Personal

Today marks six months since I arrived in China. In some ways, it seems like a short time. Work keeps me very busy, and so the days go by quickly. In other ways, it seems like a long time. I have learned a lot, and done a lot so far, but I miss my family very much.

In the future, when I look back on this time, I hope I will not regret the price that I forced my family to pay by choosing this career path. There are always regrets, of course, and you can never be completely sure that you’re doing the right thing.

Maybe all you can to is try not to second-guess yourself, and look to the future.

This morning at the visa interview window, I was insulted in a new way. This insult hit me like a solid punch to the solar plexus. My feeling of self-worth has been severely compromised. I may never recover from this attack on my self-esteem.

What happened? A woman applied for a visa with her 2-year-old grandson. She was trying to get the kid to engage with me. In China, children are encouraged to use family terms to address people, like “older brother” or “aunt.” It’s considered polite and a way to build relationships. If a kid calls you “Uncle Bill,” that puts you in a familiar relationship, with its accompanying status as an elder relative.

This applicant tried to get her grandson to do that to me. She told her grandson to use a familiar term to address me.

She told the kid to call me “Grandpa.”

And I felt really guilty about it. But an important visitor from DC came to the Consulate today, and we wanted to take her out to dinner. We went to a nice Manchu restaurant in town, and had some interesting Manchurian food. As usual, I ate too much.

When dinner was over, and we were going our separate ways, I looked at my watch, and saw that it was 45 minutes until the end of my Chinese class time. For a minute, I thought to myself: I can still run to school and get a little class time in.

Then the little devil guy who was sitting on my other shoulder hit me on the side of my head and told me that I was being an idiot.

So I went home and had some scotch.

Yesterday I represented the visa section in an outreach session to parents who are interested in sending their kids to U.S. community colleges. Representatives from several community colleges sponsored an event to promote their colleges. I was asked to be there as a resource person to answer questions about student visas.

There weren’t very many people there, and I didn’t get a lot of questions. I was starting to feel useless, then things got worse. An “agent” for a school cornered me for several minutes and asked why her clients would get denied visas. I told her that the simple answer was that they were probably not prepared to study in America. She wanted to press me on details of their refusals, which I was uncomfortable with. We in the visa section have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with agents and brokers. They do provide a valuable service to students who want to study in America, but who need help filling out their applications. That’s where the love part comes in: they help students get admitted to colleges. However, agents and brokers have a tendancy to hijack the process: they can push students to chose a particular school, and even give applicants false documents and tell them to lie in the visa interview. That’s the hate part.

So I wasn’t interested in talking with the agent very much. The agent didn’t seem likely to stop grilling me, so I looked for a chance to be more useful. I saw some parents in the room that were just sitting there, so I engaged one in a conversation. It turns out that she had a lot of questions, but didn’t realize that I speak Chinese, so she was reluctant to approach me.

The woman has a teenage daughter, and she’s considering sending her to high school in America. We talked about how the education systems in China and America differ, and I offered some insight into how Chinese students can benefit from U.S. schools. I shared with her that I have two kids, one in college and one getting ready to apply to college. We talked about the uncertainty of the future, how things are changing so fast, it’s hard for young people to know which direction to take, because we can’t predict where the jobs will be by the time they graduate. I commented that all we can do it encourage them to be flexible and well-rounded, adaptable to change.

She suddenly looked at me and said: “don’t you think that being a parent is really hard sometimes?”

I smiled and said yes, of course, and followed on with some personal experiences about parenting, and offered some perspectives about parenting in American culture.

I felt that the conversation changed at that point. I think that she began to see us not as an American and a Chinese person, or a diplomat and a citizen, but as two people, parents who are struggling with our common role as caregiver to our respective children. As a diplomat, we are supposed to be forging connections with the Chinese government and people. That is often difficult to do, given the linguistic, cultural, and political barriers. In my conversation with this parent, I feel that we managed to break down those barriers. Public diplomacy in China can be described as “challenging.” It’s hard for diplomats to have meaningful connections with the people in China. But through the combination of personal issues and my professional position, I had a small, but meaningful, public diplomacy win.

The other day I had to refuse a visa applicant who became belligerent upon receiving my refusal. He kept demanding to know why he was refused, and would not accept the standard reason that we give.

Normally in this situation, we tell the applicant that the visa interview is over, we cannot reverse our decision, and although he is welcome to apply again, he is not qualified for a visa today. We then call the next applicant, thereby making it clear to the applicant that the interview is over. The applicant usually gets the message, and leaves.

This time, though, the applicant refused to leave, and continued to badger me for a reason why he was refused. This sometimes happens. Some applicants are so intent I’m going to America that they simply do not except a refusal. Usually we can defuse the situation by telling the applicant that it’s not a permanent refusal, they can apply again in the future. That usually works for me.

For some reason though, this applicant became hot under the collar, and lashed out at me verbally. This irritated me, and against my better judgment, I engaged him.

I have two serious personality flaws that contributed to what happened next. The first flaw is that when somebody gets in my face, I tend to get right back into theirs. This is not a good personality trait for a diplomat to have. We are supposed to work through conflicts with reason and calm, not slug them out with emotional reactions. However, when someone gets angry with me and I don’t believe that they have good reason to do so, I tend to get angry right back at them. This is a personality flaw that I am trying to overcome. However, it’s pretty well ingrained into my psyche, and it’s hard to get rid of something so deeply a part of my personality.

The second personality flaw is a healthy ego. I am confident in my ability to use Chinese in a variety of situations, even situations that I probably should not engage in. I feel that I have the language skills to engage in debate and argument, and I am egotistical enough to enter into an argument, even when doing so is unwise.

In this situation, those two flaws combined to create a bad situation. My frustrated and unhappy applicant was demanding an explanation, and I was retorting back to him that I had given him an explanation, but he just happened not to like the explanation that was given to him. He raised his voice, I raised my voice, and eventually I told him that he had to leave, or I would call the security guard to escort him out of the Consulate, which I soon had to do.

I should also add that our interview windows are on one side of the main office which everybody sits in, so all of my coworkers were witnesses to this embarrassing outburst. I later apologized to everybody, especially my boss, for causing a scene.

We frequently get this kind of reaction from applicants, but I think that when they encounter it, most of my coworkers have handled the situation better than I did that day.

So I have yet another set of things to work on: curbing my temper and checking my ego.

Eventually, I think that I will be a good diplomat. This incident shows that I still have some work to do, however.