Visa Vis
Last Thursday, just in time for Chinese new year, President Obama unveiled new directives that would make it easier for tourists from countries like China and Brazil to visit the United States.
In a speech delivered from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the President announced:
I’m directing the State Department to accelerate our ability to process visas by 40 percent in China and in Brazil this year.
The White House has also expressed hopes that 80% of non-immigrant visa applicants could be interviewed within three weeks of getting their application. According to China Daily:
Charles Bennett, minister counselor for consular affairs of the US embassy in Beijing, told China Daily earlier that 50 more American staff members will be deployed to the embassy and US consulates in China this year.
In addition, more interview windows and buildings will be built and the embassy is considering allowing people to arrange an interview date as early as two days after he applied, he said.
But don’t be fooled. Despite the bilateral enthusiasm surrounding these new initiates, the push to expedite visas for Chinese nationals has less to do with improving Sino-US relations than one thing: cold hard cash.
Chaos Talk
“You’ve hurt me. Do you know I’ve already folded three, four hundred stars for you? My friend tried to introduce me to some guy but I refused. I didn’t realize it before but I like you. I like only you. Will you be my boyfriend? I cannot just be a normal friend to you anymore. Either accept me or I will leave.”
This was the first time to my knowledge I had ever hurt a girl, and it was an experience I was not quite ready to take responsibility for. The Chinese place great emphasis on grand gestures and confessions. To many girls, you are not officially in a relationship until you make the ultimate confession and ask her formally, “I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?” It doesn’t matter if you’ve already had sex, or if you’ve never said a word to each other. The act of confessing, the grand, sweeping scale of expressing your feelings which have been so deeply bottled up, is the only way to consolidate a relationship.
On Charity
Before this year, I didn’t get philanthropy. I knew it was important, and gave a moderate amount when disasters like the Sichuan earthquake struck, but still, it rarely felt better to give than to receive. However, it’s been a tumultuous year for charity in China and I don’t think anyone living here feels quite the same about giving as they did a year ago.
In September of last year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met with 50 wealthy entrepreneurs in the name of promoting philanthropy but in 2010 donations from the largest state-owned enterprises was only 2% of net income and the numbers for 2011 are likely to be worse for one simple reason: Guo Meimei.
The Kim is Dead, Long Live the Kim
As a China watcher, the most remarkable aspect about the recent death of North Korea’s hereditary Dear Leader is the level to which it has exposed the Chinese media’s divorce from reality. Last night before bedtime, a CCTV news anchor read out a complete list of branches of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, Navy and Airforce, and all major government ministries, all of whom “stand in solidarity with our North Korean comrades.” Finally, as an afterthought, she mentioned that the Chinese people shared in the grief of North Koreans, and offered their condolences at the passing of their leader, and their support for his heir, a man qualified only in happening to be his predecessor’s son. How very socialist.
Two hours prior to the anchor’s emotively-worded but utterly deadpan performance (which, along with her tearfully hyperbolic North Korean counterpart, deserve Oscar nominations), I had been discussing humorous cat anecdotes with a few of the Chinese people at my local gym. One of them, coincidentally, was a CCTV presenter, who told us her cat had learned to move its feces from its litter tray and onto the kitchen floor, thereby incriminating her pet dog. My boyfriend joined in the discussion. That afternoon, he had stood up in his office to announce the death of Kim Jong-il, China’s great pal, the guy whom the CCP never gets tired of shielding, and was met with utter indifference. “I don’t care about him,” remarked his deskmate. “I’m busy.”
All China Can Eat
The salmon sashimi platter at Golden Jaguar is never full. Every time the employee behind the counter slides some on, customers swarm around and snatch them all up. Since they don’t know when they might get more, each diner grabs enough for her whole table. The sight reminds me of those Chinese temples with fish that try to jump over each other to snatch a morsel of food, or piranhas at feeding time. If you’re having trouble visualizing the situation, try this:
I was eating lunch at the restaurant with some friends when my roommate remarked that he saw a woman literally pick up the platter and scrape half of the salmon sashimi onto her plate. I decided to see this for myself.
Perhaps it was the furious way diners descended on the sashimi like ravens on a deer carcass, or perhaps it was because I had just finished Jonathan Watts’ fabulous but depressing book When One Billion Chinese Jump, about environmental crises in China and what they mean for the world, but I suddenly had a vision of the apocalypse.
The Foreign Duckling
In China, no matter what I did, how I primped or what I said, I stood out like an ugly duckling. It was simultaneously freeing and infuriating. I was stared at without pretense, and for the first year it drove me nuts. Men, women and babies would stare at me, mouths open, totally unperturbed by my churlish glare. I sometimes lashed out at them—screaming in English, knowing they couldn’t understand, furious that they looked at me like I was some misshapen Frankenstein.
But at the same time, it was freeing to be so different. It was so obvious that I was an outsider, that I didn’t need to make any effort to fit in. As a student Prague, where I studied abroad, I was mistaken for a Czech several times, which was flattering, and made me hesitant to come across as an American, if I could avoid it. In China, despite the perfunctory compliments on my hair, it was obvious that I was a weirdo, and because there was nothing I could do about it, I was freed from any expectation of how I should act, what I should wear, what I should say, or how well I said it. (It’s common for any foreigner speaking a word of Chinese to be excessively praised for their masterful grasp of the “foreign-proof” language.)
Sympathy for the Teacher
In the blissful summer before my junior year of high school, my parents forced me to take an SAT preparation course in the basement of a brown-brick building named The Lyceum. But despite the name, it was not a place of higher learning.
The teacher, a lumbering middle-aged woman, resembled Aristotle about as much as I resembled Alexander the Great. She stood in the front of a makeshift classroom that looked like it doubled for AA meetings and read from an open Princeton Review prep book. She taught us how to divine, through the process of elimination, the correct answer to reading problems even if we hadn’t understood the passage. She reminded us of things learned and forgotten, like scalene triangles and the transitive property. If you had told me, ten years ago in that depressing classroom, that one day I’d be in her shoes, I would have laughed and gone back to sleeping.
Dire Straits
Editor’s Note: This article is a response to Paul V. Kane’s op-ed in The New York Times which suggested the United States reduce its budget deficit by ending military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan.
Few articles have riled me up as much as this one, which exemplifies the misguided conventional thinking regarding China. It is a microcosm of the wishful thinking that permeates the global community at the moment. Here are a few reasons why Paul Kane is wrong.
Geo-political
Taiwan is an old, old ally of the United States, with strong political and cultural ties. Taiwan sends a significant portion of its youth to be educated in the United States. To “ditch” them, as Kane suggests so casually, would severely damage U.S. credibility in Asia.
Death by Indifference
Nearly everyday when I take the subway I hear the same refrain, “‘Respect the old and cherish the young’ is a traditional Chinese virtue.” So how does one make sense of the news that a two-year-old child was run over twice and passed by no less than 17 people before she was helped? “Girl Who Was [...]
Every Dog Has Its Day
I bought a ticket for Two Dogs’ Opinions on Life on a whim. The Kennedy Center website described the show as “an avant-garde contemporary theatre piece”; an “improvisational comedy.” Whatever that meant. Putting my theatre major to work, I decided to approach the experience as an academic exercise, and with notebook in hand I took my seat between a young Chinese couple and a pair of old white ladies.
The audience was predominantly Asian (presumably Chinese) couples and families, with the remainder consisting of older Kennedy Center regulars and a few young, would-be aesthetes like myself. I dutifully sketched out a floor-plan of the set: TVs here, oil drums there, a door frame, a short armchair, two off-beat painted drops in black and white, instruments and seating for a four-piece rock band. One of the old ladies wondered aloud if this was supposed to be the Chinese version of Second City. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a pretty good idea it wasn’t that.
When the band took their seats and started playing a low riff and our two actors stepped on the drab, junk-laden stage wearing cargo shorts, ragged blazers, and Kanye glasses—looking like the swag, hipster cast of Waiting for Godot—I knew this was going to be my kind of show.
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