Welcome to America!

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The first thing to understand is that my wife, a Shanghai native, looks nothing at all like Osama Bin Laden or your basic Islamo-facist, nutball suicide bomber. I think all of our friends would attest to that. But on September 11, 2007, at immigration at Kennedy Airport in New York, that didn’t matter. We were at the start of a long delayed, much needed vacation, one that took us from New York to Hawaii and a couple of places in between. It turned out to be a great trip, but thanks to the inimitable Bureau of Homeland Security (now the parent of the INS) it got off to a very rocky start.
I had enough miles on United Airlines for one free round trip ticket from Shanghai. I priced two other seats on the United flight, and my wife comparison shopped on the internet and at discount travel agencies here in Shanghai. The result: she was able to get two tickets on Air China for a price considerably below United’s, on a flight that left about 12 hours later than mine. So we decided to take the different flights, saving more than $1500, even though that meant she would take care of Abby, our three and half year old daughter, by herself on the long flight to NY.
Big mistake. The flight, as my wife Joyce describes it, was uneventful, and Abby endured it pretty well. But upon arrival at Kennedy, as I waited outside for them, they confronted a lengthy line at immigration, and after close to an hour of waiting, Abby got cranky and started to lose it, refusing to sit in the stroller, running around a bit crazily in the immigration hall, and finally throwing your basic I’m three-and-half-years-old-and- I’m- not-gonna-take-it -anymore fit
They were in the line for foreign citizens at Kennedy, because my wife is a Chinese passport holder, and after fours years now of extraordinarily frustrating dealings with the INS—and man, is that an understatement–she still doesn’t have the green card (or even any precursor document) that would enable her to go into the shorter line for Americans whenever we return to the States.
After close to an hour and a half in line, with Joyce trying to control Abby (with decreasing success as time went by), they got to the interview window. Joyce had been given a multiple entry visa by the consulate here in Shanghai—as she had before—and Abby has an American passport. The immigration officer looked at their documents, asked my wife the purpose of the trip, called Abby’s name to see if she responded (she did, Joyce says) and then things went off the rails. Instead of stamping her passport and saying have a nice vacation, the officer behind the glass told my wife and daughter, after an hour and half in line, to go to a “question room” and wait.
Perplexed, exhausted and angry, Joyce did so. And, as she describes it, you can imagine the scene in that “question room” six years to the day after September 11, 2001: my wife (a 34 year old Chinese woman) my three and half year old daughter (American), and about a dozen other folks who, unfortunately for them on this day, looked as if, as Joyce later put it, “they could have been from somewhere in the Islamic world.”
I was out in the waiting area for arriving passengers, meanwhile, wondering what the hell was going on, as person after person from the Air China flight streamed out after immigration. But of course I couldn’t call Joyce on her cell, because cell phones must be shut off when your going through immigration. So she sat there, trying to control Abby, for half an hour, and finally asked an immigration officer coming in and out of the “question room” that they needed to ask their questions, now, or else she needed to go. The officer left the room for about ten minutes, came back, and said ok, you can go.
Just like that. No questions. No indication as to what the point was of forcing them into the “question room” and making the two of them—an exhausted Chinese mother and her cranky three and half year old– sit for more than half an hour after a grueling 14 hour flight. Nothing.
Friends in New York later told us that Immigration might have been concerned about child kidnapping, given that Joyce’s passport is Chinese and Abby’s is American, and Abby had been acting up. So by this theory, I said, Joyce had kidnapped Abby in China and was bringing her to the US? Couldn’t they check both passports and see that they had made the same trip about 18 months earlier—Shanghai-New York? Whatever the guy at the window was thinking, wouldn’t that have been, as the lawyers say,dispositive? Joyce could have explained that on that day, we had all traveled together, so Abby came through the American line with me. She could have mentioned that I was in the waiting area outside and given the officer my cell phone number.
Whatever. For us, married for five years, dealing with Homeland security and the immigration bureaucrats continues to be an absolute, unfettered, ongoing nightmare. Any Chinese readers of this blog who have tried to get a visa to the US have a different experience? I’d love to hear about it if so, just so I know that for some people out there the U.S. immigration process can approach sanity.
Oh and by the way, when we returned to Shanghai, we all sailed through immigration, no muss, no fuss.