Chinese Whispers

IV

The new visa office was opposite the Dongzhimen Bridge on the Second Ring Road. It was too far for Margaret to cycle with Li Jon strapped into the baby seat in front of her handlebars. Life had been simpler when the visa office was located in its original crumbling grey brick building on the east side of the Forbidden City, five minutes from the apartment. Now its replacement, in a twin-towered monstrosity of stone, glass and steel, was a twenty-five-minute taxi ride on a good traffic day.

Her taxi parked up beneath the flyover, and the driver settled down, meter still running, to read his Beijing Youth Daily while Margaret struggled to get the baby buggy out of the trunk. She was not in the best of humours by the time she had negotiated four lanes of traffic and a revolving glass door that wouldn’t revolve. And since the counters were on the first floor, there was also the escalator to contend with, which was never easy with the buggy.

The concourse was busy this morning, queues forming at all the counters, raised voices echoing off marble floors and walls. Margaret queued for ten minutes to get her application form, and then made her way to the line of desks to sit down and fill it in. Li Jon was not being co-operative. He had been fed and changed before she left, but something was troubling him, and he had been fractious and prone to complaining all morning. Much as she loved him, she found his periods of unaccountable bad temper difficult to cope with. She was sure that one day she would be able to have an intelligent conversation with him and ask him what was wrong. But until then it was a guessing game. Colic, teething, stomach-ache, hunger, dirty diaper. Any one of any number of things. She gritted her teeth and filled out her form.

There was an unusually large number of people queuing at the foreign counter today and she had to wait nearly twenty minutes before she was seen, acutely aware of the meter in her taxi clocking up every second of it. A frosty young woman in a neatly pressed black police uniform, hair scraped back severely from a pockmarked face, demanded Margaret’s passport. She gave it lengthy scrutiny, before turning her attention to Margaret’s application for a six-month visa extension. Margaret waited impatiently, Li Jon still griping in the buggy beside her. Finally the girl turned the form back towards Margaret and stabbed it with her pen. ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘You fill in address here.’

Margaret scowled. ‘I filled in my address.’ But her heart was pounding. The address she had given was her official address in the staff apartment block at the University of Public Security — an apartment she had not occupied for nearly a year.

‘No,’ the visa cop barked again. ‘You fill in wrong place.’

Margaret looked at the form again and saw that in her hurry she had accidentally filled in the space allocated for a previous address. ‘Shit,’ she muttered under her breath. She started to score it out and write it in the correct space. But the visa cop pulled the form out from under her pen and started to tear it up.

‘No, no, no. You fill out new form.’

Margaret glared at her, barely able to contain her anger or the caustic comment fighting for expression on the tip of her tongue. New China was still bedevilled by the bureaucracy of Old China, and its bureaucrats were just as intransigent. ‘Could you give me another form, then, please?’ she said through clenched teeth.

‘Forms at that counter,’ the visa cop said, pointing to the far end of the concourse where Margaret had queued earlier. ‘Next.’ And the next in line tried to push past. A tall, fat, balding American in a business suit.

But Margaret stood her ground. ‘No, wait a minute! I queued for a form. I filled it out. You tore it up. I want you to give me another form and I’ll fill it out right here.’ She looked at the line of unsympathetic faces behind her. ‘And these people can wait.’

But the visa cop just shook her head and pushed Margaret’s passport back at her. ‘No form here,’ she said.

‘Chrissake, lady, go get a form,’ the fat American said. ‘Face it. You’re in China.’

As if sensing her tension, Li Jon started to cry. Margaret felt her blood pressure soar. She grabbed the handles of the buggy, spun it around and wheeled it off across the concourse. She hated having to admit defeat. It was another fifteen minutes before she found herself back at the application counter pushing her freshly filled-out form across it at the frozen-faced visa cop, who gave no indication that she had any recollection of their previous encounter.

‘Passport,’ she said, and Margaret almost threw it at her. Having examined it only fifteen minutes earlier, she proceeded to examine it again in great detail as if for the first time. Then she looked at the form, scrutinising it carefully, section by section. Margaret stood watching her impassively as she entered details into a computer terminal behind the counter. Then she stamped the form several times and pushed a receipt back across the counter, along with the passport. ‘Visa over there,’ she said, pointing to a young man in uniform sitting further down the same counter. All the people who had been in the line behind Margaret at the visa application desk, now stood in the line ahead of her at the visa issuing desk.

Margaret leaned over the counter and said, ‘Chicken feet.’

The visa cop looked at her in surprise. ‘I am sorry?’

‘Someone told me once they were good for the complexion. You should give them a try.’ And she wheeled the still wailing Li Jon down to the visa issuing desk. It was petty, childish even, but it made Margaret feel just a tiny bit better.

But as she stood in the queue at the visa issuing desk, she saw Miss Chicken Feet with the bad complexion walk along behind the counter and whisper something in the ear of the issuing officer. The young man looked up and ran his eyes quickly down the line. They rested briefly on Margaret, and then he nodded and turned back to his computer terminal. The girl went back to her desk. Margaret began to worry. When she finally got to the head of the queue, the officer didn’t even look at her. He took her receipt and her passport, and his keyboard chattered as he entered data into his computer. He took a thin sheet of official paper from a tray, scribbled on it, and then stamped it with red ink and pushed it across the counter at Margaret. ‘Come back in two days for passport,’ he said.

‘What?’ Margaret couldn’t believe it.

‘Two days,’ said the officer. ‘Next.’

‘I’ve never had to leave my passport before,’ Margaret said.

The officer met her eye for the first time. He was coldly impassive. ‘You want visa, you come back in two days. Okay?’ And he was already taking the passport from the next in line.

Margaret knew she was beaten. She glanced along the counter and caught Miss Chicken Feet smirking.