Next to the Ikea in Shenyang is a large shopping mall. This could be a mall in America. China is an interesting mix of modern and traditional, east and west, progressive and traditional. I have not felt bored a single minute that I’ve been here.
Indeed.
Part of the menu on the wall of the Korean bibimbap place near the Consulate. The item is a fried pork chop with rice. The handwritten addition reads: “SOLD OUT!! We will make it in the winter.”
That had better be some great-tasting pork chop. Now I can’t wait until winter so I can try it.
People lie to me every day. During visa interviews, I hear unbelievable stories from people. “I make $100,000 dollars a year. Here’s the deed to my 5,000 square foot house. I am the General Manager of my company.” All lies from the broke farmer who lives in a small brick hut in the country.
Intellectually, I know that people lie all the time, not only at the visa window. I also know that when the applicants tell lies, they don’t feel that they are lying to me personally. I know that I shouldn’t be bothered by the lies. However, I’m a human being, and emotions are part of being human.
Sometimes when I adjudicate a case, I feel like there are two devils sitting on each shoulder: Anger and Empathy. Each of these devils try to influence my decision.
When I detect a lie, Anger jabs me in the face with his little pitchfork. “This jerk is trying to pull the wool over your eyes, cheat the system, get something that he isn’t entitled to!” Deny that rascal a visa! Deny! Deny!” he shouts in my ear. Jab jab jab.
From the other shoulder, at the same time, Empathy pats my nose with affection. “This person is lying, but he’s a person and he lives a really tough life. He just wants go to America to improve his life. He knows that if he tells the truth, he probably won’t get the chance to pursue that dream. He is willing to leave his home country in order to try to get a better life. He’s willing to lie to get it. His current life is so bad that he’s willing to try to lie his way out of it. That’s pretty sad. Give him a visa, it’s the least you can do.” Stroke stroke stroke.
Unlike in the devil and angel, cartoons, where you’re supposed to kick out the devil and do what the angel tells you to do, in this scenario, you’re supposed to listen to both of them, then make an adjudication based on the applicant’s qualifications, not on how you feel about his situation. Simple, right? Wrong.
A hard part of this job is not to let emotions, either anger or empathy, get in the way of doing my job. Sometimes it’s tough to get past the emotions and do my job the way it should be done. I think that’s why the government has people doing this job. A robot or a computer program could never take just enough of the applicant’s situation into account. It takes a human being, who has emotions, but knows when to trust them and when to ignore them, to make the right decision.
More tasty, this time in English! This city is getting tastier and tastier all the time!
Here in the consular section, I am caught in the middle of an office dispute. Two factions at war: we can call them the Heat Wave and the Cold Front. What’s at stake is the optimal office temperature. The battlefield is the Holy Thermostat of Shenyang.
We work in an open office. The interview windows are along one wall, and the officers and local staff all have desks in a big open office (I’d post a photo, but regulations prohibit that). During interviews, the room is very noisy, as you can imagine. In spite of the high noise level, noise is not the source of the dispute. We find a way to work through the cacophony of interviews. But the temperature of the office is another thing. Another big thing.
The dress code for officers “on the line” (conducting visa interviews) is business attire. For men, that means suit and tie. Locally-Engaged Staff (LES) can wear business casual attire.
When we officers are standing at the interview window in our suits, we get hot. But many LES, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a short skirt, sitting at their desks in an air-conditioned room, get cold.
You start to understand the source of conflict now, right?
The officers, wearing several layers of clothes, complain that the office is too hot, and ask for the A/C to be adjusted to make the room cooler. The Facilities Manager (an American officer) asks the maintenance crew to make the room cooler. The LES, dress more sensibly for the summer weather, complain to the senior LES that the room is too cold. The senior LES — who I suspect actually runs the consular section, if not the entire consulate — then asks the maintenance crew directly (bypassing the FM) to make the room less cool.
Back and forth we went, the temperature of the room swinging up and down like the forehead of a feverish child. Battle cries echoed through the office. Snarls from the LES when the room cooled. Howls from the Officers when the room warmed up. The layer of civilization that governs interaction with our fellow man was wearing thin. Bloodshed seemed inevitable.
I recall Captain Picard’s famous line, uttered when he captained the Starship Enterprise into a life-and-death battle: “We have engaged the Borg.”
The Facilities Manager, a reasonable and even-tempered man, was (understandably) getting tired of the back-and-forth. He directed the installation of a thermostat control near the interview windows. It’s a nifty control box with an LCD display and buttons for adjusting the temperature up and down.
Hooray! Dance of joy! The officers win the war! we think to ourselves. We can set the office temperature to whatever we want! Suck it, LES!
The victory parade was thrown prematurely, though.
It came to light that the thermostat, with its fancy LCD display and responsive temperature controls, is not actually connected to the temperature control. It was installed as prop, possibly to give the officers the illusion that we were in control of the temperature. Maybe the thinking was that if we thought that we were making the room cooler, that we would feel cooler.
The thermostat is just a placebo. A placebostat, if you will. No matter how much we bang on the buttons, we can not change the temperature of the office.
I suspect that the LES know that the thermostat is fake, but they’re hiding it well. No smirks or guffaws as we feverishly punch the buttons, muttering obsenities to ourselves. It seems that the officers have lost the battle.
BUT…
It is summer now, and it’s hot outside. It will not always be hot, though. Air conditioning will not always be a useful weapon of war. Summer’s influence on the temperature of the office, and on the clothing choices of the LES, will not last forever. We officers have begun silently chanting that famous line from Game of Thrones:
Winter is coming.
Do you think you’re good at using chopsticks? Let’s see how good you are with this super challenge chopsticks! The first person who figures out how to eat noodles with this set wins a big prize!
We went out for lunch at a fancy restaurant today. The menu had English translations, but the English was hilariously bad. Here are some examples of the really bad translation.
I will drink Wahaha water.
