Life Is Just One Big Hassle

Ever since my visa was “checked” — put into administrative processing — I’ve been living in a state of anxiety. That anxiety peaked last week. Personnel changes at the company made my future look unbelievably bleak, and all my plans for 2015 were suddenly full of unknowns. On Monday night after 10 p.m., I was still dialing the DOS number in Washington, D.C., over and over: press 1, press 0, wait for a human, then the long wait. That wait usually consists of three minutes of hold music followed by seven minutes of ring… ring… with no agent answering. As usual, after ten minutes I would hang up in resignation, redial, and pray that luck would smile on me and give me one chance to say the sentence I had already recited in my head a thousand times:

Good morning - could you tell me how my background check is going?

I was waiting there helplessly, ten thousand alpacas stampeding through my head, when my wife casually said: why don’t you check the Visa Status Check page again? Almost in despair, I clicked on the site that had been eating my bandwidth every single day for the past month, expecting no miracle.

But the miracle happened. The page that had read “Administrative Processing” just two hours earlier now read “Issued.” I could hardly believe my eyes. I yelled, leapt onto the couch, cheering and bouncing, completely forgetting that Xiaobao was asleep.

Yes, everything is cleared… From April of this year until now — more than half a year — I have been through far too much for a relocation. What comes easily to other people seems cursed for me. Sometimes I wonder whether I am the poor Sisyphus, and relocation the boulder that can never be pushed to the top of the hill.

(I)

I formally raised the relocation with my boss, G, in April this year. Actually, back in September and October of 2013, I had already mentioned the idea to A, my former boss’s former boss. A pounded his chest and said no problem. But at the time I wasn’t yet eligible for an L1. Under L1 rules, an employee must have worked for the employer’s branch office for at least one continuous year before qualifying to relocate to headquarters on an L1. “Qualifying” is a terrifying thing — it’s like an insurmountable wall that splits people into two categories. Apart from working hard, all I could do was quietly wait as the clock ticked away, tick by tick, until April 2014 — when I would have completed one full year.

But before April arrived, I witnessed A’s departure. G, who replaced A, unexpectedly placed me under his own name. Organizationally speaking, I had been “promoted” a level. Since G valued my ability, I repaid him with hard work and earned his recognition. At the April annual review, I plucked up my courage and raised my relocation idea with him on the phone. G’s reaction was:

This is an interesting idea.

But relocation is something a Sr. Director can’t decide on his own; it requires a VP sponsor. As luck would have it, I had a business trip in May, so I scheduled a one-on-one with J, G’s boss. We talked for half an hour and he verbally agreed to my relocation. So after I returned to China at the end of May, I started planning my to-do list for Silicon Valley. Little did I know that no sooner had I left Silicon Valley than J left the company at the beginning of June. Fairly speaking, J’s departure was within expectations — but nobody expected it so soon. Selfishly, I had hoped he would stay another month or two and sign off on my offer. Alas, fate toys with us: Sisyphus’s boulder knocked me down for the first time.

(II)

Those were turbulent days. I lost count of the reorganizations, and the whole BU went into a job freeze — no more hiring. My relocation meant opening a job requisition in the U.S., but new offers had been frozen completely. With J gone and no replacement, my boss G moved up a level in the org chart, and N, the BU’s SVP, temporarily became his boss. G told me the only chance for my relocation now was for him to convince N of the necessity and urgency of my moving over. This runs on the same logic as the L1 visa: prove by every possible means that a person is irreplaceable. True, everyone is unique — but in a well-run company, who is so essential that the company cannot survive without them?

In my weekly one-on-ones with G, besides business, I never failed to end with one line:

Has N approved the job opening?

By then there were already rumors that N was on his way out too. I was anxious; once the BU head leaves, the changes are huge, and my case would nine times out of ten fall through. In the past I could quietly be a happy code monkey, because the blood and thunder up top never reached us — the horses kept running, the dancing went on, and the sun rose as usual. But now every step was terrifying. Looking back, I must have put enormous pressure on G then — carpet bombing him with phone calls and emails. He wasn’t close to N and wasn’t part of N’s faction, so winning N over really was hard.

Two or three weeks passed like this, and then N suddenly showed some mercy: in early July, my job opening finally materialized. I applied almost immediately, then anxiously waited for the job offer. Going from opening to offer requires a long approval chain, and I wanted it to move fast.

But in late July, before N’s approval came through, he left as well. This too was expected, and yet it gave me no end of headaches. This time, after all that effort, I had pushed the boulder halfway up the hill, only for it to roll back down and crush me.

(III)

After N left, G got a new boss, R. For the month between getting the job opening and R taking over, there was no news at all about my job offer. R had a mountain of things to sort out, thousands of threads to untangle, and no time for my little mess. My biggest fear was that the offer would never come and the job opening would be cut or simply expire — then I really would have no tears left to cry. Sounding G out, he said the whole process was stuck with R, and he’d try to nudge it along. Later G told me R wanted to personally review the value of every relocation, so there was nothing he could do; I should set up a one-on-one with R and make my case myself over the phone.

Maybe the goddess of fortune saw how ill-fated I was and decided to give me a hand. In August I had another business trip for a project, and the scheduled conference call turned into a face-to-face conversation. For me, face-to-face has a much higher chance of success; no other form of communication comes close to being as effective as meeting in person.

In that conversation I managed, at any rate, to prove my value and win R’s approval. After nearly another month of waiting, the entire approval chain around my offer was finally complete, and in late September I got the offer.

Five months of torment, and dawn seemed to be just ahead.

(IV)

My family and I prepared everything the lawyers needed as fast as we could — what would normally take over a month, we compressed into less than one. In the meantime, we happily ate farewell dinners with one batch of friends after another, and it seemed like all that remained was to go through the motions.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

When the heavy package from the lawyers arrived in late October, I tried to book an appointment that very day. Unexpectedly, the system showed no slots available. The next day, and the day after, and for a whole week, it was the same.

I panicked. From forums, chat groups, and all kinds of hearsay, I arrived at a terrifying conclusion: the U.S. embassy in Beijing was preparing for APEC and might not take visa appointments at all — or at least not for the troublesome categories like H1/L1/F1/J1.

Day after day I tried to book, almost in despair, every two or three hours, hitting the page’s visit limit each day before giving up. Then one day a friend who was also waiting for an appointment told me: Shanghai has slots.

The available Shanghai dates were very far out, so I checked Guangzhou and Shenyang, and found that Shenyang had a slot just two days away. After much deliberation, we refilled three DS-160s and prepared to book that date — which meant taking the train the next day to Shenyang, staying one night, and going to the interview on the third day.

While booking Shenyang I couldn’t resist checking Beijing’s available dates again — and found that Beijing had opened up for 11/13, the day after APEC ended! A week’s difference. After thinking it over, Shenyang was not home turf and involved a lot of travel, so we might as well wait another week and interview in Beijing. Anyway, having waited this long, I had gotten used to waiting.

(V)

The interview day was bright and mild. The U.S. embassy, open for the first day after APEC, was packed — everyone was scrambling for that legendary ten-year B1/B2. The middle-aged Taiwanese woman at the window assigned to us had just rejected a rather wealthy, cocky young couple ahead of us. We took a deep breath, stepped forward, and submitted to judgment. Colleagues all say L1 interviews involve just a few simple questions, but we got a pile of them; at one point the woman spent ages consulting a blonde colleague with our forms, and I had a bad feeling. After we paid the anti-fraud fee, she said the words that are burned into my memory:

OK, here’s the deal - We will do further administrative processing on your visa, so we need to keep your passports and …

That was it — I’d been checked. My luck was bankrupt. This time, the boulder didn’t crush me outright, but I had no strength left to push it any higher either. There I was, just short of the summit, locked in a standoff.

(VI)

This was my fourth U.S. visa, and my first time being checked. Of course, the earlier ones were all B1/B2 and don’t count. Here I was, having come this far, and my departure date got pushed back again. My heart was heavy. I felt like a marionette, manipulated at will, utterly unable to resist — a terrible feeling that no one wants to experience. Life is a strange journey: sometimes you hold your fate firmly in your hands, and hard work always pays off; other times fate plays with you, and no amount of talent or effort makes any difference — you can only swallow it and comply.

I reach out to pluck the red cherry; the red cherry falls like sleet. Every day I hoped; every day I could only sigh. Three weeks passed like this.

Last Thursday, G and I had our usual one-on-one. I waited on the bridge for him to join, but instead got an overseas call from his cell phone.

I’m going to leave…

He was laughing heartily as he said it, as if he were in a good mood. I was stunned, almost suffocating. He told me candidly why he was leaving. Reluctant as I was to see him go, I completely agreed with his reasoning.

My visa was still in limbo, and suddenly I had “lost” my organization. I’d met my interim new boss exactly once, for half an hour, and I had no idea whether he even liked me.

So helpless.

(VII)

That night, the visa status that had sat motionless for three weeks suddenly changed its “last updated” date to that very day. Maybe a good omen.

And then came the scene at the beginning of this piece. On December 8, my wife’s and my visas were finally issued.

I was happy for one evening; by the next day I was anxious again.

Xiaobao’s visa hadn’t come through yet.

Every day I told myself it was nothing to worry about — book the tickets, pack the bags, there will be bread. But every day her status was still that infuriating Administrative Processing, and it stuck in my throat like a fishbone.

Yesterday I picked up my passport from CITIC Bank and, grinning, took a look at it — and the alpacas in my heart, like the ghost army Aragorn summoned in The Return of the King, swept in like a tide and devoured what little joy I had left. Speechless! They gave me a three-year work visa, but the visa’s validity period is only one year (most of my colleagues got three years, two at minimum). That means I can legally stay in the U.S. for three years, but if I go back to China this time next year (and maybe my family too), I can’t re-enter without going through the whole L1/L2 process again.

Is this their way of telling me to treasure my time and count the days on my fingers?

(VIII)

Life is just one big hassle.

Throughout this whole ordeal, countless friends and relatives said: good things come only after a good grinding. Grinding? This wasn’t grinding — this was being ground into powder. But looked at optimistically, all that thrashing turned me into a cockroach: what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Whenever I hit a rough patch, after the anger, pain, and disappointment passed, I would gaze at the blue skies and green grass over there and feed myself another bowl of chicken soup:

The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not to keep us out, but to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.