After Alex’s illness, I know it sounds so cliche, but we were so happy to have him home with us and healthy(ish) that you couldn’t help but look around and be grateful for the weird set of circumstances that had affected us during the last 10 months.
I’ve said it before and it’s as true today as ever, I can go anywhere and do anything so long as I have my family. Mark gives me strength and believes in me when I don’t believe in myself, he is the anchor on my wildest stormy days and so long as we’re together, I can get on board for any adventure (which is how we ended up in China). Alex is my wild, my try something new, my be-better-than- I-thought-I- could- be. He inspires me to be a better version of me as an example for him, and he is the most compassionate kid, with the weirdest sense of humor, and I find myself looking forward to see what kind of man he becomes.
All this to say, I can make anywhere home so long as we’re together. Right after Alex got home, we got the news that my visa had been approved and if we could find a flight (that didn’t cost 12,000$- no joke, that’s what some seats were going for, not even in business class) we could come back home to China. We checked with Alex’s doctors to make sure that he would be able to fly, and they gave us the all clear. So we booked tickets and started packing up our Houston lives to bring back to China.
It is amazing to me how much we managed to accumulate in just under a year, but there were new clothes, so many thoughtful gifts from friends and family, and suddenly the two suitcases we came with were overflowing. We bought and packed some new carry on luggage (no affliations, I get nothing from this recommendation, but I just really liked these bags, — and now it seems like they are even less expensive https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LX9BWDM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) and thankfully my aunt and uncle were willing to store two boxes for us.
But for the stupid part, because we had flown from Hong Kong to Miami (via San Fran) American Airlines was making us leave from Miami, even though we had to fly from Miami to Dallas to South Korea to Shanghai. You know Dallas, as in the city a 3 hour drive north of where we were living? Yeah so we flew from Houston to Charlotte to Miami. And this is where the most stressful trip of my life started.
So, the rules to get back into China went , at the time, like this- Get visa, buy plane ticket, get a negative covid test (both PCR – up the nose- and IGG- the blood test) within 48 hours of flying. For those not familiar with the US during this time, no one was able to give us 48 hour results most couldn’t even give us 72 hour results- which was the previous rule. We found one place in Miami, I guess two really but the one basically costs your liver to get it done. I say we found, I called every testing site and number off a website from any where in Florida, I called multiple times asking for updates and finally we had to go with this last place, even though they cost a fortune. They had three appointments left but for a weird time that wouldn’t work for us with the flights we needed to take, so after calling and talking to the amazing lady who answers the phones, she told us to come by right when they open and they would make it happen for us.
After landing in Miami, we drove to the north side of the city, to this weird bank building park lot, and pulled in to the teller window lane. We weren’t the first car, but I think we were second or third. We had to have our passports out, and they checked our names to the forms and then they swabbed, Alex went first, then Mark and lastly me. I’m not going to lie, I’m a baby and anything up my nose makes me cry, I tear up getting my eyebrows done. Alex and Mark were teasing me because I had managed to avoid testing up until that point but they had both had it done already. We drove home and they said we’d have the results in an hour.
The second part of rules for flying back to China is that once you get the results back, you have to send them, along with pictures of your passport, visas, flight itinerary, and some other things to the Chinese Embassy. They then send you back a peice of paper with the stamp that you show to the airlines. It was so late when we got our results that we sent out our papers to the embassy with Urgent written all over it, and we went to the airport early in the morning without the stamps hoping that they would appear before we boarded. In addition to the need to fly to Miami to go to Dallas, we had to have the approval before we boarded the flight to Dallas so there were some really anxious moments waiting for it. But we managed to squeak by and get on the plane to head to Dallas, and we kept waiting for someone to tell us that the flight was cancelled or something else would prevent us from getting to that Dallas flight. We had so many tickets cancelled and rescheduled and we had thrown all our eggs into this basket.
Flight to Dallas, no big deal, we had a longish layover in Dallas so we sat down and had lunch- we were in the same terminal at almost the same gate we flew out of on our first visit to China. Mark will be the first to tell you, I like to be early…. not normal people early but like 15 minutes to everything, so waiting at the gate is the only way I feel calm, and I even get anxious that I’m somehow going to miss my flight while I’m sitting at the gate- and that’s on a normal flight, not a getting back to my life flight. As soon as we were done eating I dragged the boys over to the gate to wait, and it’s a good thing I did– our flight was already lining up early and there were extra steps to get on the flight.
We had to scan a QR code and enter information to get another code that they would scan before we got off the plane in China. Mark’s code worked, Alex’s code worked… mine- error messages- asked for help from the flight attendent, she was mobbed by everyone asking questions, so she asked a nice Chinese student to help me. He couldn’t make it work either, I was starting to panic and tell Mark that he and Alex should go anyway and I’d follow later.
I don’t know how it finally worked, like so many things in the last year, it seemed like everything fell together at the last minute. Meanwhile the airline has been asking for volunteers to fly on the next flight (I think 4 days later) because they weren’t allowed to fly at full capacity and had oversold assuming (probably rightly) that not everyone would get all their testing and paperwork in right. We were listening to the numbers creeping up, by the time we board the plan they were up to $3500 and a hotel room for the time between flights.
Traveling Expat Family 