knowing what to write: the duplicity of our life

It's always hard to know what to write about our lives in China. This post isn't meant to be a complaint in any way, perhaps an explanation about why we don't share more details, or more often, or why we there's a long pause before we answer.

The first reason communicating clearly is difficult is because it's difficult to find the right balance. We don't only want to share the good things going on, but that leaves out our struggles, but we also don't want to over-emphasize our difficulties and leave out the positive stuff. We don't want to complain all the time, but we don't want to be overly-rosy.  We also don't want to become PR experts, always trying to "spin" a story the direction we want. Sometimes we just want to tell the story.

The truth is that our life is neither as glamorously cool as some of you think, nor is it as grimly arduous as others think. When we used to have a house helper, that made our life seem very privileged. "Wow, you're a stay at home mom and you have a helper!" However, we have no dishwasher, no dyer, no convenience products or foods, so the extra help sure it nice. Although we live abroad, we are very much regular people who don't have the have the privilege or prestige of diplomats. We do get to see and experience another life and culture, but most days we just live regular ole normal life.

Here's our family at a UNESCO world heritage site. That was cool, but we were only able to see this because we traveled to a friend's wedding nearby. 

There are parts of our life that are terribly difficult, but not every minute is like that. There's also lots of job, happiness, and fun. One time I was talking with someone in the States about our life in China and she tried to make a comparison between our life and a summer backpacking Europe and living in hostels. It's not that hard. We sleep in our own comfortable beds every nights. While we do have to travel to get to our China home, we are home once we get there. We are well-fed. We have all that we need.

James would also like to chime in and add that our life also probably isn't as spiritual as many of you think is. We are doing our best to maintain our personal disciplines, to guide our children toward faith, and to share Truth with those we encounter, but we are far from perfect and experience many of the the same challenges that most of you do. (and possibly some other as well).

The second reason telling all our story is difficult is because we live on two continents. It's hard to maintain the relationships we have with friends and family in the States when we're in China. It's hard to keep up with our Chinese friends when we're stateside. When we're in China and we need to take care of things (banking, taxes, etc) we have to stay up late at night to make the necessary phone calls. To stay in touch in China, we use wechat, which basically no one in the States uses. In US, our friends use facebook, which is blocked in China.

And mentioning social media brings me to the third reason it's hard to share: technology and security. Technology makes living on two continents SO MUCH EASIER, but it also creates some headaches. In addition to multiple social media accounts, we have multiple email accounts. Some accounts require first signing in to our VPN and the encrypted portion of our hard drive. Some days our internet is fast enough for all that to work smoothly, and other days it's not. Our business accounts in China can't overlap with some of the messages we receive from the States. I maintain this blog and connect it with my facebook account, but we never disclose our location here or on our facebook.

I also manage a blog about the city where we live, but because it discloses our location, I can't connect it here or with my facebook, thus, I connect it with my wechat and have a second facebook account I use to promote the blog and connect with Chinese friends or expat friends connected with our city.

Managing all of the email, social media, and blogs takes time, and generally it's the first thing to let slide when things get busy. But that leaves many of you feeling like we aren't staying in touch as we should be.

We'd love to tell more of the story of the people we serve, but that's difficult to do and maintain what we feel is appropriate security. We'd love a way to streamline all that's involved in communication, but when most of the US platforms are blocked in China and the most-used Chinese platform is not popular in the US, it doesn't seem possible.

If you'd like to connect more with the China side of our life, send us an email and we can send the link to our city blog. Also, we'd love suggestions to improve our newsletter as it seems to be our best venue for communication. And, a little more understanding of all that we're juggling when we respond slowly.

best of 2015

The past couple days I'm sorting, organizing, and formatting the pictures we'll use for our 2016 poster in our dining room.

I realize most people do their looking back on the previous year in early January. Because I won't print our poster until we're back in China I wasn't in a hurry to do this project, but now that our time here (in US) is coming to a close, I started working on it this week. Anyway, it's so good to look back on all our memories and how good He was to us.

I'll share 2016's picture once it's done, but here is 2015's that I didn't share last year.

you can't make this stuff up....

Situations like the subject of today's post are the reason my blog has the name that it does: because there are so many situations with life overseas that the only response is to shrug one's shoulders. Ok. It's not the only response. But it's preferable to bursting forth with a tirade of anger.

There's so much back story here. You need to know that even simple banking transactions in China take multiple receipts, stamps, signatures, and paperwork. Nothing is "simple." It's even more difficult operating as a business than as an individual. It's even more complicated when you're a foreign-owned business.

Essentially, we had to use Bank of China to open our business account. There is exactly one branch, exactly one window that we can go in-person to use. If the someone who works that window is out, on break, on vacation...sorry. Come back another day.

BUT.....They have online banking! That doesn't mean you can actually just log on to the bank's website and make a transaction. In order to access your online banking account you have to first insert a USB fob security protection thingy. After that, to actually complete any transaction, both parties on the account have to enter their username and password correctly. In a larger company this would be like the CEO and the CFO, in our case it's me and James. In theory it's a great checks and balances system: one party enters who should be paid what and the second party approves it. IN THEORY.

Here's the thing: this fob thingy is clearly ONLY designed to be used with Chinese computers with Chinese operating systems, even though we are a foreign owned company.

Our first problem was that the majority of the time we plugged in the USB, it would un-install our Chinese keyboard rendering us unable to type Chinese. We operate in China, so every payee has a name that we need to type Chinese characters for! This device makes typing in Chinese impossible. After trying a failed series of actual fixes for this problem, we just outsmarted it! We would send ourselves wechat messages with all the Chinese words we needed to type, open up the web version of wechat, have two tabs open and cut the words from wechat and paste them into the online banking window.

Judds-1
Chinese online banking-0

Lest you think this problem is limited to us, it's not. Our friends in our city who also have a business have one and only device that they can even get the fob to register in and it's some old laptop that's like 12 years old. They use it for nothing other than this one task of online banking.

But the problem was becoming exacerbated. Instead of just disabling our Chinese keyboard, which it began doing more frequently, it's now just messing with the keyboard in general. This means that even if a type a letter "c," it may or may not register that I'm typing a "c." This becomes a HUGE problem when one must confirm not one, but TWO user names and passwords in order to do a single transaction. AND, one also only has three tries to type the password correctly before you are completely locked out of your account.

Let me break it down this way: To access our account we have to use a device that messes up our keyboard, but we still need the keyboard to enter the correct passwords. It makes our computer unable to type Chinese and then requires us to type Chinese to actually make any payments.

Remember how I said there's only one bank and only one window? And guess what? Because James and I are BOTH on the account we BOTH have to go to this one window and wait in line and fill out papers, and bring our passports, and company registration paperwork, and company chops (stamps) to reset the online. And if we both have to go we either have to do all this with three small ones at our feet or find a babysitter.

We are currently in our third lockout. THIRD LOCKOUT! At least the first two happened when we were a few miles from the bank. This time it's when we're in America and our bank, and our hope of reset, is on the other side of the world.

Judds- (maybe)1
Chinese online banking- 3

These are the aspects of life overseas that we've just gotta shrug our shoulders and go on, because there is literally nothing we can do until we're back on that side of the world. Our business money is just stuck there and we're here.

But, I'll also add that this is the same account and same money that it took us exactly three months to the day to get access to when we were first registering the business. We started transferring the money for the initial business investment on Jan 10 and it was completed on April 10. The name and investment amount on the wire transfer had to exactly match the name and investment amount on our registration documents. On our registration paperwork, James and I invested equal amounts separately. X amount from him and X amount from me. However, all this money was coming from the same place, our joint account in the States. It HAS to come from the States to verify that it's a foreign invested company. But because it's a joint account, James name keeps showing up on both wires, truncating my name since it's the second name listed on our joint account.

We stayed up late at night multiple nights calling our US bank to talk through options about how to make my name show up. We paid additional wire fees for the banks to send each other "messages" to try to make it all line out correctly. The Chinese bank had all the investment capital but couldn't give us access to the money or finalize the opening of our account until the names matched.

We looked at options for me opening an additional, separate account so that my name would be the only one listed. (No one lets you do that from the other side of the world) Finally, we remembered an old savings account I had before we were married. Score! More late nights calling their customer service to change it to my married name. That was easy. After we got access to that account, we planned to move the money there, then transfer it to China. Guess what? That bank can't do international transfers!

New plan. We'll use one of our other accounts to transfer it. (Our main bank is a local bank in OK has to use a bigger bank to send the wire transfers and the messages and some things are getting lost in that first transfer, so we're trying to cut out middlemen).

More late nights on the phone with that bank's customer service who tell us they won't send international wire transfers to China because there's been an uptick in fraud. James patiently asks for manager after manager until they finally agree to do it if he can answer a series of security questions.

If you think that seems like an easy task, you have never been an expat. Where were we living when the account was opened? Which stateside information did we give them? my parents? James parents? Our old house we still owned after we moved to China but sold recently? cell phone number? whose? at which point in history? But this particular set of "escalated" security questions will go back 15 years and pull questions from our credit history. Although it is day time for the US bank, it's the middle of the night for us, and we are living in three-small-children-induced-sleep-deprived-inability-to-remember-what-we-ate-for-breakfast-land, and now the registration of our business depends on our ability to recall specific numeric data from any point in the past 15 years.

GREAT. In this case, seriously. Great job, James. He was able to pull out his cousin's full birth date (who was also a college roommate) and I think we had to know the names of all the counties we had lived in. or not lived in. I can't remember now. And a few more questions. Anyway, somehow we were able to convince them to let us send our own money to our own selves.

If you've read this far, the moral is this: the Judds can't win. If we're in China, our money is stuck in the US wire transfers or fraud protection purgatory. If we're in the US, our money is stuck in China's USB-keyboard malfunction hell.

Next time I'll write about how every time we've broken a cell phone, it's been a Chinese phone breaking in America when the needed parts are in China, or breaking an American cell phone in China, when the needed parts are in America.

Abigail Joy's first birthday

Well, I found this I hadn't published yet and it was six months ago!

We didn't have an official party for Abigail, but we took a cake to our Sunday gathering and we always have a meal afterwards. We celebrated her then with some of the members of our church.

Our one year old! 

Of course I forgot to take a picture of the cake before we cut it. We decided a smiley face was fitting for our generally content, happy girl.

Family members from the States sent birthday presents for her. 

It's seemingly impossible to get a photo of all three of them looking at the camera!

At one year old Abigail is a very content girl. She can play happily with just a few toys for a longer period of time than either of her sisters.She took her first steps last week on Catherine's birthday, but she isn't really walking yet. She loves her sisters. She loves music and dancing. She hasn't started speaking yet. She's not a picky eater and will put ANYTHING in her mouth. ANYTHING. We have to constantly watch the things she picks up from the floor/ground because they all go straight to her mouth! She is truly living up to her middle name and bringing our family so much joy!