China 2008, Part VIII: Revenge of the Public Security Bureau

I find it interesting that, for the nearly entire month that I was away, Grant's Pad maintained a steady flow of daily visitation of close to 60 visits per day, while, over the last few weeks, despite that there have been new posts every few days, visitation has dwindled to just over 20 visits per day. Maybe if I stop writing completely, we'll see more visitors! But what would be the fun in that?

Bright and early on the morning after our reception, we left our large but somewhat grungy hotel to go pick up Cherrie's parents. Our flight was scheduled for around 8 in the morning or so, and we had told them to pack warm clothes the night before. However, when we got there, they had not even changed their clothes! In fact, Cherrie's parents didn't really feel comfortable going on a trip with my family - I wonder if their not being prepared might not have been a last ditch effort to not go... but we ended up leaving on time, although they still didn't pack any warm clothes - something which would bite us a bit later on in the trip when we would go up a snow-capped mountain!

After about an hour drive, we arrived at Wuxi Airport. I'd never been to Wuxi Airport before - it was actually quite nice - a bit smaller than Shanghai Pudong Airport and thus less crowded. At least at 7 in the morning, anyway. I was a bit surprised when my mom recognized a poster ad featuring the Korean singer, Rain, at the airport. Rain is the hottest artist to come out of Asia over the last few years, exploding on the entertainment scene when he starred in the comedy series Full House opposite Song Hye-kyo of Autumn In My Heart fame. A recent online user poll by TIME magazine found him to be the most popular entertainer - and he wasn't even on the official list in the actual magazine feature! In any case, I did not even know about Rain until Cherrie's Korean roommate told me who he was earlier this year - I guess my mom is more in tune with the Asian entertainment industry than I am!

The major challenge of this morning was finding out whether or not Cherrie would be allowed to board the plane. If you recall from my first post about the Public Security Bureau, Cherrie had surrendered her old passport and Chinese ID card so that she could renew her passport, which was due to expire in July. The only problem was, she needed at least one of those documents in order to fly! Luckily for us, there was a local PSB office right there in the airport, so we hurried over to try to figure out how we could solve this problem. The PSB officer told us that we would have to fax a copy of her ID card in order for him to let her board. The problem was, it was Sunday morning - how could we get the person holding her ID card to find a fax machine at 7AM on a Sunday?

After a lot of pleading and trying to call the local PSB office in Cherrie's home district, we decided we would stay behind and wait to have the ID card brought to us. The tour coordinator lady then made one last effort and took Cherrie and her dad to the airport PSB office again. Remarkably, Cherrie's dad recognized a superior officer who happened to walk by the office who then had the other officer pull up Cherrie's registration information on the computer and print out a temporary ID card, complete with her profile photograph! The officer could have verified her identity just by looking her up in the computer this whole time, but chose instead to have us run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to get the information ourselves!

Score another victory for "A$$es of the Public Security Bureau"!