.com you can get the Chinese Breeze books (the ones with red covers are Level 1). They've got fun stories and the Memrise HSK 1 class was just about enough to get me through them, with the occasional help of Pleco and my wife . I haven't bought any of the Mandarin Companion books yet, but they also look good.

It makes sense that the Party wouldn't like NGOs since they've previously rejected the concept of 'civil society'; the Party should be able to do it all, they think. With regards to hacking, I think the difference is that the PLA is willing to do bespoke hacking jobs for Chinese companies. The NSA hasn't shown a willingness to do this; if they had, I think it would have come out in the Snowden leaks. I think there's spycraft, which every country does to one another, and then there's corporate espionage. While both may be illegal, governments have the (scary?) power to put themselves above the law when doing things "in the national interest", while companies do not have the same power when breaking laws for their own interests. China's model of direct government support (or ownership) of companies apparently includes using intelligence and military assets to conduct spycraft on behalf on Chinese business interests. This is different to what the US does, and is different from 'regular' spying.

On that point: Follow the link for the whole article.

Eugene – which province is this? My wife has gotten occasional phone calls from the PSB over the past year while I've been on a marriage-based residence permit, but nothing like that.

Memrise has some great Chinese courses and lots of English courses, and it's free. I started with their HSK Level I class and it made a huge difference.

I've been thinking about this, specifically asking families to file FOIA requests to get data from the government about what was done when. I'm not sure what to request from whom, but it seems like we should be able to request: That the FBI disclose when the background check request was received, when it was processed, and how long it took for this to be sent back to GZ. That USCIS Guangzhou report on how long it is taking for background check requests to be sent, received, and processed. Would there be anything to request from State or Homeland Security?Here are the various sites: USCIS FOIA requests, FBI FOIA, State FOIA, DHS FOIA. I think this is an uphill battle, though – I doubt there are many who want to expend political capital to do something that a political opponent could describe as "helping Chinese Communists come to the United States". We are seven days away from having waited a year.