How to Get Incredible Service at Immigration

First of all, long time no see, blog friends. The last six weeks have been a whirlwind of late nights with baby

and early mornings with Tim Gearty studying for the CPA exam.

I found it hard to justify blogging when I literally didn’t even have the time to return my parents’ phone calls (I know, terrible son). The only reason I’m managing to write this is that I’ve just surpassed my expectations by scoring in the high 80s-low 90s on four of the six chapters on my Becker’s Financial Accounting and Reporting practice exam for the week. The other two were, to my disappointment, Income Statement (63%) and Marketable Securities and Consolidations (a shocking 37%).

That unpleasantness aside it’s gratifying to see some progress being made for all the early mornings and ten hour stretches of studying at McDonald’s and Starbucks on Saturdays. Most amazing to me though has been the amount of support that Miyoung has given me. I was fully prepared for her to try to get me to stay home and help her take care of Pauline to the exclusion of my studies, but quite the contrary she has pushed me to study harder (and earlier in the morning) than ever, and I can feel it paying off.

OK, enough about waking up early in the morning, which I feel is becoming my only character trait. The real reason I’m writing today is to tell you about a very interesting experience I had this week. On Thursday of last week I took the afternoon off to go to the Incheon Immigration Office to register Pauline and apply for her foreigner registration card. I availed myself of the apparently up-to-date information available at Hi Korea and went to the office fully prepared to apply for Pauline’s F-1 (family visitation) visa, using myself as the family being visited.  This is permitted according to the Hi Korea site, which states that F-1 visas are available for the spouses or children of those with F-2 (Residential, spouse of a Korean national or permanent resident) visas.  I came prepared with original and copies of the following documents as instructed by Hi Korea:

• application
• passport
• birth certificate
• my foreigner registration card 
• my certificate of employment from my company (to prove economic viability)

I also brought our marriage certificate, mostly because it was already in the pile from when we had to register Pauline at the U.S. Embassy a few weeks ago.  There are a few reasons that we chose to have Pauline’s visa come from me rather than her mom.  First and foremost is the fact that both she and her mom get their health insurance from me, but similarly relevant was the fact that Pauline’s birth was not registered with the neighborhood office, and so she is not included on any family register or any other such document in Korea.  Finally, Miyoung is a permanent resident in the U.S., and previous experience has shown that this tends to complicate matters significantly.

After a pleasant wait spent banging out questions about pensions and overhearing through thick, high quality 3M earplugs the conversations of impossibly loud fobby American English teachers and their handlers, I bellied up to the counter and found myself face to face with the same woman who helped me out the last two times I’d gone to immigration.  I wasn’t sure if she remembered me, but I realized that this was probably my first time coming here without Miyoung and thus on my own and in the driver’s seat.  I handled myself ably in Korean.  Comprehension – 100%.  I would give myself a 90% for communicating what I wanted to say on this particular occasion.  I chalk all of this up to working in a Korean office, which is a great way to improve your Korean skills fast and the skills learned there easily transfer over into the rest of your life.

But I digress.  I hand over the sheaf of documents and explain that my daughter was born in Korea and needs a visa.  She goes through the documents and sorts them out into three piles.  She tells me the application form I downloaded from Hi Korea is wrong and makes me go fill one out and come back.  She then tells be that the fee of 50,000 won is just for the registration, but the issuance of the card costs another 10,000.  Keep that in mind as well, those of you following in my footsteps.

Then she asks where Miyoung’s paperwork is.  I explain that I understood that the visa could be issued with just my information and that Miyoung’s was not necessary.  She gave me a look as if to say ‘Yes, but . . .’  Then she said ‘ . . . yes, but . . . ‘

‘Can’t you just proceed with the  documents you have?  Is there anything missing?’

‘Can you call your wife and have her fax her ID card to us?’

‘We don’t have a fax machine.’

‘She can go to a stationery store.’

‘She’s 산후조리, plus she’s taking care of the baby right now, so there will be no faxing.  Why do you need that anyway, can’t you just use my documents?’

‘Are you working?’

I anticipated this.  ‘My certificate of employment is right there.’

At this point she scrunched up her face in exasperation at my incredibly good document preparation.  She turned to the clerk next to her and explained the situation.  ‘This baby’s mother is Korean, but we don’t have proof of citizenship for the mother.  What can we do?’

‘Use the marriage certificate as proof of citizenship.’ he replied nonsensically.  I laughed to see the hoops they were willing to go through to get it down in writing that Pauline Miriam is a Korean.  I also kicked myself for including the marriage certificate, which was not a required document, in the submission.  I would have loved to see what they would have done without it.  Perhaps they may have used my garlic breath as proof of my wife’s nationality.

And so that’s how Pauline Miriam Mondello got her Korean visa.  The whole thing was very cordial.  I never really got angry or cared much, because I knew in the end that they had a full submission on their hands and it was going to go through either way.  I would love to see if anyone else has had a similar experience though.  Is it their mandate to not let even half a Korean fall through the cracks?

Here’s The Story Of Our Baby’s Birth

The following is an email I wrote to my friend Jeff, who is about to become a first-time father as well. I got the idea from a very touching email from my friend Matt, which I received ten days before Pauline was born. Matt’s email follows (without his permission, actually, but with the names changed just in case).

Fair warning: I forwarded this email to my family and my mother suggested Jeff may never speak to me again and my cousin Dianne wrote ‘Adoption has never sounded better after reading this’.  Just so you know.

Jeff,

 

I got the email below from a friend of mine on January 15th, and it really touched me, so I felt a responsibility to write you and give you the low-down on my experience having Pauline.

 

First of all, I strongly recommend you don’t drink until Carol has the baby.  January 24 was the hundredth day after my nephew’s birth, which is a big event in Korea.  My sister-in-law and her husband had a party at their house with a lot of alcohol, and I got drunker than I’d probably been probably since the last time I saw you actually, as it’s been a pretty dry year.  Anyway, we left their house and got home after midnight, and Miyoung woke me up to tell me her water broke at 5:30.  Her brother and mother went with us to the hospital and left us there, taking our jackets and all of our bags with them to free us up a bit.  Miyoung’s water had broken but she hadn’t gone into labor, so they induced that beginning around 8 am.  At this point we were in a common room in sight of the nurse’s desk.  I was badly hung over, but more than that I was extremely nervous, and when I get nervous I drink water and go to the bathroom.  Over and over again I went to the bathroom, feeling terrible for walking away from my wife but really helpless to do otherwise, as my nervous bladder had shrunken to the size of a plum.

Miyoung’s sister is a nurse in the hospital where we went, and she had given birth there twice and so had Miyoung’s other sister, so they treated us very well.  It was also the first day of Chinese New Year (a three-day holiday in Korea) and so there were relatively few staff on duty, but even fewer patients.  That is how we ended up getting the ‘family delivery room’.  The family delivery room is a big room with everything you need to deliver a baby, plus a sofa, TV, fridge, and a private bathroom.  The degree to which the family delivery room is better than the regular delivery room-plus-recovery room combo is staggering, and I sort of felt guilty whenever I saw the other new parents in the halls.  Anyway, we moved into the family delivery room around 9, around the time that the induced contractions started to get really strong and frequent.  The nurses told me that any time a contraction came I should massage Miyoung’s lower back extremely hard.  I ended up doing this for about five hours straight, to the point where I thought I was going to lose all feeling in my fingers. 

I did not complain about this pain, however, Jeff, because the pain that Miyoung was going through from about 9 to 12 appeared to be staggering.  It made me want to cry to watch her go through this pain.  I mean her eyes had a far off look in them that I imagine people have when they are about to die.  She couldn’t meet my gaze.  I offered her my hand to squeeze throughout, and for this three hour period she either squeezed it so hard that I thought I was going to lose a nail or she instead grabbed my shirt and a handful of flesh with it like she was threatening to kill me.  She did not speak during any of this.  She said ‘Joey’ once in a voice so fraught with pain that I did actually shed a tear, and she said ‘It hurts’ in Korean probably a dozen times.  It was terrifying.

But the worst part was when I asked them to give her an epidural.  They informed me that the hospital we were in prefers not to give them, because ‘they can prolong the delivery’ and (this is actually a choice example of the way that Koreans talk when they are bullshitting you) ‘It can’t be said that the epidural would have no effect on the baby’ (although they refused to elaborate on what kind of effect it may have).  At that point I knew it would make Miyoung mad and hurt her more if I put up a huge fight (my first instinct) and that all my effort would do nothing but get my kicked out of the family delivery room, so I did what any husband would do when he realized that his wife was about to exerience a surreal level of pain.  I cried.  I just cried to think of all the pain that Miyoung was about to go through.  That thought just kept running through my head over and over again, that she was about to be forced to go through a natural delivery with no epidural just because we hadn’t done our homework (the three other kids in the family born at this hospital had all been C-sections).

After the really really bad contractions the doctors began to get serious.  The cervix had opened to 8cm but the baby hadn’t descended.  There was talk of a C-section.  The nurse told Miyoung she had amazingly perserverence.  The typical mother-to-be would have asked for a C-section ten times by this point, but Miyoung just silently suffered through the pain.  When things got serious they sent me back behind the curtain to sit on the sofa and wait with Miyoung’s mother and sister, who had arrived by this time.  This was scary, partly because these two women with experience with this kind of thing both looked incredibly serious and grave.  When the water breaks the doctors do a constant fetal health check to make sure the baby continues to get oxygen from the placenta.  If the placenta starts to fail they’ve got to go in and get the baby through a C-section.  The labor had already progressed very fast, but they wanted it to progress much faster because they were worried about the placenta.

From behind the curtain we could see the silhouette of a nurse on a chair physically pushing on Miyoung’s belly.  The doctor brought in the giant suction cup and performed an episiotomy, which makes an absolutely terrifying snapping sound.  At this point I was getting anxious, sure that they were going to pull the baby out of my terrified wife, in gruesome pain and alone, while I was on the other side of a curtain.  Finally the doctor told one of the nurses ‘Bring in the father’ and no sooner did she do so than I was on the other side of the curtain. 

They had my put my arm around Miyoung’s back and physically help her push along with the nurse on the step stool pushing her stomach.  We gave two final big pushes like that.  I was looking at Miyoung the whole time, but I did happen to glance down.  Don’t do that.  I saw my baby with a suction cup on her head and the image will flash in my head forever.  I mean, how can that be good for a kid?  Her head was stretched out like a conehead, no exaggeration.  I knew they were going to do that, but I didn’t need to see the sausage being made.

As soon as that final push, when the nurse on the step stool sank appreciably and I knew the baby was out, I peeked down to see my baby, being held by her feet and blue.  I couldn’t help myself, I did that cliche ‘ten fingers, ten toes’ thing.  That’s just what you do, I suspect.

As soon as Pauline was out the nurses hustled me away with her so they could work on Miyoung uninterrupted.  In fact, they ended up kicking out my mother- and sister-in-law too, but not before I got the chance to take a few pictures and cut the cord.  After that we were out in the hall and calling people.  Of course the hot topic was how Korean/white the baby looked.  This has continued to be a hot topic, with the initial consensus being ‘The baby looks like Miyoung’ having switched to the current ‘this baby looks like Joe’.  I do know that she has big eyes, of a color I’ve never seen before. Sometimes they look purple, other times gray, and sometimes they look brown-blue.  Very unique, and I suspect that, like blue-eyed kittens, the color will change soon, so I am taking as many pictures as I can.

Anyway, getting her out of the hospital and the first night at home is a story for another time.  Suffice it to say that having a baby is highly affecting, to say the least.

 

Let me know how things are progressing.  Also, where are your sonogram pictures?

 

Joe

And here’s Matt’s email to me.

So exciting, are you ready to see that little nugget?  We chose to keep the sex a surprise.  Everyone kept telling us it would be a boy, I was expecting just that.  When she came out I had to do a double-take.  Marcy was planning on delivering naturally, but she was not descending like they wanted.  So she had a Cesarian birth.  I watched as they pulled Sidney through Marcy’s abdomen.  I promised Carrie I would not leave her side, but when they put Sidney in the incubator thingymabobber, I could not resist. She was crying, and as soon as I put my hand on her body she stopped.  After they wiped her off, I took her over to Marcy for her to see her daughter. 

We were not pleased with the staff we had at that time, except the obstetrician was very nice, and he happened to be Korean.  Our midwife could not be there, and the people on rotation we did not see eye to eye with.  A series of unfortunate events.  However, most importantly, Sidney was wonderfully amazing.  We wheeled Marcy into an adjacent room immediately after she was sewn up, for Sidney to feed.  I put Sidney down on Marcy’s skin, under her gown, and Sidney pulled herself right up to Marcy’s nipple, within 10 minutes of being born.  We stayed in the hospital for the next four days.  I would hold Sidney directly on  my skin as well, with a blanket wrapped around us.  There has been some good research on the effects of skin to skin contact with newborns. 

Now I am missing them.  Marcy and Sidney are in Canada right now visiting family.

Good luck Joe, let me know how everything goes for you.

Matt

By The Way

No offense, Al Kooper and the other members of Blood Sweat & Tears, but it turns out you’re wrong

I can now say with absolute certainty that the child is in fact not the father to the man.

Quite the contrary!

That said, I find this absolutely indisputable:

Wife Gives Birth, I Photograph

Allow me to introduce you to Pauline Miriam Mondello:

Pauline Miriam Mondello

 I’ll be updating this album constantly, so if you’re interested you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

By the way, the series I wrote about jung has been nominated for a Golden Klog for Best Post or Series in a Korea Blog, 2008 over at Korea Sparkling, but will most likely lose to that big giant thing about complaining expats and defensive Koreans.  Still, it’s nice to be reminded that I used to have interests other than burping (my new baby).  Vote for me if you hate jung, anyway.

What’s With All The Sympathy?

(I’m still blogging from the iPod touch. I’ve got the Korean keyboard working now인거 같은데 I’m not so much in the mood for such niceties as proper spell checking and links, so all y’all people who like to judge people on their spelling, punctuation and the factual truth of the things they write should read at your own risk)

Anyway, I came home last night and was greeted by the sight of endless news coverage of an encounter between demonstrators and the Seoul SWAT team that left six dead. Here are the details I am currently aware of:

The fire that killed all those people was caused by the Molotov cocktails that the demnstrators had stocked in the battle turret that they constructed on the roof of a building in order to stage a standoff with the police.

Honestly that’s all I need to know. These protestors pose an obvious and serious danger to themselves, the police and the public, and any country that takes the law seriously would do what it takes to stop this kind of dangerous behavior.
So I point out all this to my mother-in-law and she tells me that the police are to blame. I ask her how that can possibly be the case. “Ehhhhhhh” (ie “Don’t think too much about such things, just believe.”)
You probably are way ahead of me here. This is exactly what happened when that dick burnt down Namdaemun. People here seem to sympathize with unrepentant jerks. Granted, all but one of the people who died was a demonstrator, but that doesn’t negate the fact that they were the ones who built a battle tower, made (and appear to have at least lit) the Molotov cocktails that started the fire, and goaded the police in the first place.
Nonetheless there’s talk in the press about the police chief stepping down and calls from some corners for the police who participated to be somehow punished.
This is the kind of dumb crap you come up with when you combine a complete lack of principles with a love of dramatic, stupid and incredibly destructive behavior in others.

Irony

Pu’er Tea Bubble Bursts

The New York Times has a funny (but ultimately sad) article about the bursting of the pu’er tea (보이차) bubble in China. Those of you who live in Korea are likely to have been told about this tea but an 아저씨 who probably told you how it gets rid of hangovers. Chinese friends have uniformly told me that pu’er tea is the diet drink of choice in China these days. I quite like its strong yet somehow mild, hay-like flavor and have some that a Chinese friend of mine brought over here for me.  At 16,000 won a disk (a fermented block about the size of a small dish and as thick as a pack of cigarettes) the price is just right, but at the peak price of $150 a pound, which is just ridiculous, I’m pretty sure that the burgundy liquid would leave a bitter taste in my mouth (modern internet etiquette requires that I hang a lampshade on this bad pun in some way . . . zing!).
I love bubbles. There’s something so great about the way people talk up some dumb thing (real estate comes to mind, but I hear we are also in the middle of a luxury bag bubble, a sea salt bubble and a blog bubble, the last of which is least likely to make anyone poor that doesn’t otherwise have it coming) and make you feel like you can’t live without it, and then when the bubble bursts everyone shares a good laugh over how dumb they were. It was all in good fun. Except some people’s lives and hopes for their children’s future are ruined as a result.
It’s all in the game, as they say on the mix CD that my local Starbucks plays on Saturdays.

But actually this particular bubble is the best one, because the product in question is (a) something I can afford, (b) something I like, and (c) something that is probably worth a try.  Not because of any hangover-relieving or fat-fighting properties.   Regular readers of this blog should know that I pretty much discount all health claims morea elaborate than ‘it’s nutritious’.  Nonetheless, when all those ruined Chinese farmers start to unload their pu’er tea, make sure and snap some up.

My Favorite Thing on TV

At the moment is a public service announcement that is absolutely brilliant. It shows clips of people doing typically rude things that you might see people doing anywhere around Seoul on a typical day: talking loud on their phones on a crowded subway, pushing and shoving, not letting people out of the elevator before trying to get on, etc. At the end of the commercial a single sentence comes on the screen. Forgive me for not being able to write hangeul, as my Dell computer has still not been fixed (that’s a long angry story for another time) and I’m forced to blog at you from the iPod touch. That simple, genius message is

Eolmana deo bukkeureowoya haeyo?

Which I would translate as one or more of the following:

Shouldn’t we be a lot more embarrassed?
This should make us more ashamed
We should be much more ashamed

Et cetera et cetera.

Way to shame, PSA.

By The Way . . .

It’s a girl. I mean, once she’s born, she’ll be a girl.

Because Yes, Nationalism Is Bad

Further proof in this tragic waste of time (HT to Idiot’s Collective)

Like, truly tragically wrong. So wrong that I’ve gone to the trouble of reposting this video.
What force has the entardening power of nationalism to shut off people’s power of rational thought. I find it truly disgusting that people would make such a pathetically self-serving one-sided video without even the apparent ability to see why some (read: all those outside of South Korea) would have a difficult time accepting the message, medium, and means of communication chosen for this video and song.
That said, I should be careful myself to not fall victim to what I call ‘Brian’s Folly’, or the tendency to think that just because something is in English it needs to be heard, understood and digested by English speakers. I’m sure the douchebags who made this video are getting mad play for their trouble from their countrymen. The trouble I have is that, if the rest of South Korea is going to pretend that making shitty songs about Dokdo ‘for a foreign audience’ is somehow going to serve the country’s political interests, at least polish it up enough to be credible. I shudder to think of the degree to which most South Koreans who see such a pro-Dokdo video will be bound to ‘agree’ with the ‘effort’ to ‘convince’ ‘foreigners’ of South Korea’s claims to the islands that they occupy.