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We should really never let our SO's read CFL before their interviews. All of the horror stories and instances of arbitrary and idiotic decisions by VOs who got out on the wrong side of the bed would only make them insecure at a time when they should be filled with self-confidence and joy. Waiting for my fiancée to come down from the fifth floor, I gave her no more than a fifty-fifty chance. On the one hand, our paperwork was perfection, every notarization and signature in place, forms not handwritten but photoshopped with all entries in English and Chinese fonts, 187 pages of QQ call logs and IM's, two years of text messages and two kitchen sinks for good measure. My fiancée knew my family details and my life history. There appeared to be no substantive reason for denying the visa. And yet red flags were lurking in the background. I am 70 years old, my fiancée 53. I first met my fiancée in person the day after my divorce from my fourth wife became final. I had only been able to come to China once before the interview week. You can read a lot of warnings about these things on CFL, and yet are they not matters of moral and social judgment which should have no place in a sober legal determination? The line-up in front of the consulate was pure chaos, five signs were meant to indicate five different lines, but none of the signs had "K-1" written on it. We were there 20 minutes early, and the right line turned out to be the one with a few couples of mixed ethnicity. Logical, of course, but it means that in order to find the right line, you have to do a little racial profiling. My fiancée drew a friendly male VO in his fifties, who asked her if any of my family members live in the USA, the reason for my only having been to China once to visit her (she explained why), how many times I had been married before, and the reason for my latest divorce. We had indeed met for the first time the day after my divorce became final, but the dates on the decrees don't show that the separation had occurred two years before that. He didn't look at my passport, the EOR, Intent to Marry, QQ, text messages, or any of the other stuff we had meticulously prepared, but he did look at the folder with eight photos. He also didn't offer her either of the "do not write below this line" forms to sign (GNI-2 and 156K), nor the Chinese certificate of intent to marry. And in the end she didn't even get a pink slip. It was the white pick-up notice with the words "Congratulations! Your visa has been approved." Length of interview: about 4 minutes. We are having the visa sent to the post office catacorner from the hotel Westin (that little one-desk hard-to-find post office in the basement of the Zhongxin Guangchang) because we are pressed for time and are guessing that we will get it sooner there than if we waited for China Post to send it to her hometown. We are greatly relieved, and feel for all those who worked hard to prepare their cases, but in the luck of the draw ended up with consular officers who had chips on their shoulders and delayed their cases unnecessarily. Da Ben Niao
