How Sweet the Bitter Soup by Lori Qian

Author:Lori Qian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2019-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

When we returned to the hotel, we called the embassy on my mobile phone. They confirmed that they couldn’t do anything by fax and that we did indeed need to have the appropriate form.

“Well, you’ll need to go to Guangzhou,” William said mat-ter-of-factly after I hung up the phone.

My eyes widened. “Sweetie, what do you mean? Go to Guangzhou, get the form, and come back here? This is crazy. It’s totally expensive, and we’re so short on money now!”

“What other choice do we have?” he asked. “This is our only chance to get that form.”

I knew he was right. I couldn’t believe we were going to do this, but what choice did we have?

Throughout the day we tried to focus on what we could do— which wasn’t much. However, we were required to get a medical exam, so we figured this was the best time to do it. We had gotten the form for the medical exam from the official and took that with us to the hospital.

We had to pay almost five hundred kuai (yuan) right off the bat—another expense we hadn’t planned for. The irony is, money was not usually an issue for me in China. I made an American salary, and when we converted that to yuan, we multiplied by eight! This generally equaled me not having to worry too much about lack of money.

These circumstances, however, were quite different. I had gone home just one month earlier, and the expense of that trip and my dad’s funeral costs had all but wiped me out financially. As we forked over the five hundred yuan to get our medical tests, we began to be conscious of how little money we really had— especially since we’d just learned that we needed to buy me a plane ticket to Guangzhou so I could get that precious piece of paper from the embassy.

All the plans William and I had about giving his family lots of money and buying them a new washing machine and water heater went right out the window as these marriage certificate expenses continued to add up.

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