西洋오랑캐

Yesterday I was sitting at home, under immigration office mandated vacation, organizing my mp3s when without warning my phone rang. The number was an unfamiliar one, so I answered with trepidation.

“Is this Jinhui?” a strange Korean man asked me.

Jinhui, unlike Kelly…or Chris, is one of those names that only girls can have, so when this character had any doubt as to weather or not I was Jinhui, I knew right away I was not dealing with the brightest fellow. I informed him that I was not Jinhui, but I was her husband.

“Ah I need to talk to you too. I need to set up an interview with you and your wife, when would be good for you?”

“An interview? Who are you?”

“Oh, I should have introduced myself! I’m with the immigration office. We need to interview you and your wife. What would be a good time to meet?”

“Well, my wife is working right now, I’ll have to check with her and get back to you.”

“Ok fine.” Click.

So I phoned up my wife, and passed along some information and phone numbers so that she could arrange a meet and greet with the good people at the immigration office. A short time later she called me back, “We’re going to immigration tomorrow morning for an interview. He said it would be about 30 minutes long.”

A 30 minute interview? That’s a pretty intense interview…I’ve had shorter job interviews than that. My mind began racing. “What questions will they ask me during this interview? What if they don’t like the cut of my jib?” I started to feel uneasy, much like Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi (”It’s a trap!!!”).

After an evening spent doing mock interviews, the wife and I hit the sack to rest up for the big interview. Somehow it took us over an hour to get to the town where immigration is from our town, and then we had to catch a local bus…we would never make it to the office in time. So we snagged a cab…a cab with a driver that seemed to have no idea where we needed to go.

With a cab driver barreling down the avenue, and my wife and I giving half-assed directions (”I think you need to turn by that big crab statue,”) we somehow managed to arrive in a timely fashion. We bolted from the cab, ran across lanes of traffic, and up several flights of stairs. We had made it. We walked over to the window we were told to meet the interogater and announced our arrival.

He stared at us blankly.

“Oh…you people. Please sit down.”

He then handed my wife a sheet of paper and told her to write about how we had met, when we met, and why we got married. I watched the news on the television. Once my wife finished the paper, the guy asked her a series of Wyatt Dunn triva questions: how many siblings, hometown, major in college, name of my university, and so on. From there the guy asked my wife about some of the information of the papers we filed earlier in the month: “Who is Seonhui?” “My sister.”

I figured that I would have do write a similar deposition and answer triva about my wife so he could make sure we got our stories straight, but he simply took the papers, said he would call us in about two weeks and we were free to go. I had to do nothing…except offer up the more correct and commonly used name of my university (SUNY Albany as opposed to Albany State University). Other than that I did nothing.

So we left immigration and perpared to head home, first stopping for a cup of coffee. As we drank coffee we noticed a Chinese food shop (中國食品 as opposed to 中華料理) and decided we would go pay them a visit. I’m not really sure what we were looking for when we decided to pay them a visit, but we ended up buying 100 grams of Jasmine tea for ￦2,000 (about $2) and then calling it a day.

As we got on the bus home, I declared I would have never set foot in that town again, if not for cheap Chinese tea. “And the fact that immigration still has your passport,” my wife added.

“And that.”