Renewing my Chinese Passport in New York City
One bureaucratic process. Three times over twenty years. Two continents and two political systems. One quest for freedom.
It was raining cats and dogs that Friday morning when I arrived at the Chinese Consulate in New York City. “Look at that line!” My Uber driver said as I jumped off into the unforgiving downpour to claim my spot at the end of what seemed like an endless stretch of pressed raincoats and umbrellas.
I was there to renew my Chinese passport. Despite the chilling rain, there was a strange mix of warmth in the crowd. Maybe we were just standing too close to each other. Maybe it was seeing the scores of faces that resembled mine. Maybe it was hearing my mother tongue in various dialects. The two young boys in front of me spoke in Cantonese which I could not understand a single word of, but it did not sound foreign. The girl next to me drove all the way from Philadelphia, and her husband works in a similar field of physics as I do. I learned this because she and I quickly struck up a cordial conversation, which was soon joined by a few more around us.
We did not know each other, but we knew each other. We were all Chinese immigrants who had lived in the United States long enough that our old Chinese passports were running out of their decade-long validity, but not long enough to hold a navy-covered passport instead of a maroon-covered one. Here we were, “too foreign for home, too foreign for here”, seeking validation of the bond in birth and by blood to a land whose government was never really ours, all the while being in a country with a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but “the people” did not really include us.
The passport I needed to replace was the second passport I had. I got my first passport in 1998, when I was eight years old. My father, a young professor in mechanical science and engineering at an elite university in inland China, had just started working as a visiting scientist at the University of California, San Diego. To the envy of many of my friends, my mother and I were to join him on the other side of the Pacific.
Foreign travel in nineties’ China, at least for the ordinary citizen, was a privilege, not a right. I was too young to grasp the full story, but one of the more dramatic points in the saga came when my maternal grandfather, a professor of economics with an unimpeachable reputation at the university where my parents both worked, was forced to sign some form of pledge that his oldest daughter was only going to the United States for a short period of time to be with her husband, and the whole family would certainly return to China.
As a matter of fact, my mother had no desire to leave China and live in the United States had it not been her husband’s job. Her understanding of patriotism was the same as what she was taught as a girl born into the Cultural Revolution, and had herself preached to her students over the decades as an elementary school teacher: the holy trinity of country, government, and the one and only ruling party, inseparable, unquestionable; love for one meant allegiance to all. When an authoritarian regime weaponized patriotism as a tool of self-oppression for its people, aspiration for a better life in a different country was met with self-doubt or even shame, as if the thought alone was unpatriotic.
My mother was as loyal and obedient to the Chinese government as one could be, but still not enough to be given a passport the moment she was presented with the chance to leave. If there was one thing that demanded greater loyalty and obedience than one’s country, it was one’s family, and hence her father’s signature was her bond, despite the intangible one she already subjected herself to.
After months of uncertainty and agony, my mother finally obtained the necessary permissions and documents. On November 26, 1998, we boarded our flight across the Pacific.
My family dutifully returned to China on August 26, 1999. A few months later, my father passed away very suddenly in the middle of the night. My first passport was locked away at the bottom of a drawer, where it quietly expired.
I applied for my second passport in 2007, the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was selected to represent my university as part of an international delegation to South Korea on a trip organized by its Ministry of Education. Obtaining a passport this time was a plainly standard process: a visit to the local security bureau with personal identification documents, proper-sized photos, and a form to be filled on the spot.
In the decade since my grandfather pledged his daughter’s loyalty to a still developing China, the country was nothing short of an economic miracle, leaping from the third world into the most prominent of emerging powers. Personal travels abroad were no longer viewed with political paranoia, but encouraged as a booming new industry. Tourism and consumption are good for the economy, and what is good for the economy must be right for China.
Two years after obtaining my second passport, I took the maroon-covered booklet, together with my offer letter to the PhD program in physics at the University of Chicago, to the United States Consulate in Shanghai for a student visa.
A few days before I left China for the United States the second time, with no return date mandated or planned, my extended family gathered for dinner at a local restaurant. My uncle, who emigrated to the United States as a doctoral student in the early nineties, looked at me in the eye and said, “Yangyang, you are free.”
My plane touched down at O’Hare on August 22, 2009, almost ten years later to the date of my last departure. I worked hard and received my degree. I got a job at an Ivy League university and moved to upstate New York. I made great friends and worked with wonderful colleagues. I debated politics and volunteered on campaigns. I read and wrote and listened and talked and laughed and cried and lived the American dream.
I never went back to China. Standing outside the Chinese Consulate in New York City, I was the closest to my home country in almost eight years.
A security guard came out of the building and asked if any of us were applying for a visa instead of a passport. The visa seekers were quickly ushered inside. “This is not fair!” The girl next to me complained in Mandarin, “The people who need visas are not Chinese! Why would the Chinese Consulate make Chinese citizens wait longer in the rain?”
A few of us shook our heads. Some of us had a muted, knowing smile. It was not fair, but it was also not unexpected. There is much to complain about bureaucracy almost anywhere in the world, but agencies of the state in non-democratic regimes often function deliberately worse, not due to a lack of competence, but as an assertion of control. The constant inconveniences and indignations reinforce the political hierarchy in the minds of the public, that instead of government for the people, the people are at the mercy of the state.
When a state derives its legitimacy through perpetual oppression of its people, the deep sense of insecurity is often projected in the state’s own perception of its international standing, regardless of the material wealth it has accumulated. The bitter irony is that there is no better way for China to earn universal respect and become a true global power, than by empowering its people with freedom, civil rights, and agency in self-governance.
After two hours in the soaking rain, it was finally my turn to get inside the consulate building. A big sign on the front door read that all cell phones must be turned off before entering, and the security guards meticulously inspected each of our phones to make sure they were off and not just on silent.
I needed to get inside to renew my passport. I turned my cell phone off. When waiting inside, I saw a security guard briskly walking up to a girl who was looking at her phone. “I was only looking up a phone number to fill out this form.” The girl explained. “Turn off your phone or leave.” There was no room for compromise or debate. She turned her phone off. I kept mine off.
A few hours later, I walked out of the consulate office, and turned my phone back on. Self-silencing in exchange for a needed service was only a transient experience for me inside the consulate, but for over a billion Chinese people it is the way of life.
Many western observers of China had long predicted, that once the Chinese people were no longer anguishing in dire poverty, with the free flow of goods would come the free flow of information, and with the choice of shampoo would come the desire and demand for choice of government. To the surprise and dismay of many, China has now arguably surpassed the United States in GDP, but the communist party’s totalitarian control remains just as firm if not firmer.
Empowerment of the people does not automatically come with material wealth. Quite the contrary, the Chinese government has cleverly phrased the issue as a binary choice, material comfort with the governing status quo, or political freedom at the risk of economic degradation and social unrest. With the memories of misery in want still fresh, and alternative forms of governance lacking in the people’s education and hence imagination, most Chinese people quietly accept the former. The problem is not the Chinese people’s less-than-idealistic choice. The problem is that prosperity and freedom should never have been presented as mutually exclusive.
When silence is a prerequisite to simply living, after a while it is easy to forget that one can live and still have a voice. Perpetual silence breeds collective servitude, and authoritarian regimes survive on this cycle of oppression.
I returned to the consulate two weeks later to pick up my new passport. I was a little nervous walking into the consulate office this time with my cellphone turned off, more than the usual tingling of unease going inside a structure of the Chinese government with no means of communication. I recently published a couple articles on science and society. I used examples of the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution in China to argue the dangers of sacrificing facts and reason for political ideology, and referred to the scientists who led the pro-democracy movement in eighties’ China when describing the civic duties of scientists. Had the Chinese government looked up my writings when reviewing my passport application? Would I be denied a passport because of what I wrote, or face more serious consequences?
I would not be able to type keywords on these topics into a web browser had I been living in China, much less write publicly about them. One of the first things I did when I arrived in the United States eight years ago, was to look up in Wikipedia, “1989 Tiananmen Square”. I needed to cross the greatest ocean on earth to learn about and discuss parts of my own history, but even the Pacific did not seem wide enough to protect me from the omnipresence of the Chinese state, or its waters deep enough to quench my concerns.
As the consulate officer handed me my new passport in a professional and uneventful manner, I felt a strange sense of gratitude. I was not just grateful for the consulate service. In that moment I was grateful that the Chinese government still acknowledged me as one of their own, regardless of what I might have written critically. I felt as if I was granted a privilege, a special pardon, when all I did was claiming the most basic right of a citizen.
I guess the Chinese government did not need to withhold my passport, if after eight years it still had in its grips part of my psyche. There is a little seed of fear in every Chinese citizen’s mind that the government has planted and nurtured with relentless care, its leaves of paranoia always whispering in the winds of rumour and propaganda: imagine the worst possible consequence to the smallest act of defiance, is it worth the risk?
I walked out of the Chinese Consulate a second time, my new passport in hand. It was a sunny day. Across the street from the consulate, a small group of people were holding colorful signs, quietly protesting against the mistreatment of animals in China. A few uniformed security guards and besuited gentlemen came out of the consulate and watched in apparent unease.
Undemocratic governments, just like their citizens, are always a little paranoid. Authoritarian states know better than any that the cycle of oppression they survive on is ultimately a deception. Strict forbiddance in the exercising of certain powers only confirms the existence of such powers. The voice of the people cannot be collectively silenced, unless the majority choose to silence themselves. However what if the majority choose otherwise? What if the majority reject as false the choice between staying alive and truly living?
The Chinese Consulate in New York City sits on the shore of the Hudson River. The same stream that flows by the unremarkable grey building will eventually pass the Statue of Liberty on its journey into the sea. I stood by the Hudson in the bright early summer sun, my finger tip etching along the golden seal of the People’s Republic of China on my new passport. The maroon-covered booklet is the ticket to break free, and the ties that still bind. It is a constant reminder of the vulnerabilities of an immigrant, and the privileges of living in America.
Life as an immigrant always has a certain probationary quality, more acutely felt since November 8 of last year. However if I needed any self-assurance that America is still a free country, it was the moment I stepped outside the glass doors of the Chinese Consulate into the open streets of New York City, and felt freer and safer than the instant before. Despite its historical ills and current challenges, this is still the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, with strong institutions and the rule of law. While actions by the current administration expose the fragilities of the American system, they also test its resilience.
The final guardrail of a democracy lies not in its leader, but in its people. Freedom is only extinct if the people stop exercising it. The idea of an open and just America will continue to be alive, if its people still believe in it, live up to it, and are willing to bear the burden to defend it.
