distant ruminations

So I’m legal for another year. Well, a year and a bit, actually. The whole residence permit extension process went through without a hitch…. for my two colleagues. For me, well…

I arrived just before lunch time this morning with colleague K to collect our shiny, new residence permits. We saw M on his way out, all newly legal again. He’d had to go in earlier than I could, but as it turns out, not that much earlier. Anyway, he was pretty happy and assured us there was no problem. So in we go. K gets her passport back just fine, but the cashier tells me that although my yellow slip says I have to pay 400 kuai, the computer wants 800, and so I have to go find the duty officer to find out why. The duty officer, of course, is out to lunch, as is the officer who approved my application last Friday, and neither will be back till one.

So K and I trundle off in search of a restaurant. I mean, what else can you do? Anyway, getting a feed sure beats sitting in the police station. After lunch I put K in a taxi and send her off home- she had her residence permit, so there’s no sense in her hanging around any longer than necessary. Then I go back in search of the duty officer.

Well, it’s not that big a deal, as it turns out, just that the residence I was requesting was for more than a year, and therefore twice as expensive. See, even though my current contract runs until July 15, my residence permit expired June 29, and my new contract, and therefore the residence I was applying for, go through to July 15, 2009, putting me over a year….. So obviously my boss decided to save a bit of money last year and perhaps didn’t think things through quite so far as he might’ve. Oh well, he’s supposed to reimburse me, anyway.

So with all this talk of a visa crackdown and people being kicked out of China or not being able to renew past this July 1, I was a little nervous about the whole process. As it turns out, apart from that [ahem] minor oversight of explaining how much extra my new residence permit would cost unless I wanted to chop a couple of weeks off the application (understandable when you’re handling three applications at once, with only one applicant able to speak enough Chinese to handle things, and therefore having to translate for the other two), it was all good. Oh, there was one small hiccup with residence registrations from our local copshop, but that was solved quickly and easily. Actually, I have to say I was impressed with the police officers involved- they were good, courteous, professional, and totally upfront about what we needed, when, where and why- apart from, of course, obvious exception that I’ve already mentioned.

So bright and early last Friday morning I take colleagues M and K in to the PSB Entry-Exit Bureau at Xiaojie Qiao with the materials provided by gk, the secretary of our programme. There’s almost nobody inside, just the cops waiting for visa and residence permit applicants to clear off last night’s Sanlitun and get in to the copshop, a group of apparently German students, a few others, and ourselves. No queue, so we go straight up to the desk. The cop looks through our materials and tells me that if M wants his residence to go through till July 15, it’ll cost him 800, but if he changes it to July 14, it’ll be only 400. M says, well, change it then, we move on. Where’s the residence registration from your local copshop? she asks, holding up an example. They didn’t give us any. Well, call them up and get them to fax it to the desk downstairs, then photocopy it, photocopy all the necessary pages of your experts’ certificates, bring that all up here. Don’t queue up, just come straight to me when you have it all.

Well, it took a bit of explaining to gk, but she figured out what we needed, got it, faxed it over, we got everything photocopied, back up stairs. Oh, says the cop, your school is supposed to stamp the residence registrations here. Nevermind, I’ve checked you on the network, you’re all good, just tell them next time they need to make sure they’ve stamped the forms. Then she zaps us through the computer, prints off our yellow slips, tells us come back next Friday. I ask morning or afternoon? She says it’s all good. I say sweet, and thanks very much. Off we go.

Then today’s minor hassle.

But that’s ok, I’m good for another year and a bit, through till July 15 next year. That’s a huge weight off my shoulders. Now I can relax.

All I’ve got to do is mark exams, fill in the paperwork, then I’m on holiday. And it looks like it’ll be a longer holiday than usual- which should be obvious, but until recently, the boss has been working under the assumption that we’d start back as per usual on September 1. We’ll see.

As for this visa crackdown, much has been written and vented about it already. There’s not a lot more that could be added. All I can say is that apart from today’s hassle with the cost of my permit, the police were totally professional and very good about everything.

Oh, and I can say that it is very hard, if not impossible, to sympathise with anybody who’s been caught working on an L visa. I can’t think of any country that allows people to work on a tourist visa- and no, I’m not counting working holiday visas, they’re a kind of work visa. As for Fs, I don’t know. The system certainly has been abused by some, but plenty of others have used that former grey area to do good, and even necessary jobs. I can see the need for a “freelancer” or “entrepeneur” visa- with the appropriate checks in place to prevent it being abused, of course.

The only thing that really concerns me is these rumours- and the best I can manage is “a friend of a friend”, and although I trust the friend who told me this story, it’s still a “friend of a friend” story- of people married to a Chinese citizen, with a child and perhaps even a house, who’ve been kicked out. In that “friend of a friend” case, he was given 24 hours to leave Shenzhen. Now, without knowing the full story you can’t pass judgement, and I certainly won’t. Even if you’re married to a Chinese citizen and have a child here, if you’ve been working (or otherwise) illegally, you’ve still been working illegally. Having said that, I do think all countries need to tread a little more carefully when families are involved.

Oh, and the crackdown seems to have been rather clumsy, and although it certainly has gotten rid of some who were assets to China (although, most of those who claim that status probably were not), I doubt whether it’s gotten rid of the people who really need to be gotten rid of.

Anyway, I’m good for another year and a bit.

Not looking forward to the next round, though- my passport expires next September. I’m going to have to find out whether I can renew it through the embassy here (past experience suggests that the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade does as little as is humanly possible for New Zealand citizens) or whether it has to be done in New Zealand.

Opening up the windows for the warmer months was a good thing- and one thing I’m going to miss about this apartment (we’ve been promised a bigger place, but the bigger place in question is “further in” the building (we’re in that old, barracks-style long with half a dozen entrance ways to half a dozen stairwells isolated from each other style of apartment block) and therefore overlooks only the campus’ west zone to the south and our own estate to the north, and neither the apartment complex nor slum to the west and northwest)- and one reason, apart from the fresher, ahem, ‘air’, is the noise.

Odd as that may sound, a certain amount of noise from the neighbours goes a long, long way to making you feel at home. And it saves time spent sat in front of the idiot box watching bullshit soaps. In certain respects, real life beats fiction every time.

This morning it was a bunch of people fighting. It sounded like a family, one of those really huge family disputes that drags the whole neighbourhood in whether the neighbours like it or not. I’m sure I heard a woman calling her opponent a ‘stupid cunt’- and other kinds of the female orifice in question, just to be sure she got her point across- and swearing till the sailors at Tanggu were blue in the face that she “wouldn’t come down”. Come down from what, I don’t know. The big problem with this apartment in the warmer months is that views of all the “action” is so effectively obscured by all the tree leaves. In the winter, the view is fine, but having to keep the windows closed to avoid hypothermia in our inadequately heated apartment (and before anybody down south mouths off about weak bloody northerners and how they don’t get any kind of central heating where they live: I know. I’ve dealt with that. Heating or no heating, unless you’re on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau it still gets colder here than you dreamt of) cut us off from the action. I mean, with the windows closed, I feel so isolated I might as well be in one of those ridiculous segregated compounds so many schools maintain for their foreign teachers. What’s the point of living somewhere if you’re going to be completely cut off from the community you live in?

And then from where I sit typing this, I can’t here where the noise is coming from. Or at least, I can hear whether the noise is coming from inside our apartment, “inside our stairwell” (from the stairwell or any of the apartments it serves, in other words) or “over the fence”- from the apartment complex and slum on the other side of the wall. Oddly enough, noise from inside our complex but outside our stairwell never gets in to our apartment- much like China Unicom signals.

So this afternoon, after we got back  from lunch, I heard a lot of glass being smashed up and men shouting- but not necessarily in an angry or agitated kind of way. Curious, I wanted to find out what was going on. The noise was clearly coming from outside- the apartment complex or the slum. Sitting here in front of the computer, I couldn’t hear where, exactly, the noise was coming from. So I went out to the balcony, opened the fly-screen, and stuck my head out. That is the only way to figure out what is going on outside. But with all the trees covered in leaves, all I could do was hear that the glass-smashing was happening in the courtyard of the apartment complex next door. Couldn’t see the people doing the smashing at all. I could see the tail-end of a truck that seemed to be parked right next to the glass-smashing, but that was it. Then I saw a worker in a yellow, plastic hard-hat walking towards the glass-smashing calling out something to who I assume was his colleague, but, as is always the case, regardless of language, when you listen in on conversations of a work-related nature between people whose professions, trades or at least occupations are entirely different from your own, I had no idea what he was on about.

Well, there have been workers hanging around there the last few days. Literally. Mostly they’ve been suspended from ropes tied to the rooves of the buildings, sitting on platforms of one- and two-man size giving the buildings a fresh lick of paint, presumably sprucing things up for the Olympics and the vast hordes of tourists the world’s largest marketing exercise is supposed to bring. And yes, it does seem utterly absurd- I mean, what kind of tourist- other than anybody genetically related to myself or any of my colleagues, of course- would come to this corner of Beijing? Sure, Panjiayuan is nearby, but you’d have to really willfully get lost to wind up here. But the Olympic badminton and artistic gymnastics competitions will be held on our campus in a brand spanking new gymnasium on the southeast corner of our campus. So this painting, along with the new, “ancient China style” wall along the southern edge of the wasteland just south of that apartment complex, does make a kind of sense.

One has to wonder, though, what, if anything, has been planned for the older campus buildings. I mean, all of my classes this semester have been in one of the original campus buildings, built, I presume, in the late ’50s for the university to open in 1960. Apart from new, strict, security measures about who may or may not enter the campus (and this afternoon’s experience, when lzh and I came home separately- me with an ID card to allow me on campus, her without (we don’t live on campus, but we have a shortcut through campus)- suggests that they may not be as strict as they should), nothing has been done, other than the construction and landscaping around the Olympic gymnasium.

But it seems to be my fate to never see the action. I remember the summer just after SARS, when I was still living on the tenth floor of a high-rise just opposite BeiGongDa’s south gate, a fight broke out just outside my building. I ran into the spare room and open the window to see what was going on, but all I could see was a whole bunch of people standing around something that just happened to be directly under a tree. Didn’t matter what I did or where I moved, unless I went outside, I wasn’t going to be able to see what was going on. And fights are the kind of thing that can easily have broken up and disappeared without trace by the time you’ve grabbed your keys, put your shoes on, ran down ten flights of stairs (I only took the lift down when I had a shitload of stuff to carry, and even so, running down ten flights of stairs is generally faster than taking the lift), out the main door, and around two corners. Then I saw somebody run away from what was happening under the tree, then two or three minutes later run back with two cops in tow. Then somebody was hauled away by the cops, and that was that.

And, you know, I’m not sure I’d be able to handle a move back to New Zealand. Thinking about such a thing, naturally, I’m more worried about my wife’s inevitably culture-shock. A short trip to NZ would be fine for her, but I’m a long, long way from convinced she’d be happy to settle there. Fair enough, too. I mean, as much as I love my own country and as proud as I am of the culture that raised me, I’m still somewhat less than convinced I’d want to actually reside there for the rest of my life. China, despite or perhaps because of, or despite and because of all its problems, has been and continues to be very good to me. But last time I was in NZ it was so quiet. The differences, really, are of degree- degree of closeness, degree of space, degree of whatever. In fact, NZ does have the same sort of community as China, it’s just done differently, with a lot more space for each person and between families. The question, of course, is whether we can adapt to that quietness. For now, the noise of China is good.