A tiny yet tremendous dream come true

Have you ever stood in a long line at an international airport, slowly inching toward the immigration inspector's counter, and looked over wistfully at the "Diplomatic Channel" lane? I remember so many jet-lagged afternoons at HKIA or JFK, staring incomprehensibly at the people around me and feeling like a zombie. If only I could breeze right through that empty lane and get on with the journey....

Oh friends, a most momentous thing has happened: I am now the owner of a diplomatic passport.

It has been 9 years and 6 months since getting a new passport. It's also been 9 years and 6 months with a horrid photo, so I tried to convey the weightiness of the situation to the girl at CVS who took a passport photo for me ("Can you just take one more please? Try one more time? This is for the next 10 years.")

Horrid photo aside, the old passport has well-beloved outlines of the last decade: The very first entry stamp into Hong Kong on 3 July 2003. 6 Chinese visas. Pages and pages of Lao entry and exit stamps from border crossings. The most prized of all - a single-entry tourist visa from the Union of Myanmar in 2009, before Burma got trendy.

The new passport is of an upgraded kind, though, and it has something lovely - quotes from American authors and leaders on each page. In light of the turmoil and attacks on our embassies last week, these two were particularly meaningful:

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." 

~John F. Kennedy

"We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream."

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

May God grant that we each live up to the noble callings we have received.

9/11 and the visa window

OK, so perhaps blogging is not my strongest point. For about two weeks I had no creative thoughts and pretty much forgot that I am even keeping a blog, and meanwhile so many clever people are writing clever things about life! But today is a new day.

As it happens, the last two weeks have also been spent learning how to be a consular officer - the person you see behind the window when you apply for a visa. Most consular officers do a lot more than visas (for example, help Americans in trouble and give out beautiful Certificates of Birth Abroad to newborn babies), but Shanghai mainly processes Non-Immigrant Visa applications. So I really will be standing at the visa window for 2 years. And it will be good.

On the first day of ConGen class, we were given two books: "The 9/11 Commission Report" (can now finish the assigned reading from a college class long ago...) and "9/11 and Terrorist Travel" (reviewed by TIME as "tantalizing and important," containing "full-color travel documents used by the 9/11 hijackers").

It turns out that the hijackers had gone in and out of the U.S. quite freely on perfectly valid visas. The immigration inspectors were mainly looking for intending immigrants, criminals, and drug couriers - not terrorists. In fact, the only potential hijacker to be denied a U.S. visa was turned away because he seemed like an intending economic immigrant. Looking at the hijackers' photos on their visa applications, I wonder: Would I have stopped any of them? Would I have recognized something suspicious in their stories or seen malice in their eyes? Standing at the visa window is serious business.

But despite the weightiness and frequent sense of drowning in legal citations, we've learned some interesting things:

• Being born to American citizen parents doesn't necessarily make you a citizen if you are born abroad - at least one parent must have resided in the U.S. at some point in life.
• Every year about 1 million immigrants come to the U.S. (legally/documented). 
• In 2011, 20 million people took a chance on the Diversity Visa Lottery for underrepresented countries. Hooray, 20 million people still believe we are the land of opportunity!

ConGen can be fun, especially when examining fake passports or role-playing visa interviews. But I always get a little envious when I walk by the Hindi and Azerbaijani classrooms each morning and think about all the new languages out there to learn!