lhp

Congratulations! Was your interview in April or was that when your file was created?

Waldo, I have a marriage-based Residence Permit. It was easy to get; went to the visa office; got pictures taken; got a physical; submitted the results along with the visa form, current police registration, and a copy of our marriage certificate; and then picked up the visa after a week or so. The RP I have is good for one year and multiple entries. The downside to this sort of visa is that you cannot legally work. Otherwise, it's quite handy. I'll be really interested to hear about it when/if you apply for the Chinese green card. It seems like you hear completely different things from everyone about what it takes (and if it's even possible) to get one. Good luck!

Thanks for the responses. Sounds like it will be relatively straightforward (though not as easy as it is for others), though expensive. Looks like we'll go the I-90 route. My wife will be eligible for a 10 year GC (she'll be entering after 2.5 years of marriage), and I don't think we want to wait until citizenship in three years' time for the name change, so we'll just bite the bullet and go through the legal name change procedure. I'd love to hear anyone's story of doing a name change after marriage in China…I wonder if that's even possible to do.

After my wife has her visa and gets over to the States, she'd like to change her name to take my own last name. I've looked at some old threads on here, but have mostly come up with threads about folks coming over on fiancee visas. So, what's the skinny on name change after entering on an IR1? Will we need to have her passport sent to a Chinese consulate to have an "Also known as…" sticker added?

Thanks, guys…I just needed to let off a little steam. I'd be curious to keep track of the clearance dates (as mentioned above) on those visas that are being issued. From the QQ group it seems that people with the same clearance date are getting the visas issued at different times…which makes me think that there is a big pile of visas that have come back from the States and are just waiting to be processed. They've also noticed that it seems like visas are being processed/issued in groups, with each group containing one of each type of visa (K1, IR-1). I've seen some immigration lawyers say that they make a federal case out of this, forcing action. I have mixed feelings about doing that.

In the past four years my wife has twice done two trips to the US on the same visa with no problems at all. We did trips in February and July of one year on the same visa and then December and February a year or two later. We did as you said – just booked tickets and then went through customs in the US. No problem.

Absolutely, Greg. The US's allegation is that members of the Chinese military performed acts of corporate espionage (a) in an official capacity (b) in order to provide Chinese companies with a competitive advantage. This is very different to regular acts of spying…but what with the Snowden/Greedwald leaks, in the court of public opinion it'll be hard for the US to look like it has any sort of moral high ground.

Saturday will mark eleven months of waiting. From what we've heard from the QQ group, people who interviewed after my wife have finished AP and gotten their visas. There are some other folks from around the same time who haven't, so it seems that GZ is doing things out of order. is all I have to say about it.

When we did this the appointment was in my name and we were both let in after explaining it at the Embassy gate, so it may not be a problem. They know that she needs to be present with the passport.

Congratulations! Ours is still pending. It'll be ten months in ten days.

According to the QQ group, people from August are starting to get their P5 notifications. I guess we'll have to wait for them to work backwards to June.

Great news!

I got more or less the same reply via my Senator yesterday. I originally sent the info request to the senator in September of last year, so it took about 5.5 months for them to get a reply from GZ. Instead of being really angry about that, I'm hoping it means that the gears are coming unstuck.

Pretty sad to see Locke treated that way. I voted for him for governor when I turned 18, and thought it was a nice coincidence that we were in Beijing at the same time. One of his last interviews in the Chinese-language media was with Men's Health China. Here's a translation of it – I was impressed by his polite (political?) answers.

Thanks, Randy and hh. Having an easily accessible resource like this will help couples in the future to more accurately determine how long they're going to wait. I quit a good paying job in China last July, assuming that we'd be able to move to the States in October/November. If I'd had any idea that it would take 8+ months to get through AP, I'd have kept my job.

Hey lhp, could you put your info in the spreadsheet, there is no names or anything required. Sorry it's been so long, from my perspective when you say 8 months, I'm looking ahead like damn I have 4 more months of this to go through. I did it. The mods here might want the embed urls from you so they can embed the form and embed the results. That would be very useful. I think it's great to pass this along to the QQ group, but I think it's going to be hard for people in China to fill this out if they don't have a VPN. I've been out of China since the end of December, but while I was there everything Google was blocked. Worst case, we get it to the QQ group and have the QQ group members force their US-based spouses to do it

A somewhat related article from this week's edition of The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/china/21596994-party-membership-does-not-necessarily-mean-better-job-prospects-rushing-join As of Monday we will have been waiting eight full months.

In which month did your SO interview? We're still waiting from the end of June…working to keep spirits up, though!

Thanks, pal. We haven't come close to waiting as long as you had to…it should be over soon, just a matter of being patient. Hopefully the next post in this thread will be good news and not another 'monthly update'.

Seven months since the interview and still no visa. My wife got two updates on her file the end of December, getting our hopes up, but no movement since. In the QQ group I mentioned above, people who have gone through AP and have gotten their visas have noticed that they have annotations on their visa like: Quote In general, these folks have gotten their visas shortly after the 'clearance date' noted on the visa. I guess this means that the current backlog is happening at the name checks, not in GZ. Called my senator's office and was told that GZ still hasn't responded to their request for information sent back in October…

She is most likely still on the books as a member. If the Consulate decides to investigate, it means a 2 or 3 month delay in most cases before the visa is awarded. That's it, pure and simple. Nothing further is required. Coming up with "proof" of an official dismissal might be MUCH more difficult and time consuming - and counter-productive, since it would require more involvement with the Party. The facts are simple - she signed up at the urging of her school officials, but never actively participated. My advice - keep it simple. I don't think we've heard of anyone who was denied the waiver. The wait for administrative processing currently seems to take 8 months or so (we're on month seven). Hopefully it'll go back to taking three months. My wife looked into formally quitting the Party (this after 2+ years of inactivity and never having paid dues b/c of being a student), and, as Randy says, it looked like it was going to be a huge hassle. The lady she spoke with said that my wife would have to submit a handwritten letter explaining why she wished to quit the party (despite the rules, they don't seem to consider you an ex-member simply because of inactivity and not paying dues), which would be given to a panel that would consider and vote upon her request. Just calling to ask about this was quite uncomfortable for my wife because she was asked a number of personal questions before the woman would answer the question. If anyone's SO has gone through the process of formally quitting, I'd love to hear how it went, how long it took, etc.

I've found an easier way to watch Chinese TV shows. If you use Google Chrome as your internet browser, you can download the Unblock Youku extension. This will let you watch TV shows and movies on Youku. Very useful…there are a fair few American movies on the site, so it's not just for a Chinese SO! Now I am looking for something similar for PPTV so I can use it to watch sports live.

My wife and I also lived in housing provided by my employer. I wrote a letter in English stating that my wife and I had begun living in that apartment since X date, and then had my employer stamp the letter. That was evidence enough for us. I also added my wife's name to the beneficiaries of my Roth IRA account with Vanguard. I printed that page out and included it in the packet. If you've got any sort of accounts in the US on which you can add a beneficiary in the case of your own death, you might add your husband. They almost certainly do know he's living there…my experience working/living in Chinese universities is that they keep quite a close eye on us, even if they don't say anything. We didn't include such a letter with our DCF. We'd been married for ~1.5 years at that point (and had known each other for 2.5), and had a pretty good photo trail of it all, both in China and in the US. At that point my wife had been to the US two or three times and my mother had been over for our Chinese wedding, so we had a number of photos of the two of us with our families both in the US and in China. You may not really need the letter, but since you wrote it it can't hurt.

Glad you like it, I think it's excellent. When I was doing my grad work we learned about current understanding of how we learn language. Basically, you're supposed to do productive (speaking, writing) and receptive (listening, reading) skills together. This is just really hard in Chinese, though, because speaking requires tones, writing & reading require boring memorization of characters (though Memrise really helps with that), and listening…well, listening may be the easiest part if you can find standard Chinese to listen to. From what I've read, it seems like people learn Chinese fastest when they start out with instruction (including reading & writing) all in Pinyin. Use that to get down basic grammar and vocabulary and to get comfortable speaking with attention to tones, and only then start introducing characters. Unfortunately, most Chinese teachers don't want to do that…they want to cram lots of characters down your throat from the very beginning. It's really important to know characters if you're living in China, but it isn't the best way to start learning the language.

Rosetta Stone for Chinese is pretty poor. Don't waste the money. For starting out with speaking and listening, Pimsleur is a good resource to start with, I think. Lots of people say that it teaches you good pronunciation…I know that I was able to make myself understood after spending lots of time with it. I checked out Pimsleur Chinese 1-3 from the library and basically put each lesson on repeat while I was in the car or at the gym until I knew it cold. The first few lessons were painful, but after that I got the feel of it and the others weren't as bad. If you spend time in northern China (Beijing on up), I think that Pimsleur really does a good job or preparing you for the language you hear there. After you've gone through the Pimsleur CDs, lots of people seem to like ChinesePod. I've never really gotten into it, but that's not for lack of trying. If you want to read/write at all, I'd recommend getting on Memrise and taking the HSK 1 Chinese course (it's free). You learn 300 characters (plus 100+ radicals). After finishing that course you can start to do some really simple reading. There's a series of books called Chinese Breeze that I've been working my way through. After finishing the Memrise HSK1 course and getting a chunk of the way through HSK 2 I can slowly but steadily read them.