Chinese Work Visa 101: English Instructor Edition
I just got my Chinese work visa two days ago. It was one hell of a ride getting it – I had to apply twice and had to go back to Canada for it, and in between I had to travel to HK and was afraid for 2 weeks that I’d get deported / get an international criminal record.
After finishing my MA last September, I decided that I would like to go back to China for a while, and since my Chinese isn’t really up to par for most jobs, I could only teach English. I don’t necessarily agree that everyone in the world should speak English, and sometimes this makes me feel slightly conflicted, but I try to reassure myself that it’s cultural exchange and at least I know more about Chinese culture than the average English teacher going there (I hope).
It’s usually pretty easy for Westerners to get a foreign English teaching job, but it’s a lot harder for non-Whites. During my MA, when I was looking for work, I got many emails saying that I couldn’t be hired. Even after my TESOL course it was the same thing. In the end, a local TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) college took me on for a half year contract (I suspect due to work connections my mother has), and then a sister school of one school who rejected my application decided to take me for the next academic year.
I had gone to China on a tourist visa, being told that I can do a port re-entry after getting work and applying for a work visa. I was accompanying my mother, who relocated back to China to work, so I got a resident permit as an accompanying family member for the city we were living in (Nanning). This required a repeat of the physical examination checks I did a couple of months before, since the Chinese authorities doesn’t trust foreign medical reports and apparently even different cities would not recognize medical records from other cities. Since the college I was working for put me on a 6-month contract, they told me that I could choose to apply for a slightly less complex version of a work permit that doesn’t require a work visa and a re-entry. So, I went with this, after getting all the documents together. By the time everything got submitted it was the middle of the term, and then I never heard back from the college office who was doing this for me.
Then I found a job for the next academic year. This was a bigger university with a more organized system for hiring foreign teachers, so after submitting my documents I got letters in the mail with which I could apply for a work visa. I had to apply for a work visa even though my residence permit hadn’t expired, because I would be in another city and the permit only covers me for the city I was in at the time. Since I was already in China and a plane ticket back to Canada would cost me a month’s salary or more, I decided to go to Hong Kong (Even though Hong Kong is a part of China, it’s an SAR – Special Administrative Region – and its currency, political system, etc are not under PRC direction. That means there is also a consulate of China in Hong Kong).
Before I left, I noticed that one of the letters was addressed to the Chinese Consulate in Canada, and also noticed that there was a number required on the Supplementary Application Form. I emailed the staff members at the University about this a couple of days before I was planning on going to HK, and because he was on holiday already, I didn’t receive a reply. On the day of my departure I was desperate and sent him a text message, but since I thought that the number was more important than the addressee, I only asked about the number. I was told that the number wasn’t important, so off to HK I went.
Nanning, the city I was living in, is sort of a backwater place, and there were no trains from it to Hong Kong. I had to take an overnight train to Guangzhou and then change to either another train or a bus, and I opted for the bus because it was slightly cheaper. When I got to Guangzhou, I realized that the women who sold me the ticket in Nanning told me the wrong destination terminal in Guangzhou, so I had to take the public transit for a lot longer to get to the hotel where the HK bus left from. This worried me because I didn’t look up how to take the transit from the station I was actually in, and I needed to get to the Consulate in HK by the afternoon, and I was told that some residents of Guangzhou would tell you wrong directions on purpose. Luckily it wasn’t too complicated and I boarded the long-distance bus.
The bus had to stop at the customs between China and HK, and the lineup was huge. After that, we changed to another bus waiting on the other side of the border operated by the same company. This bus took us to the Mong Kok area in Kowloon, which was easy for me to take the subway onto Hong Kong Island, where the consulate was. The lineup outside the consulate was also huge – it nearly went around the block. We had to go through an airport-grade security inspection and leave all food and drinks outside. Thankfully, there were something like 10 service windows in the actual visa office, so things went quite well. I fudged a local Hong Kong address because I hadn’t yet booked a hotel.
Everything seemed okay until I got to the service window – but there I was told that since the letter was addressed to Canada, I had to go back to Canada. I did not foresee this because the actual location of my application doesn’t actually matter, and there was another document that instructed me to apply at my nearest consulate. But no, there was no leeway on that rule. I was extremely upset by this because I had a part-time job pushed back specifically for this trip and Hong Kong wasn’t somewhere I really wanted to go for pleasure, and on top of that I was tired from an 18-hour trip.
I tried one last shot at applying in Hong Kong by changing the addressee on the letter to HK instead of Canada, but then I asked the staff member at the office and they said it had to be an original. So I miserably left the visa office and went back to Kowloon to find a place to live – I didn’t have time to take a bus back to Guangzhou to catch the only remaining train back to Nanning. I ended up going to Chunking Mansions, which was a slightly seedy apartment complex/mall area, but I got a small private room for $90 HKD, which was decent. There was a cockroach on the ground, but I could deal with that. However, the University I would be going to work at is located in Chongqing (cantonese = Chungking), so I felt like the city was rubbing in the fact that I couldn’t get a visa for that. I would read “Chongqing” on packages and on ads for the next month and feel depressed every time.
Anyway, so the next day, after visiting the site of Kowloon Walled City, I went back to Nanning. I decided to try buying a seat ticket (I went to HK on a berth ticket with a bunk), which was a really bad idea because in the seat wagons the light is on the whole night, and I couldn’t sleep for most of the ride. After I got back, I asked the University to send me another letter addressed to HK, and they said it could be done but I needed to send the letter I had first. Apparently it was a government document and it had to return to government possession. I had no idea about this and had to fish it out of the recycling pile.
A few days later I got a call from the University asking me why I tried to change the addressee to Hong Kong, and that the Foreign Affairs Office (FAO), who issued me this letter, was extremely angry at me for doing so, and that I had to send everything back to them for them to re=process my application. The staff member who I had been in contact with told me that changing government documents like this was like forgery. I started getting worried about this because 1) it was already almost and I was running out of time to make another visa application trip, and 2) I didn’t know how serious my offence against the FAO and whether it would count as a criminal act. After being on tenterhooks for two weeks, I got another call saying that the FAO finished reprocessing everything but that I would have to go back to Canada, because other foreign teachers who went to HK had their applications rejected.
I began getting paranoid on something else – I had been reading forum postings on the Internet about China tightening up on its immigration laws, and began to be afraid that I hadn’t been working legally in China and that this might affect my next application. Since I have never seen this document that the college applied for, I did not know what it allowed me to do and what was outside its scope. At the best, it didn’t matter; medium-worst, the Consulate wouldn’t approve of my next visa application; worst, the Consulate would decide that I’d dome something really bad that it never lets me return to China again. So I called the college and they said that the province issued me a working document but they never picked it up – this is probably my fault, because after I told them that I would get another job, I said I probably won’t need the documents they applied for. But after another day they sent someone to the government to get it, and it looked like, provincially at least, I was working legally. The University and the Canadian side responsible for some of its operations assured me that I wasn’t doing anything illegal.
So I madly tried to find a short notice ticket back to Vancouver, and thankfully the university would cover my cost for this, at least sort of – it’s in my contract that they will pay for one return ticket between Canada and China, but this means that my return to Canada after the job is over wouldn’t be covered anymore. I left for Vancouver last weekend and got there on Saturday. On Monday I went to the Consulate to hand in my application, and was told that I had two problems with my documents. One was that one letter issued by the FAO looked like a fax. This was sort of stupid, as there seemed to be no way I could prove that it wasn’t a fax. After arguing with the girl for a while she shrugged and said that I could submit it but there was no guarantee that I would get my visa on time. The second was that the repeat physical exam I did upon my arrival in China was from December of last year and so it was no longer valid, and I had to get another one.
This second point was troubling because I planned to stay in Vancouver for a week. The girl at the Consulate told me that I should go to a hospital and do the exam in one day, which is how the Chinese system would work, but with the Canadian health care system, it’s pretty hard to get a physical exam done in 3 days. I was really starting to think that I couldn’t pull through this, especially because I moved back to Vancouver from Ontario a year ago, and didn’t apply for a BC health card because the Ontario one covered me for the length of time I would stay in BC until I left for China. I went to the Vancouver General Hospital for help and they directed me to ask the BC health care, who asked me to ask Ontario, who didn’t pick up. VGH gave me a few clinics close by and I went to try my luck there.
The clinic called Ontario first, and apparently Ontario has a rule that its residents can be covered for 12 months, so I was almost out of that time range but not yet. The doctor who saw me, luckily, had the same issue with another teacher who needed a physical done for a Chinese visa application, and even knew where to download the form that the Consulate requires. Also, she put “not applicable” on many of the sections on the form that would require me to be sent to a lab, such as an ECG. After that, off I went the next day to apply for the visa again.
At least this time the girl (another girl) didn’t tell me she thought that the letter was a fax, and accepted the application. I left feeling a lot more hopeful, though I was still paranoid that someone else who processed the application would think that the letter was a fax or frown on the list of “not applicables” on the medical form. While waiting to pick up the visa the morning after, I was so stressed that I had to jog on the spot in the lineup to avoid going crazy. But my turn came and I managed to get the visa, and I noticed that they cancelled my resident permit.
But that’s over, finally. I celebrated by posting everything I’d translated for Baccano! volume 8/9, which I’d been working on on my trip to HK and on the flight to Vancouver. From now on, I have to fly back to Nanning via 2 transfers, and then try to find a train ticket to Chongqing in 3 days amidst the back-to-school rush and start working a week after that, all on a wonderful 15 hour time zone difference….
