One More Bump in the Road: Adventures in Chinese Bureaucracy

Yesterday (Thursday), Dave had a very productive meeting with Mrs. Wu. He found out that he’ll be teaching 2 junior faculty seminars on American history per week until Sept. 10 (after which he’ll have one seminar and also teach three classes of English daily). He actually taught his first seminar that afternoon. He said it was the first time in the last week that he felt truly at home, since he was in a classroom. This great bit of movement forward (Dave hadn’t heard anything up until then) was tempered by the news that we had to have a physical exam and visit the Public Security Bureau Friday (today) morning. What???? It is still vividly fresh in our memory the day that we received some very cryptic looking paperwork back in March, accompanied by the directive that we all had to get physicals NOW in order to get the visa process moving. Or actually, we had to send the results of our physicals, along with our criminal records, to Inner Mongolia so an official letter could be generated, which we then had to send to SF with our passports, to get the visas. Phew. Given all of that, we were really bummed out about having to have physicals here—what in the world could that mean? Did I have to take my clothes off in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language? Did the kids have to do this, too?—especially since we thought we had done that all already. We did our best to get out of it but to no avail. The most we heard was that the kids didn’t have to have physicals. The silver lining, so to speak.

And so, bright and early this morning, we fed the kids their breakfast but Dave and I had to fast, then we trooped down the stairs at 8 a.m. to see our escorts. He asked Mr. Song yesterday for someone to come with us who speaks English, and we got that, in the person of Athena (I cannot even begin to attempt her Chinese name, but really, she looks like an Athena and is the sweetest, kindest person ever), a faculty member in the International Exchange department. I was really, really dreading the whole experience and the kids were freaked out just because. Remarkably, and I should remember this so that I can spare myself future stomach aches over matters I cannot control, the whole process was pretty painless. The clinic they took us to was clean and modern looking-- big relief and a further indication of the various unknown prejudices that lurk in my deepest parts, for I was sure it would be dark and scary and dirty—and actually, being foreigners we were pushed through to the front of the line in every room we visited. And where did we go? We first visited the x-ray room for a chest x-ray… See the scary picture below.

That’s right, no lead apron, no closed door, nothing. Ugh. Then we went to the Surgery room, which really was just where a lady took our pulse and blood pressure and wrote down our height and weight, but the sign completely freaked out Samuel. We then had to have an EKG, our blood drawn, a urine sample, and an ultrasound on our stomachs. The whole thing only took an hour, when I think for the other people waiting it would probably take all day.

They then took us to find a little breakfast—it ended up being ice cream bars, much to the delight of Grace, Samuel refused to eat—where I took this picture of the ice cream freezer.

Abercrombie and Titch??

At the Public Security Bureau we ate our ice cream bars, which seemed rather decadent and disrespectful, given the seriousness of the place, had our pictures taken again (I forgot to mention that we had that done 2 other times previously in the day, on top of the four pictures each we brought along with us in the morning), and then that was it. The gentleman who is responsible for putting all our resident paperwork together will keep our passports for about a month, oh lovely thought, but for now I think that is it for our encounters with Inner Mongolian bureaucracy. I remember thinking back in March as I looked at the crazy list of paperwork we needed to compile in two short weeks, this is but one of many bumps on the road to China. Well, here came another bump and in the end it wasn’t so bad after all.