dear members i am going to shre , some one,s case ,
The officer noted in the denial letter that my wife had provided basically factual details that were easily recited or memorized. She stated that my wife would divert and digress when unable to answer questions and that she even tried to provide details and answers that the officer had not asked. The officer cited in the denial letter that my wife had failed to provide anecdotal evidence about myself or my son.
We received the CAIPS notes at the end of June 2010. When I questioned my wife about the use of anecdotal information as evidence I asked her if she understood the word anecdotal. She replied that she did not. I asked her why she had not asked what that meant at the interview. She stated that she thought she had answered the questions. She had told them about my job, how I did many other jobs before, in the army, drove taxi, I had settled in with this one and liked my job. She explained how we would learn and practice language by talking about what hours I worked and what times we would meet. She talked about how I would tell her stories. I would play guitar for her and I talked about playing guitar with my friends. I would show her my newest paintings and the progress I was making. She told them about me visiting with my son, about his four children, about her meeting him in chat, about how my son approved of us and cared about her.
When I asked her again why she had not asked what the word anecdotal meant, she replied that the officer doing the interview had gone on to ask another question. She had talked about my telling her about the animals around my house, about meeting my son in chat, about meeting my mother and my sister in chat, about my family members inviting her to come to visit them in Canada, about being in the internet café in china and how I had encouraged her to learn the use of the computer. She thought that she had answered the question.
My wife stated my son’s age wrong. She also stated his maternity incorrectly. He is 33, his wife is 40. When asked his age she said 40...something. My daughter-in-law thinks that she got their ages confused, it is not common for wives in china to be so much older than their husbands. Maybe she adjusted the information in her head so that her cultural norms would coincide better with the information I had given her in conversations. It doesn’t matter. We concede. It was a wrong answer. My wife answered that my son was a result of my first marriage. My son was the result of a separate relationship more than 30 years ago in which we were not married. In all of our conversations I had always and only referred to her as his mother. i had never hidden or obfuscated the relationship.
When asked, my wife stated that my son and his wife had four children, we had four grandchildren. The officer stated in her denial letter that this was wrong. The officer insisted that we only had 3 grandchildren. Additional and supplemental discussion was not welcome during the interview; we were cautioned and redirected to answer only the questions that were asked. When they did not like the answers we gave they provided their own acceptable answers and quoted their answers as our testimony. We even provided dates, names and pictures in the additional evidence package that the officer refused to look at. Now we understand clearly that documents need to be submitted minimum 21 days beforehand.
I am looking at a system where the officer can make these mistakes, she can even fool the minister’s council into denying the ADR and going to full hearing, but she cannot fool us, nor my son and his family. We know the correct answers. My daughter-in-law has agreed to testify on our behalf to state that the answer was correct. We hope to get the chance sometime next year.
In the CAIPS notes page 23 half way down the interviewing officer asked the open ended question as a prompt if I had any interest in China before I met my wife. I would say that this appears to be perfectly acceptable as an example of an open ended question.
Her answer to the question was to recapitulate a series of conversations we had had in our letters and in our chat sessions. My wife’s answer was that my guitar was from China, my couch was from China, my television was from China, and my computer was from China…
This answer was hilarious to me. I had mentioned it in our earliest CHNlove letters and I remember a conversation one evening when I was looking at my wife on the computer and I was thinking back over all my life decisions. I was looking around my living room and I remembered that my couch was from China. I had been replacing the bottom dust cover one night and I had seen the stamp from china on the inside. As I looked around I started looking for labels on other belongings in the room and I realized that my television, my guitar, my dragon carving, my shirt, my shoes, and my computer were also from China.
The conversation itself at that time was about money exchange rates and I was trying to explain that the currency numbers were greatly different but the buying power for one hours wage was very similar. I tried to explain that when shopping around in Canada many of the goods are from China, China is one of the biggest exporters so often the best prices are attached to the goods from China.
I was kidding her and trying to make a joke when I was saying that now; my new wife was also from China. We both laughed at the time.
She has remembered that I said this. Her answer seemed to indicate that I was collecting memorabilia from China and she was now in my collection. I recognize that she was answering the officer seriously; she takes everything so literally, she would think that was the right answer.
The officer explained in the denial statement that she had intended the question as a prompt to hear my wife answer about my plan to ride my motorcycle across China. The IO considered it an open ended question that would lead to my wife telling about my plans to visit China. When my wife failed to answer the specific answer sought after with the “open ended” question, the IO ended the interview and decided that she did not know me very well. I am possibly the only human alive that could find humour in this situation. The investigating officer would not appreciate this sense of humour; she did not think these matters were funny.
The officer closed the interview after this question. She cited my wife's failure to mention my motorcycle trip as a reason for the denial.
We were unable to impart the quality of the fun times that we share together during the tension filled moments at the PRV interview in Beijing.
No, we did not know everything about each other in the interview after our first year of forced separation; this was something that we had planned the rest of our lives to do at our leisure. We had planned to use the visitor visa for that exact purpose. We failed only to accept the seriousness and the immediacy of the residence interview process.
My original interest in riding my motorcycle was simply to ride across China. A group was organizing to reproduce the great race of 1908 from New York to Paris as a centennial commemorative. The plan was to land in Shanghai and proceed up to Beijing and then up into Mongolia on my way across Russia then to Poland, Germany, and then France on to Paris. The China part of my original plan was for three or four days as I crossed it. My interest was not in China at all.
The rally that I had planned to attend was cancelled. I wanted to try to reproduce stages of the same trip on my own. I was googling road maps when I came across her profile at the agency.
I had shared my latest plan to follow the great wall and ride a motorcycle across China. She had expressed her own concerns. She did not grasp the idea of camping and living in a tent or a camper during the travels. She thought that only the poorest people who could not have a home lived in a tent. She did not recognize it as a sport or a hobby or a dream vacation.
She thought that it was very dangerous to drive around China and be vulnerable at night. Her brother had recently been injured in a motorcycle accident and we had visited him and his wife in the hospital. He suffered a leg injury and his wife suffered a head injury.
She thought the whole idea was too dangerous. Why did I want to take chances with my life this way? I had her to think about now. What would she do if I became hurt? She just did not like the idea.
I had found other difficulties. My motorcycle was experiencing mechanical wear. A foreign national in China is not allowed to own and operate a vehicle without special permissions. There was limited service and parts available. Large sized motorcycles had special requirements and limitations, as in not allowed into the inner cities past the third ring if over 400 cc. The shipping expense was prohibitive. I would not be properly licensed nor allowed to ride my bike home from the docks.
I wanted to buy a motorcycle in China. Insurance was a risk. She could not operate the motorcycle I wanted to buy. It was no use to her. She objected to the storage fee I would be paying when I was not there. She did not like the idea of me riding a motorcycle in china. It was too crowded. She called it my ‘saddle horse automobile’ (l还是坐骑气车去？l or the horse car to gas?)
We could not even set a time frame. She could not understand why I would want to travel to Tibet. There was much trouble in Tibet. She did not refuse to consider a train trip. She finally agreed to consider the trip if we had a car.
The idea of a train trip was very appealing to me as an alternative idea. I had not been defeated and the idea lived quietly in my mind. I had simply stopped talking about it. She had stopped talking about it. She had thought the problem was solved before Christmas. (2009)
It had been discussed and dealt with. She did not like the idea.
She had fixed it, it was over.
She did not mention it in the January 2010 interview. Why would she? She was dead set against it and terrified at the prospect. The entire motorcycle trip thing was part of my own 'how i met my wife' story.
The immigration officer prompted a response with a series of open ended questions and anticipated the mention of the motorcycle trip discussion.
When it was not mentioned in the open ended answer the officer claimed that this was evidence that she did not know me.
When I asked her why she had not mentioned the motorcycle trip I had planned she stated that I had not mentioned it to her in a long time before the interview.
The fact is that we communicate very well together. We were unable to demonstrate this to the IO during the interview.
They condemned our use of an agency, they condemned our use of translation software, they condemned our use of computers instead of telephones, and they noted that a great deal of our correspondence was about the immigration application. What would they expect a couple that had been denied temporary visas so they could work on an application together to discuss in their correspondence?
We were not able to allay any of their concerns with our answers and explanations. It's all too much and it has gone on too long is all i can say. I have also heard and read things about china and immigration. i have read that there are certain provinces in china that immigration will not accept applications from, there is no way to check for genuine documentation and they have just had so much trouble. My problem is that the agency that i dealt with was completely above board, delivered excellent service, met all their promises, made additional effort to facilitate us, they introduced us to other couples, we liked them so much that we asked them to the wedding dinner, and that the woman i met was exactly what she said she was and absolutely wonderful. Neither one of us feels guilty nor responsible for any of the infractions we read about in the news. That same callousness was my downfall. I was so uninformed, so ignorant of the entire thing. I had better learn to care. We are the exact profile they are hunting down. It hurts to become informed. My teeth grind when i read Mr. Ali's post. We did not prepare for the interview. What’s to prepare? We met at the airport the one night, found a taxi to a hotel, arrived after dark, got up before the kitchen was open, left without breakfast, taxied to the embassy and stood outside before dawn. I will never be late again with her around. We were going to get her passport stamped. We had completed the application and we had a bundle of additional documents and pictures that they had asked for. We had actually been working on this together since we met over a year ago. I was bringing my wife home to meet my mother. There were groups of people waiting to meet us when we got here. We had return tickets. How ready can you be? How could we know this was going to happen?
There was another couple that we met there. They had been commuting for almost 3 years. He had been there about 8 times. They had been married for over a year before they even applied. He had experience and good advice from consultants. In reference, they actually had a long term relationship timeline to demonstrate to immigration at the interview. We acted quick. 9 days later we knew exactly what we wanted. We talk a lot about luck. Time has proven that we made good decisions for ourselves. We made right choices. Getting married was a bonding agreement between us, it was the nature of our understanding, I loved her, I meant what I was saying, I was serious, I was here to stay, I would be back to get her. She loved me, she was serious, she was willing to go all the way forever, she was dedicating herself to me, and she would put me first in all her attentions. We made it real. Immigration has broken this down to married for the purpose of a visa. Now we have to prove that we are genuine.
There is no established etiquette for 3rd marriages. There is no facility for immigration to pre-approve a marriage. No way to ask permission. There is no published guidance on expected length of time before betrothal, prescribed lengths of proper courtship, allowable family constellation, or expected length of time between applications or before applications could be accepted. It seems as if they make it up as they go along. They are deciding if they like you or not. There is no actual line or criteria. There is nothing that you can do to work harder, to achieve anything, to strive for… to work towards… no way to improve it, or fix it, or resolve it, or make it better, or at least efficient… so we have additional thousands of pictures, hundreds of receipts, years more letters and chat records, maybe they have done us a favor after all, now we have a time line to show. I felt a choke in my throat when I read Mr. Ali’s post… that was the first time in all of it anyone offered to actually take a look and help if they could.
You can visit us at our blog over at cinderellacanada.com
i think i understand what your saying turquoise.
and we wait for someone to look at it… maybe next year.
