How US Citizen Services Fell Apart During Shanghai’s Zero COVID House Arrest
Citizenship is a paper trail.
My son was born in Shanghai, China almost a year ago, in a lockdown that played out like a home imprisonment. For all babies born abroad to parents in a foreign country a passport is essential; my son was unable to leave China because the US failed to have a coherent plan for operating during an office closure. For the last 11 months his application for US citizenship and passports has been a disaster.
Every baby is born nationless. For babies born in America to American parents this is no big deal, they can get a passport eventually, or not. In 2021 44% of Americans had passports. I was born in the US and didn’t get my first US passport or travel outside the country until I was 18.
The CRBA was created for would-be Americans born abroad. A CRBA is a Certificate of Birth Abroad, and it is the document that creates US citizenship. There is currently no way, as of 2023, to apply online for a CRBA, you must appear in person, which was the beginning of my son’s problems. The Consulate in Shanghai was closed by the Chinese government 8 days before he was born.
The Shanghai 2022 “lockdown” lasted 61 days. The word lockdown is not accurate. It was more like a city-wide house arrest, enforced by the police, for 26 million people. Everything was closed, no one was allowed to leave their home and the streets were empty. Whatever you picture as a small amount of “essential workers” allowed out to keep the city running, picture dramatically less of that. People could not get delivery. Period. Food, medicine, toilet paper, almost all of it was inaccessible in the first weeks. The government told us in advance to prepare enough food and supplies for a five day lockdown. The day before it started every store was stripped bare and all the foreign Embassies and Consulates were ordered to close.
This is when all passport and CRBA services should have immediately been available online and over zoom. That is not what happened.
The decision to close the consulate came from the Chinese government. But the decision to make citizenship and passport services contingent on mandatory in person visits came from the US, and they refused to revise the policy even weeks into a lockdown with no clear end date and with arbitrary enforcement stay at home orders.
At midnight on April 1, 2022 Shanghai started the lockdown as an extension of China’s “zero COVID” policy. The arrival of the omicron variant had already spiralled Hong Kong out of control with measures to contain it, so we were not expecting a swift resolution. At this point I had lived in Shanghai for a little over two years. During this latest phase, we were required to get a government issued PCR swab every 48 hours to prove we were negative, even if we were asymptomatic or vaccinated. We had been vaccinated the previous year.
If you tested positive you were sent to a mandatory government quarantine center. Picture a minimum security prison. They were known to be crowded and uncomfortable with hundreds of people sharing a restroom; some were stadium gyms with rows of cots where they did not turn the lights off at night for sleep. Every case was different, but typically you needed to test negative for COVID twice to get out so it could take a while to be released, even if you had one negative test. Yang Yi had a pretty amazing story about that on This American Life.
The “zero COVID” policy was very successful in 2021, and I would include myself as an advocate during that year. Schools and businesses stayed open and the rates of infection were incredibly low. In 2021 the death count from COVID in China was two cases. But early in 2022 things started to get dark. There were widespread stories in Shanghai where the government would quarantine an entire office building because one employee tested positive. All the workers had to stay in the building for 48 hours until everyone completed the mandatory PCR swabs. They were given sleeping bags and food rations. If someone tested positive they were taken away. In retrospect they were just warming up the restrictions in February and March.
The official news on March 31 was that the lockdown would last five days, but no one believed it, with good reason. The plan was to mass test all 26 million residents and clear out the positive cases by sending them to central quarantine until they tested negative.They would keep doing this until no one tested positive outside of quarantine. But the city kept finding more asymptomatic positive cases and extending the lockdown by weeks, not days. Such was the harshness and the literalness of the policy. Zero COVID was impossible but they continued to double down on chasing it.
On March 31 I was almost 38 weeks pregnant with my son. I was too pregnant to fly (that was the advice to many foreigners in China at the time — leave!) but not pregnant enough to be induced, which becomes an option in China at 39 weeks. We were advised that during the lockdown there would be no private transportation, because all drivers were also ordered to stay home. Only ambulances would be able to operate. There is much documentation of how eerie and empty the streets were.
I was resigned to just wait until contractions started and call the ambulance as soon as possible to go in for the birth. But my husband’s HR department was not having it. He works for a foreign company that had sent us to China on an expat contract and they felt liable for us while in China. The lockdown started in two phases and our part of Shanghai, Puxi, was in the second phase.
A few days before Puxi locked down the other side, Pudong, was already locked down and things were getting chaotic. A man died at home of an asthma attack because the ambulance did not come in time. Asthma is different from giving birth, I tried to argue. But the HR of the company pushed back telling me that they could not guarantee that the ambulance would take me to the hospital of my choice. The drivers would likely not speak English and would follow orders to take me to the nearest public hospital where those doctors also might not speak english. I told the HR department we could just use a translator but they remained concerned that the drivers would be under strict orders and if there were any COVID cases in my building (we lived in a high rise) that I might have no options. This was actually a well documented outcome of contact tracing, If your neighbor tested positive you were treated as an assumed positive case. Guilty by association.
I gave up and checked into the hospital by myself on March 31. I spent most of the next nine days in my room alone. The hospital bed was awful and uncomfortable but I was given three meals a day while the rest of the city struggled to get food delivered during lock down. The meals were bland but plentiful. My husband and I wrote to the US consulate to get him a special letter to leave the lockdown and attend the birth of our son. The consulate assisted and he was stopped by police twice on the way to the hospital and had to show his documents. There was still no private transportation at the time so he walked. It was only one kilometer. He carried an overnight bag and an empty car seat to bring our son home in. He arrived at the hospital the night of April 7 and our son was born, after an epidural and some pitocin, the morning of April 8th. We were able to go home April 10, unlike the nurses and staff who were sheltering at the hospital so it would not close.
Then the trouble with the documents started.
We joked that my son was like the guy in the Tom Hanks movie Terminal. A man without a country stuck between gates. That movie was based on a real man with a dark story who just recently died. Other people have it worse, I reminded myself. I didn’t give birth in a public Chinese hospital where no one spoke english. We were lucky.
Normally, even in China, you get a birth certificate before you leave the hospital. On April 10, at check out, our international hospital informed us that due to the lockdown the staff that does paperwork was unable to come in and that there was no one to issue a birth certificate. We would have to come back. When? They were not sure when this staff would be in exactly, the Chinese government did not consider them essential workers. Without a birth certificate you cannot start a passport application.
This was an alarming thing to find out just an hour before leaving the hospital. How would we prove he was our son if needed? We had a medical bill for the birth, but the rules in China are quite literal. No record of birth might mean he didn’t exist. The first step in getting a passport is getting a birth certificate. Now that I was no longer too pregnant to fly I still could not leave China unless I left my son behind. He was undocumented. What if he was taken from us?
Without a birth certificate I checked out of the hospital and went home to introduce my son to his big sister, who was not allowed to come to the hospital during the lockdown. She is American born in the US to the same two parents and her first passport had been drama-free. She was delighted to have a baby brother, now 11 days into the lockdown in which she was not allowed to leave our apartment even with a mask on to play outside. We felt lucky to have something so special to be able to distract her from our imprisonment.
A few days later the hospital wrote to us saying we could come get the birth certificate. But we would need to get permission to leave our home and we would need a PCR swab no less than 48 hours old to enter the hospital again. During this time the city was still mass testing all 26 million people every 48 hours but the results had to show up on your health QR code to get into the hospital and due to the volume of testing that could take 12–16 hours or so to get the code which left you with a very narrow window in which you could go out with valid results and permission. We would have to time our appointments and our test very carefully.
At this point, the US consulate in Shanghai had been closed my son’s entire life. The entire month of April 2022, my son’s first three weeks of life, was pretty dark. By May, as the lockdown dragged on, services improved and food delivery increased as more “essential workers” were allowed to leave their homes and work. But they had to shelter at work or worse, sleep in the street because their homes would not let them in.
Throughout April our expat friends continued to book one way flights out of Shanghai and encouraged us to join. We explained our son’s situation. We remained uniquely fucked.
I started sending out newsletter updates to fight the boredom and insanity.
We picked his Chinese birth certificate on April 15, my son’s original due date. We walked there and back since there were still no cars running. I began urgently emailing the US consulate to get a passport for my son. I requested an Emergency Passport, which is issued on the same day as you apply. A regular child passport can take 2–6 weeks to arrive and lasts 5 years. An Emergency passport lasts one year. You can normally apply for both at the same time and file your CRBA. But when I started writing to the Consulate in mid-April, weeks into the lockdown, nothing was possible. We hope to reopen soon, they advised.
I reminded them that COVID positive kids were being separated from their parents and that we wanted to leave China so that our kids would not be taken to a government quarantine alone. They acknowledged this but said we needed an-in person appointment to apply for a passport and acknowledged this was impossible because they were not allowed to open the consulate office per the Chinese government. I later learned that the printer that creates the passports, of which there is only one in Shanghai, had been left in the office and that no one could gain access. So even with employees working remote to answer consulate emails there was nothing they could do without access to that printer.
I asked if Beijing (they were not locked down at the time) or America could just print the passport and ship it instead. I was told no but not given a reason. I was told I could go to Beijing and apply there if I could figure out how to leave my house during lockdown to travel (no one could, this suggestion was beyond absurd).
In May the city of shanghai relented and let those in buildings without positive COVID cases walk around their parking lots. The permission to open our doors and enjoy the weather was a huge relief and I pushed my son around the parking area in a stroller. I waited for an update from the consulate. More people around the city went to quarantine, mass testing kept up. I had to get special permission to leave my compound for my son’s newborn check ups and had to see a doctor nearby who did not speak much english because our regular pediatrician was locked in her building and unable to come to work due to contact tracing.
Around this time I started to hear from other parents of newborns, some born after mine, that they were leaving China. How? Implored. I learned that other consulates had quietly started issuing emergency passports during the lockdown, despite the same insistence from China that no in-person offices could operate. The Germans in particular seemed to be getting their people out efficiently.
I implored the US consulate to work around the office closure. The in-person aspect to a CRBA and Passport appointment is comically pointless. The only thing you do in front of the consulate employees is sign a document and raise your right hand to say the documents are true. Otherwise it is an exchange of paper. A courrier could bring them.
When I made no progress I tried to contact my elected representatives which was not that easy to figure out as I don’t own or rent a house in Michigan. A friend with ties said to just use my last known address in the US before I moved to China, which led me to the office of Rashida Tlaib. I never spoke to Rashida directly but was exchanging emails with her office when the US consulate finally got back to me mid-May. They were still officially closed, but they could send someone to me.
On May 23 we filed my son’s request for an Emergency Passport at the gate of our complex. We were not allowed out and the two consular employees were not allowed in so we stood in masks and handed documents over the metal fence that was constructed to keep us in. On May 25 we were delivered my son’s Emergency Passport, a travel document that does not guarantee him citizenship in the US since his CRBA was not filed yet. (They told me they could not take that until they “opened.”)
The lockdown ended June 1. We were allowed out in Shanghai after two months, the entire spring lost. We still had to get a PCR test every 48 hours, but as long as you were negative things were much better. The threat of being positive and sent to quarantine still loomed. But I loved every minute of June. In some ways it was the best month of my life, but it was also my last in Shanghai.
We left China for the US on July 3rd and moved to Singapore in August. My son flew on his Emergency Passport. I was told to file his CRBA and get his full passport once I got to Singapore because it would be easier at an Embassy than in the US.
I filed the CRBA at the Singapore Embassy on November 9, just after he turned 7 months old. Typically a CRBA is accepted the same day, but since he was born in China not Singapore I was told his CRBA was not automatically accepted and would need to be sent in mail back to China to be official, assuming the Shanghai Consulate would be open, receiving mail and able to process it. Shanghai endured small lockdowns through the end of 2022. Many staff were out in the fall of 2022 because they were COVID positive. The zero COVID policies had been relaxed but then everyone got sick all at once. It wasn’t until January 8th of 2023 that China dropped entry quarantine.
My son’s regular passport arrived in Singapore for pick up on February 3rd but the CRBA was still in China at the time. The CRBA was approved in China on January 13th, which allowed his passport application to be completed. But he still cannot get a social security card. The CRBA was sent from China on February 8th. We had asked that it be sent directly to Singapore, which is a five hour and 45 minute commercial flight away. It should have arrived within days, not weeks. When I followed up in March on why it was still not in Singapore I was told that it was neither in China nor Singapore, that it was in another country that could not be revealed due to security reasons. I assume they sent it to the US, but I don’t know for sure. That they needlessly added weeks to the arrival of an essential document I am sure. My son can still travel, but that document proves his citizenship. He is almost one year old and we still don’t have it in hand.
The US has proved throughout this process how unprepared they are to serve citizens who are denied their rights abroad. It’s dangerous to be abroad without a passport. As tensions between the US and China rise it can only get more dangerous. Citizen services abroad cannot be dependent on anything in-person. It’s a stupid requirement.
This will not be the last time a baby is born during a consulate closure. We were lucky not to experience any real danger, but the reasons we did not have what we needed were fixable and they are still not fixed.
In China, specifically, and in any countries experiencing lockdown, war, or restrictions on basic human freedom the consulates and embassies should allow for CRBAS and passport applications to be filed and processed remotely and sent by the fastest delivery option available, by the most direct route.
Citizenship is not magic, it’s paper. There is no dust in China or America that should make a document filed in a Singapore Embassy official. There is no reason raising my right hand in front of a consulate employee makes my application any more legit. It’s not China’s job to make sure foreigners can get passports. This is something only America can do for Americans abroad. Zero COVID is over but the consulate operates with permission from the Chinese government and that can be taken away.
We were lucky not to test positive and be sent to central quarantine. Our story is not a horror story. But it is a cautionary tale of how fast things can go wrong when Washington refuses to rewrite the rules about paperwork for a complex situation.
I’m not mad at China that the consulates were closed. China never shut down the airport and continued to allow commercial flights to depart the lockdown. We just could not board without my son. That’s on America. We were held hostage by paperwork more than we were by Zero COVID. Other foreigners left throughout April and May. It was my son’s right to go too. I’m grateful we got to have the month of June but it was a gift that came at such a high price of frustration and stress. If the way the consulate operates is changed it won’t be more “worth it” to me, but it would help me regain some confidence that American’s citizen services abroad are not so broken. I’m still abroad.
UPDATE: On March 23 the US Embassy in Singapore informed me my son’s CRBA had finally arrived. I had applied in Singapore on November 9th and had I been in the country of his birth (China) it would have been issued the same day. Instead it took 135 days. I picked it up in person at the Embassy on March 29.
An employee apologized for the wait.
