China Segment

Well we finally sent the immigration package to Canada… which is why I haven’t been posting here. It’s been like 6 weeks with this stuff. Reading the guides, getting documents, getting said documents translated or notarized. It really is intense for something that is basically just paperwork.

Rachel is immigrating to Canada with me. As I wrote about before, it’s time to go back, get the qualifications I need to be a ‘real’ teacher and set up shop in Vancouver. We should be a slam-dunk case, as we have a real marriage, but we still spent a lot of time on this thing to try to make it perfect. As a sponsor, I am a bit odd. Seems from the forms that most of them live in Canada and sponsor someone who’s living in China. Doesn’t that strike you as prima facie a sham marriage? Anyway, I actually live with my wife and we share all of our money - again, an odd fit with the forms because they’re trying to flush out arranged marriages and mail-order brides. I’m going back to Canada for school but don’t have a letter of acceptance yet since UBC takes until May to inform people if they got into their 12-month Ed. degree program. So I have no letter of acceptance, no job in Canada, and am self-employed here. Thus, I am atypical. Hopefully we can convince them that I am really going back and I am able to support Rachel. In order to go look for an apartment and get things set up, I just bought a one-way plane ticket to Vancouver, July 22. This is big. One-way says it all.

It’s one day after sending the package to Mississauga, where they process these things, and I’ve already found out that I made 2 small mistakes. Hopefully once the thing gets a file number and they start processing it we can send the correct info. Like I said, small mistakes, but you can’t misrepresent anything on these forms, and these kinds of details make for delays. The normal processing time for a spouse is somewhere between 4-6 months. I’m hoping our will be finished and approved by August, but there are many horror stories out there of it taking a lot longer. It really burns me that filling out the forms was so difficult, since having been through law school and passing the bar exams, it should have been easy for me. No such luck. My brain must have shrunk in the last few years, cause there were many nights of me banging my head against a wall trying to figure out all the conflicting instructions.

Anyway, hopefully it all goes smoothly. By the time we sent it I just wanted all those forms out of our lives. There are two steps to the approval. First, I am approved/denied as a sponsor. I am a Canadian citizen and I’ve never committed a crime, so that should not be problem. Second, the package gets sent to Beijing and they take a look at whether our marriage is real and approve Rachel as an applicant. We sent 63 pictures and a heck of a lot of documentation on our relationship. We could have had more, but bills get lost, emails disappear when people change accounts, and some things are just hard to find. But it should appear as obvious that we’re a real couple and haven’t done all this just to scam immigration officials. Some of the questions on the forms are hilarious from our point of view, but there are a lot of fake marriages out there in the world. Immigration should try to flush them out.

Some things about immigration need to be thought out far in advance. Rachel and I have lived together since 2005, but never got both our names on a lease. We’ve traveled to all sorts of different places and taken pictures of those places and ourselves, but could have used more obvious shots like us in front of Capilano suspension bridge or Hong Kong’s Star Ferry. We’re really bad at just taking photos of places or us, but not the two together. Receipts, even for things like weddings and engagement rings can be really hard to find after several years. Thankfully we did find a lot of things in various corners of our home and in email accounts to help us. We should look stellar compared to some people who meet once for a wedding and then try to apply.

I’m mostly optimistic and excited about going back to Canada. Rachel, naturally, has mixed emotions. She wants to move to Canada and continue our life together there, but is feeling bad about leaving her home, her city and her family. We’ll have to go with the flow on that. The waiting that we’ll go through over the next several months isn’t going to be easy, but once we’re all settled and in Vancouver I’m sure it’s going to be great. Thankfully, once the immigration is done, it’s done. We’ll never have to do it again. I promise. Relax.

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