The question of citizenship

Our little Monkey, Roman Karl Garmong, is due in July, which is approaching with frightening rapidity. One question which an American would seldom understand, a Chinese person would never understand, but foreigners who live in China do, is this: which citizenship will we give him?

To Chinese people, the choice between US and Chinese citizenship seems like a complete no-brainer. With half of China dreaming and scheming to move to America, why on earth would any couple choose to give their child Chinese citizenship over and above American?

To Americans, it's perhaps even more incomprehensible: why would one choose any citizenship other than 'Murcuhn? After all, isn't America about to build a Great Wall on the Mexican border to keep out the waves and waves of invading foreigners?! Doesn't everyone in the world long to breathe free in America? Why throw him in with the huddled masses, when he could be born American?

But the question indeed is a real one, and here's why:

First, the legal background: while the US accepts dual citizenship (Ted Cruz can tell you about that), China does not. At birth, we must declare the Monkey's citizenship. If he's Chinese, he gets his papers immediately; if he's American, we have to dash to the US Consulate in Shenyang to get his passport within a certain number of days. Either way, it's a decision to be made immediately after his birth.

Once the choice is made, there's a huge difference in his future options. The US is rather flexible; China is not.

If we choose US citizenship, that's final: he can, as far as I know, never get Chinese citizenship. He will always be a foreigner in China.

He could get all the same visas available to any other foreigner: he could come on vacation with a tourist visa; he could get a residency permit if he someday got a job in China; he could get a three-year spousal visa if, like his father, he one day decided to marry a Chinese woman. (I recommend it.)

But he would always be a foreigner, and subject to the same restrictions as other foreigners in China. He could never own a home here, he would face very high barriers to starting a business here, he would have to register his every movement with the government, he couldn't stay in hotels that are restricted to Chinese-only, etc.

He would also always be regarded as foreign, even if he stayed in China and became a businessman. He would never have the same guanxi, relationships/connections, as someone with a Chinese passport. He would never be 100% accepted. If you think it's hard in America for a Northerner to move to Alabama and do business, in China it's a thousand times worse.

If, on the other hand, we choose Chinese citizenship, the US is more accommodating. With one American-citizen parent, he could always apply for, and get, US citizenship. His passport would be issued within a day.

There are some minor restrictions on it, the most important of which being that he must actually live in the US for a number of years before he turns 18. (I believe that number is two, but I could be mistaken.) So we would make sure to send him to boarding school in the US, just like so many other Chinese-born students. Once that restriction is met, he could — for the rest of his life — walk into any US embassy or consulate, anywhere in the world, and immediately claim US citizenship.

He would then be a Naturalized, not a Natural-Born citizen, which puts one and only one restriction on him: he could never run for President of the United States.

In my opinion this is a feature, not a bug.

The current prevailing wisdom seems to be that, if we declare him to be a US citizen from birth, he could one day be tempted to become one of those creeps running for President — just like Ted Cruz. I'd just as soon foreclose that option right from the start.

American parents love to tell their kids: "if you work hard enough, you can achieve any goal you want. You could even be President, if you work hard enough."

I'm kind of inclined to tell my little Roman Karl: "If you work hard enough, you can achieve any goal that's worth achieving. If you work hard enough, you could be the next Steve Jobs." But if you want to become President, you  need to drop it.

So you can perhaps see why it's an open question, not the done-deal that it might immediately have seemed. If there are any advantages to Chinese citizenship, then we should give it serious consideration.

Now, there's one giant disadvantage to Chinese citizenship: Chinese citizens have no recognized individual rights. Of course they have the same Natural Rights as every other man on earth, but their government systematically refuses to recognize those rights. They may have more permissions within this country than foreigners do, but a permission can be withdrawn — sometimes savagely — at any moment.

Another disadvantage to Chinese citizenship involves travel to other countries. The US passport is among the most widely-recognized in the world; the Chinese, among the least.

If he one day wants to travel to Russia, he'd be better off Chinese than American. Ditto, in the unlikely event he wants to move to North Korea to take a lucrative job there. (Hehe.) But pretty much anywhere else in the world, it's far better to present a US passport than a Chinese one.

However, there are some benefits to Chinese citizenship.

One is the "social services" he would get in China.

I regard this one as a minimal consideration, because a) there aren't very many social services in China — which is to the benefit of China, imo. And b) I don't believe in social services, so on a moral level I'd rather we/he pay his own way through life than rely upon them. But we have to consider the practicalities, especially with my low-paying job.

The most important thing is education. If we're still in China when he enters school, it's a whole lot more expensive to enroll a foreign citizen in a Chinese school than to enroll a Chinese citizen. (By the way, as I understand it the Chinese public schools in fact charge tuition — but the tuition is far higher for a foreign citizen.)

But the Big Kahuna — the #1 reason to worry about US citizenship, imo — is the ridiculous US tax system.

The United States is the only country I know of that claims the right to tax the income of its citizens, no matter where that income is earned and no matter whether it had anything to do with America itself.

Suppose, for example, I were to open a business in China, providing — let's say — educational services to Chinese students. Suppose I were to become unusually successful at that business, such that I made a million dollars at it. Now, this business has no connection to the US government: it falls entirely under the jurisdiction of Chinese law, the money circulates 100% inside China, and it impinges not one iota on the United States economy. I'm not even using a US bank. It's all China, all the way. Nevertheless, the US government would tax me just as if I'd made my money inside the United States.

This is, to me, crackpot, nut-job crazy. It is despicable. It is a gross violation of the original American idea that government exists as the servant of the people. If the person has left town, and the government is in no way serving him, then by what right does it demand his money? Only on the premise that the individual is the servant of his government. We once fought a Revolution against that notion, but we've brought it right back in again.

It is among a large and growing category of US government rules widely regarded overseas as — this is their term — "economic imperialism." And they're right: that's exactly what it is. It's the US government's way of taking over the world, not by force of arms, but by force of tax law and banking restrictions and controls on currency exchange.

If one happens to be financially successful, that US passport can be a very heavy burden, indeed.

Now I, personally, am in little danger of falling afoul of this problem. The first $80K of income is exempt from this confiscation, and I'm nowhere near that rate of pay. But I would love to think that my son will be. And given that much of the world — including the People's Republic of China — has massively lower income tax rates than the United States — that puts my son at a huge financial disadvantage.

Hence, as a purely rational calculation, I actually lean toward declaring him Chinese at birth.

On the other hand, there is the symbolism of it. Both among the Chinese themselves, and among other people of the world, it is symbolically better to be carrying an American passport in your back pocket than to be carrying a Chinese one.

It will be easier for us to bring him to America to visit his American family, if his passport is American. It might be somewhat easier for him to get into those US boarding schools and universities, if they don't have to treat him as a foreign student. (I'm not certain about that part.)

There's also a kind of bet on the future.

30 years ago, I'd never have considered Chinese citizenship for my child, no matter where he or she was born. But in the past 15 years or so, my country has lost much of its luster, while China has gained. Where will the economic opportunities be in the future? That is very much in question, right now.

I have dim hopes for the United States. We've lurched massively toward statism, and the inevitable closing down of thought and opportunity which that entails.

On the other hand, the Chinese government hasn't just lurched, it has willfully adopted statism as the policy of its future. For a nation with, supposedly, 5000 years of history, it's been acting with a glaring lack of historical awareness.

So in an age of uncertainty, perhaps the best bet is to opt for Chinese citizenship at birth.

I'm not sure I could do it, and I'm not sure my wife would allow me to do it. But that actually is the way I lean right at this moment.

Charged by a a Bull

Last Sunday was a first in my many years as a driver: my car was charged by a bull! He'd broken free of his tether at the house next to my in-laws'. When I rounded the corner from their long, narrow driveway he was standing in the middle of the lane. He didn't like our car one little bit.

They live on a very narrow road filled with obstacles — clearly not designed for vehicular traffic — and I it's not easy to reverse while (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer) staring down a half-ton of angry pot roast. I did my best to get our of his way, but he came at me very fast.

Luckily, he veered to the left just as he was about to hit the hood of my car. He was eyeing me with an ornery look, as if weighing the possibility of smashing in my side window to get to me, when I slammed it in gear and gunned it.

If he had gored the hood of my car, he'd have done some serious damage. It would have been the fitting end to a perfectly miserable day. We hadn't planned to go out to the farm today, but Ma Lei's mother had an attack of dementia and needed us to take her an urgent supply of medicine. It was sheer luck that I didn't have anything urgent to do today. I don't know what drug she's on, but it seems to control her symptoms. By the time of our encounter with the bull, she was lucid again. 

Next time, maybe we'll hire a delivery guy!

Incidentally, I will eventually post the dash cam video on YouTube, with the link here.

The Non-Answer Answer

A woman of Ma Lei's acquaintance went to the doctor for a new ultrasound. She asked the doctor what the sex is going to be. Chinese docs aren't allowed to say, but they often do anyway. In this case, however, either the doc was unusually law-abiding, or perhaps Ma Lei's acquaintance didn't know she's supposed to slip the doc some extra cash for the information. Maybe the doc just couldn't see, but in that case she probably would've just said so. 

So the woman asked the doctor whether she should buy blue baby clothes, or pink. 

"I think yellow is a nice color," said the doctor.

"Will my parents be disappointed, or happy?" (Older generation Chinese still strongly favor boys, though that attitude is fading among the young.)

"I'm sure they'll be very happy it's so healthy."

Finally, the woman asked in exasperation, "Will my baby be described as handsome, or beautiful?!"

"Actually, on a sonogram they all look pretty ugly!"

The patient finally gave up and went home without the desired information.

Russians and Japanese

Got on the elevator with the two doglets. A skinny old guy (maybe mid-fifties) was already there, puffing away at a cigarette. He was quite friendly.

"What country are you from," he asked.

I said, as I always do, "China."

He laughed. "No, really!"

I responded: "Of course I'm Chinese. I can read Chinese, whereas you obviously can't." He laughed again.

Then I pointed to the very prominent sign which reads "Please do not smoke here" in perfectly good Chinese. I scolded him for being a Japanese in China, and I read each character out loud. 

(Calling a Chinese person Japanese is like calling Donald Trump a Mexican. YUUge insult!)

He laughed a big belly-laugh, and said "You're Russian?" 

I said yes, I'm Russian. Then the elevator door finally opened and let some fresh air in.

I believe every foreigner attempting to learn Chinese goes through four distinct phases with regard to the inevitable "Ni zhongwen shoude ting hao!" 你中文说的挺好！ ("Your Chinese is so good!") 

These are: absurdity, appreciation, acceptance, and annoyance. 

1. Absurdity: You manage to utter a "Ni hao" ("hello") or a "zai jian" ("goodbye"). Or perhaps you manage to speak one or two number words without completely bungling them. "er-shi-ba kuai yuan ma?" ("Is this 28 yuan?") Not truly impressive, but some Chinese pretend that you're the US Ambassador to China.

"Ni zhongwen shouode ting hao!"

C'mon, man, you're just being too nice. I spoke five syllables without completely embarrassing myself, and you're giving me some sort of prize for that? Give me a break! I appreciate the kudos, but really... no!

2. Then there's Appreciation, which comes usually when you speak just enough Chinese that you're sort of full of yourself about it. This is an early stage. It comes when you can order food from a menu without ending up eating bugs, and ask for directions without winding up in the wrong city.

A call this "Appreciation," because this is the phase in which you're lapping it up. "Ni zhongwen shuode ting hao." Yeah! It is kinda good! I worked damned hard to get to this point! Thanks for noticing! 

Of course, at this point you conveniently forget that the same people used to sing the praises of your Chinese language skills when all you could say was "Hello" and "Goodbye." Now you're singing your own praises: "Yes, I am fluent in Chinese!!!" When in fact you're really just minimally conversant. But really, who cares?

Stage 2 is partly illusory, but that's fine, because the high you get from Stage 2 is what propels you to reach Stage 3.

3. Then there's Acceptance, which comes when you really are basically fluent in the language, and "Ni zhongwen shuode ting hao" is the equivalent of "blah-blah-blah." Great, thanks, but let's get on to whatever deal we're transacting here. This is a brief transitional stage on the way to Stage 4, Annoyance.

4. "Annoyance" comes when you're thoroughly over the pride of having grasped this crazy language, and you really just want to get down to business. Then the "Ni zhongwen shuode ting hao" is just an interruption. 

This is also when you first start to focus on the implicit insult embedded in "Ni zhongwen shuode ting hao." It contains an assumption that foreigners can't possibly speak Chinese.

Yeah, I've got a pinkish-white face, my belly is round, my nose is larger than yours, and I'm covered with monkey-like hair. Oh, and you probably think I smell like a sheep, because that's what most Chinese think about foreigners. Nonetheless, I am capable of speaking the language of China, The Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. Please get over it, and talk to me like a normal human being!

The good thing is, they do. When you finally get to this point of understanding the language, you actually start to learn what Chinese people think. 

Most of the time, when they're speaking to you in English, they're giving you the "politically correct" version of their thoughts, or the "tell me what you think I want to hear" version.

But when you're sitting in the back seat of a taxi, and a student is babbling at you about politics and history and current society as if she couldn't quite gasp in enough air to say everything she wants to say, and you're understanding maybe 80% of her Chinese — you're still getting a whole lot more truth than you would get if you understood 100% of her English.

A friend of mine once said that English is the language of classes, and formal lectures, and therefore of "What we're supposed to say." And remember that, in China, you tell the professor only what you're supposed to say. There's none of this Mortimer Adler, University of Chicago, discussion-based method: it's pure obedience.

On the other hand, Chinese is the language that students and Chinese professionals speak while drinking too many beers and shooting the shit at the restaurant a mile away from the university. If we're going to criticize our own government and talk shit about contemporary Chinese culture, we're definitely going to do it in Chinese, not in English. If you want to know what we Chinese really think, you'd better know at least a little of our language.

Mine ain't great, but it's good enough that I've started to get a little bit of personal "vibe" from some of my Chinese acquaintances. I really need to work on it, though, because man, I'd really love to learn what they really think down at the root. It's fun when you start to actually be able to have conversations in this language!

The Monkey

Ma Lei went to the hospital this Wednesday, eleven days after her second in vitro implantation. We both were secretly thinking she probably was pregnant, and it turns out we were right.

She'd been having all kinds of abdominal pain, her skin had been breaking out, she was going to the bathroom with unusual frequency, and she was hungry at strange times. (That last isn't so far out of the normal for her. For a skinny thing, that woman can eat!) Anyway, we didn't talk about her various symptoms too much, because we didn't want to get our hopes up, but I'd been thinking for quite a while that her body was doing something. After we'd gotten the news, when I finally told her about my suspicions, I used the Chinese for "home renovation."

Her numbers were high. Very high. High enough to mean she is definitely not only pregnant, but very healthily so. Her doctor told her to stop taking some of the medicines that other patients have to take for three months.

Ma Lei is afraid those super-high numbers suggest she's having twins. Of course we'll be happy either way, but we would both much rather have a singleton.

As it happens, next year is the Year of the Monkey. This is fitting, since I've always referred to children as monkeys. If we indeed get two, we'll have enough to fill a small exhibit in the Hall of Monkeys at the Dalian Zoo.

I was thinking she's eleven days pregnant, but Ma Lei reminded me about the time her embryos spent in the incubator. In a sense, she's at 30+ days already! I guess that would make her due in July. The doctor actually told her the due date, but she was in shock and literally doesn't remember a single word said to her after that magical number 176. Even though we both rationally thought she was 80% likely to be pregnant, we'd managed to keep our emotional expectations low. The news hit us both like 120 volts.

Whatever else ails the Chinese healthcare system, reproductive health is considered to be a bright point. If there's nothing else the Chinese care about, it's having babies. This is an entirely private, non-governmental system, with many of the doctors trained overseas. They make good money, compared with their government-employee counterparts in the general-purpose hospitals. They're not innovators, but they are excellent practitioners. I've been consistently impressed with their professional level, throughout the process.

If this indeed is the last we have to see of the fertility clinic, I got off with quite a bargain. Ma Lei saved every receipt from every trip to the hospital, every medicine she had to inject herself with. Tonight, she brought out the stack for me to tally up the damage — and we were both pleasantly surprised. Converted from yuan to dollars at the current rate, it came to $5000. It could have cost as much as twice that, if her health hadn't been so good all the way through the process. Even at that, I think it wouldn't be bad, compared to what the same treatment would've cost in the US. Nevertheless, Ma Lei fully intends to present the monkey(s) with a bill at some point in the future. It's the Chinese way!

Now we're trying once again to keep our expectations low. We're well aware that the first three months are perilous.  However, her health has been off-the-charts good all the way through the process. She's promised not to lift anything heavier than an ankle-biting doglet, and to eat plenty of real food (the ramen noodles she loves so much relegated to snacks to fill her belly). We're going to do everything that's in our control to stack the odds in this (these?) babies' favor.

I know there's a lot we can't control, so there may be bad news any time. But just in case everything goes well, we've put ourselves on a waiting list for a cage for four in the Hall of Monkeys at the Dalian Zoo.

UPDATE: 26 April, 2016. Ma Lei has indeed been healthy throughout the first seven months of her pregnancy, and it looks as though we'll have a boy monkey in early July. Fingers still are crossed, of course, because there's never a sure thing until the little monkey is actually born. His name, by the way, is Roman Carl Garmong.

The Great Firewall of China — Chinese attitudes

Talking with an American friend earlier this morning (yesterday evening in America), I finally found a way to explain the Chinese attitude toward the blocking of foreign websites (such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and others)...

My American friends often think the so-called Great Firewall of China must chafe horribly on the Chinese. I wish this were true.

Imagine that the US government suddenly blocked most of the famous overseas websites or internet services, such as WeChat, Alibaba, YouKu, Baidu, and others. (To match the cutesy name "Great Firewall of China," let's call it The American Civil Wall.)

You've probably heard of WeChat and Alibaba, if not the other names. You've probably never  used them, or if you have, you wouldn't miss them very much.

There are domestic alternatives in the US, so at most you lose some cool functions that the Chinese services have and the American ones don't have. Maybe you lose contact with a few people who use WeChat but not Facebook. Probably those aren't very close friends, anyway.

Now suppose you could install VPN software to get around the American Civil Wall. But you have to figure out where to find the software, which one works best, how to install it and use it.

It's also illegal, so there's a slight chance you could get in big trouble for even having it on your computer.

Not to mention, do you even know you can trust the maker of that VPN? Perhaps it's an NSA front, so everything you do is routed directly to the US government.

Is the hassle worth it? Probably not.

This is exactly how most of my Chinese friends feel about the Great Firewall of China. They know it's there, and they abstractly disapprove of it — but it's a relatively small concern for them. They can do everything they need to on the domestic internet. They are not burning with desire for Facebook and YouTube.

The people who do care are people with strong political interest (generally anti-Chinese-government), or people with strong personal ties or commercial interests overseas, or people who want to get out of China. (Big overlap between that last category and the previous two.)

If you're in America, the US internet is the end-all, be-all of the online world. After all, the 'net was invented and created in America, and probably every website you go to is American. But the Chinese could say the exact same: for most of them, every website they go to is Chinese.

To the Chinese, the US internet is about as interesting as the Chinese internet is to an American citizen. And it's almost as daunting, since most Chinese people's English isn't that great.

So when people think "surely the Chinese people are ready at any moment to throw off this yoke of internet blocking," they're missing the point. The Great Firewall of China is the last thing that will cause unrest, and it's the last thing the government will compromise on.