Foreign Service

The German consulate’s national day party featured a 32-meter long sandwich. It was delicious.  

The Japanese consulate hosted a troop of traditional drummers to perform in Shenyang today. I was one of the few people from the consulate who were able to attend.

The performance was very interesting. Part of it was performing drum pieces, part of it was demonstration, part of it was education. The performance was very lively and interactive.

There may or may not have been the part where they called for volunteers to try it out, and I may or may not have been one of the volunteers, and there may or may not be video of me making a fool of myself on stage beating the drums like an idiot.

All in the interest of good foreign relations.

Today I took a high-speed train to another city. I was invited to talk about U.S. tourism with local government officials and members of the local tourism industry. I helped travel agencies understand the U.S. visa process. At lunch, I helped some visiting U.S. government officials to understand a little bit about Chinese drinking and toasting culture. Then I took the high-speed train back to the city I live in.

Today was the kind of day that I was hoping that I would have when I was applying to be a diplomat. I had hoped that I would be able to increase international understanding by helping communication between America and foreign governments. I had that kind of day today. I felt like a diplomat today.

Life is good.

Embassies and Consulates go to great lengths to celebrate July 4th. In Shenyang, we throw a big party every year. We invite our local contacts, government officials, representatives from other countries’ consulates, and American businesspeople to come. There are some speeches, food, and conversation.

This year we held our event in a local hotel. The theme was American music.  I brought my family’s Wii and copy of Rock Band. It was a big hit with some schoolchildren who came to the party.

This year I had the huge honor of being the MC of the event. I made announcements and introductions in English and Chinese, and translated the Consul General’s speech into Chinese.

The event was a big success; we had a big turnout, the food was great, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

The State Department, like any large organization, generates a lot of written reports. Part of our job as diplomats is to report what we see and do at post, adding to the US Government’s understanding of what’s happening in the countries in which we serve. We are the eyes and ears of the government (but we aren’t spies. Really, we aren’t).

The reports that we write are called “cables.” This is a throwback to the old days of using telegraph to send in reports.

We don’t use telegraphs any more. Nowadays we use email. But we still call them cables.

Most first-tour officers like me are hesitant to write cables, because they become part of the permanent record, available to everyone. As arrogant as most of us are (myself included), we don’t want to look like idiots (myself very much included) if our analysis is wrong. But we are encouraged (almost required) to write, so I screwed up my courage and wrote a cable.

In the process, I discovered that writing cables is a lot like writing academic papers. In academia, before a paper is published, it goes through a peer review process. In the State Department, cables are “cleared” by your manager, section chief, and chief of mission (ambassador or Consul General). It also has to get cleared by country-level managers of your subject area. In fact, compared to an academic paper, which may have two or three peers comment on it, cables have to be “cleared” by many more people before it’s issued.

Also, similar to academic papers, a cable is not a magnum opus, a summary of everything that you know. A cable is supposed to be a report on a particular topic, a contribution to the overall knowledge base of the US Government.

The Consul General, who is a great boss and who goes out of his way to foster entry-level officers, gave me some great feedback on my cable, and suggested a snappy title.

Here’s a huge difference between writing cables and publishing academic papers: cables are released instantly, through a special channel in the email system. As soon as a cable is issued, it’s available to anyone in the Department.

The biggest and most important similarity to academic papers is this: your greatest fear is that no one will read your cable.

Within minutes of my cable being released, I started getting positive feedback from my coworkers, A-100 classmates, and people that I don’t know who are serving in other posts.

The cable is short, about 3 pages long, and it’s a simple study on a certain type of traveler to the US. Nothing ground-breaking, just an interesting (I think) facet of the big picture of tourism to the US. The cable will not change our foreign policy, won’t lead to new treaties or start a war (I hope), it’s just a small contribution to the Department’s collective knowledge.

And thanks for asking, but no, you can’t read it. It’s an internal report. You could file a FOIA request to get it, but believe me, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Now that I have my first cable under my belt, I hope that I have the self-confidence (and time) to write the next one.

I am a terrible person.

Part of the visa interview process is to understand applicants’ jobs. A big cross-section of the local society applies for U.S. visas here, so we interact people with a very wide range of occupations. Most of the time the visa interview is in Chinese, so the interview can strain our vocabularies. Sometimes the interview can pull us into linguistic areas that we aren’t familiar with.

Luckily for me, I have a broader level of experience with Chinese, I know how to say things like “veterinarian” and “mechanical engineer” in Chinese. Sometimes the applicants like to make their jobs more glamorous than they really are. Like the guy who says that he does “greenification” (綠化) when he really means that he is a garbage man. Yeah, I suppose that by picking up the trash on the street, he does make the city more green, or at least less brown. But that kind of euphemism makes our job a little harder. Especially for people whose Chinese isn’t as good.

Luckily for us, we can call on the Locally Engaged staff to help us out with the interview. Sometimes we just have to ask them for a quick translation of a term. Sometimes they have to go to the window and interpret parts of the interview for us. The LE Staff are very good-natured about that, and seem happy to help out.

But sometimes they get put into embarrassing situations.

Sometimes our personal backgrounds and private lives reflect on our ability to conduct a visa interview in Chinese. Lifestyles and personal moral choices can create gaps in our vocabularies. This happened to one of my coworkers last week.

He had to interview someone who works on the local government’s Family Planning Commission. Basically, this person is in charge of making sure that women don’t get pregnant. Unfortunately, the officer is young, unmarried, and is a very devout Christian, and I suspect that’s why he stumbled with some terminology.

Unfortunately for me, I understood the whole exchange between him and the applicant, and so when he went to ask a female LE Staff about some terminology, I feared the worst.

He walked up to the LE Staff, who is also quite young (to me, anyway), and asked her (in Chinese): “What’s ‘birth control’?”

She gulped and told him.

A minute later, after some more back-and-forth with the applicant, he had to ask another: “What’s a ‘condom?'”

Another awkward translation.

By this time, both the officer and the LE Staff were a little uncomfortable with this consultation. It didn’t help when I interrupted to ask with mock incredulity why he didn’t know those terms.

I am a terrible person.

But it was pretty funny.

Not all places are easy to live in, and U.S. diplomats are expected to serve in places that are very difficult to live in. The State Department has a complicated formula that evaluates the level of difficulty, and gives diplomats a corresponding bonus. This bonus is called the “hardship differential,” and is shown as a percentage. You can see the complete list online here. Afghanistan has a 35% differential, for example. That’s easy to imagine: there aren’t many good hospitals, electricity is unreliable, and there aren’t many Starbuck’s. Iceland has a 5% differential, probably because it’s cold and remote there. Singapore has a 0% differential because it’s a wonderfully modern city with easy access to amenities.

Recently, the Department sent a team to Shenyang to review conditions here and update the differential. The result of their visit is that the hardship differential has been reduced from 30% to 25%. That’s good news in some sense, because it means that it is not as hard to live here. It’s bad news in another, because it means less money in my paycheck. Personally, I feel that although there are more grocery stores here that carry salsa, Internet access is probably worse than it was last year, the air is just as bad as it has been, and all of the other inconveniences are still bothersome.

I’m not complaining, I still get a hardship differential, but it doesn’t seem like daily life in Shenyang is 5% less hard than it was a year ago. This is also the second time that my pay has been cut since I entered the Foreign Service.

Still, it’s better than flipping burgers.

I spoke at a symposium that the U.S. Commercial Service put on for the travel industry, promoting travel to the U.S. I spoke about the process of applying for a U.S. visa. The audience was very interested and respectful. I received several nice complements on my language ability.

 

I’m in the process of choosing where I want to work for two years, beginning two years from now.

As a place to work, the Foreign Service has a lot of quirks. One of the quirks is the paradox of job stability and work instability. Although we enjoy the job security of government employment, we have to change the location of our work, and the content of our jobs, on a regular basis. Every two or three years, we have to find a new job.

We work in U.S. Embassies and Consulates around the world. Every one of the 200+ “posts” around the world is staffed by Foreign Service Officers. We have to have expertise in the local language, and political, economic, and cultural situations of the countries in which we work. But we aren’t allowed to stay too long. We work in a post for a set amount of time. A typical “tour” is two or three years. After our tour is over, we move on to another post, usually in another country.

I’ve been in China for almost a year. My tour will end in summer 2016. Not all tours have the same beginning and end date, though. Tours are starting and finishing constantly. In order to prepare for the continual migration of officers from one post to the other, the process begins early. Although there is over a year before my current tour is over, I am already looking at the possibilities for my next tour. Officers typically know where they will next serve well before their current tour is over. I will probably have my next job a year before I leave this job.

The process is simple. We are given a “bid list.” This is a list of the jobs and locations that will be available. There are over 500 jobs on my list, and the jobs are literally all over the world. From places that most people recognize, like London and Tokyo, to places that most of my friends don’t recognize, like Skopje and Vientiane. To my delight, Ouagadougou is even on the list!

My task is to decide from among those 500+ jobs, which 30 I would most like to do. Then I make a case for why I should get those jobs. This is called “bidding” for a job. My Career Development Officer in DC will then place me where I fit. With luck, I will get a job from the top of my list. However, we are worldwide available, and we are expected to go where we are needed. I could be assigned to a job that isn’t even on my list.

Most of the jobs require language training (I don’t speak Spanish, French, Japanese, Swahili, Turkish, Lao, Georgian or Macedonian). Depending on where I am posted next, my job could begin as late as summer 2017, a full year after leaving my current post. Some jobs don’t require language, so I could be back on the job right after this tour is over.

Bidding is exciting, nerve-wracking, and scary. My long-suffering wife, who likes stability, is amazed by this process. I believe that she used the word “crazy” to describe it. I don’t know if this is the most efficient way to place diplomats, but I can’t think of a better way.

I also can’t think of a better word to describe it. But I’ll be diplomatic, and call it “complex.”