The former Letter of Invitation is now apparently being referred to as the “Official Invitation Notice,” “Visa Notification,” or “Visa Issuance Notice Letter/Form” depending on which visa proxy service or Chinese consulate website you happen to check. There is absolutely no difference between these documents: They are all one and the same.

The Chinese embassy or consulate needs to see the original letter of invitation (visa notification) but does not retain it: It will be returned to you after the Z-visa is issued.

Unfortunately, the satellite package that I had been using–Dream TV–is no longer a viable option. Several channels were dropped due to financial difficulties and others were moved to an entirely different encryption system.

So I embarked on a mission from Elvis to find a better solution and I succeeded. The name of the company is China Satellite TV Service Center and it’s a national company that has been in existence for years. Historically, it has serviced Western consulates and 5-star hotels and has since expanded.

They offer three different packages, including the now defunct Dream TV, but the one that I have and highly recommend is HBOCN featuring over 60+ stations in English including 10 different movie channels and six sports channels. They have service branches all over China and will service any first- and second-tier city. Depending on your location, you may need a .60m dish instead of the standard .45m size. If you already have Dream TV, a dual-LNB setup can be installed giving you continued access to what is still left on Dream in addition to all the new stations. You will either need access to your building’s rooftop or a southeasterly exposure from your window or balcony.

Due to the popularity of Middle Kingdom Life, we were able to work out a “group sales” discount arrangement with the China Satellite TV Service Center. If you are interested in purchasing the package, be sure to mention that you learned about them through Middle Kingdom Life and you will receive a 10% discount off whatever their current purchase price is at the time of the order.

I think I found this to be as emotionally poignant as I did because it’s been almost six years since I’ve been home and I recently had occasion to communicate with family and friends I haven’t seen or spoken to in years, in one case since elementary school. At any rate, I felt this was worth sharing with our readers as I’m sure there are a lot of other “old-timers” in China who also haven’t been home in quite some time.

Recently, I overheard a mother and daughter in their last moments together at the airport. They had announced the departure. Standing near the security gate, they hugged, and the mother said, “I love you, and I pray you enough.”

The daughter replied, “Mom, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I pray you enough, too, Mom.”

They kissed and the daughter left. The mother walked over to the window where I was seated. Standing there, I could see she wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude on her privacy, but she welcomed me in by asking, “Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?”

“Yes, I have,” I replied. “Forgive me for asking, but why is this a ‘forever’ good-bye?”

“Well…I’m not as young as I once was, she lives so far away and has her own busy life. I have some challenges ahead and the reality is… her next trip back will be for my funeral,” she said.

“When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, ‘I pray you enough’. May I ask what that means?”

She began to smile. “That’s from a prayer that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone.” She paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail and she smiled even more. “When we said, ‘I pray you enough,’ we wanted the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them.”

Then, turning toward me, she shared the following as if she were reciting it from memory:

I pray you enough sun to keep your attitude bright no matter how gray the day may appear.

I pray you enough rain to appreciate the sun even more.

I pray you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive and everlasting.

I pray you enough pain so that even the smallest of joys in life may appear bigger.

I pray you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.

I pray you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.

I pray you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.

Then, she began to cry and walked away.

They say, it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but an entire life to forget them.

Take time to live.

To all my friends and loved ones who may have occasion to read this…

I pray you enough.

At the beginning of the financial crisis, when the survey study was first run, the average “happiness score” for Chinese women in cross-cultural marriages was 72, with women aged 25 to 30 reporting an average score of 76 and women aged 31 to 40 reporting a somewhat lower mean at 68.

The survey was repeated a year later with a total of 4,377 respondents with very different results: The overall happiness score dropped 25% to 54 (down from 76 to 63 for the 25- to 30-year old group and from 68 to 45 for the older women [Chen, 2009]).

It didn’t take long for the newspapers to jump all over these results with provocative headlines such as “Foreign men not so attractive” from the Shanghai Daily and “Chinese women find foreign men less attractive in financial crisis,” from the U.K.’s Telegraph with one special reports editor for the Shanghai Business Review announcing “Foreign Men Placed on the Discount Rack by Shanghai women” (ibid; Moore, 2009; Schwarz, 2009).

It is very difficult to know what these results actually mean, if anything, without having full access to the original instrument, the methodology, and raw data. I have no idea how “happiness” was defined or measured or how the final “happiness score” was calculated. As the subjects of this study were all anonymous Internet users who agreed to participate in an online poll, we have no way of knowing how many of the respondents participated in both studies. In addition, and especially because a comparison (control) group was not used in either survey (e.g., calculating “happiness scores” for a comparable group of women who were married to Chinese men during the same time periods), accurate interpretation of the comparison between the two sets of results is impossible. For example, it’s very possible and even likely that the world’s financial crisis has adversely impacted all marriages, regardless of racial composition. For all we know, the overall happiness index for Shanghai women married to Chinese men, during the same period of time, may have been significantly lower than for those married to foreign men.

What I did find interesting though were the results reported for dating and marital preferences among the single Chinese women who participated in both polls. The percentage of women who expressed a desire for marrying a foreign man dropped from 42.5 percent to just 16.8 percent with 68 percent now indicating a clear preference for Chinese men (Chen, 2009). These results support our findings from a recent survey study of 302 unmarried Chinese young adults (mostly university students) in which 48.6 percent of our female respondents indicated a clear preference for Chinese husbands (Mavrides, 2009).

The major difference, however, is in the interpretation of the results: In our study, the main reasons cited for this preference were concerns about cross-cultural conflict and parental disapproval, the latter of which may partially reflect the fact that our study’s population was considerably younger at a mean age of 21.5 years old.

Is the world’s financial crisis souring Chinese girls on Western men? The Telegraph reports:

One anonymous 30-year-old poster on a Chinese internet forum said she had dated four foreign men, but that “while they might be more romantic and have better taste than Chinese men, they are not as good in some ways. One of my ex-boyfriends was very petty. We had to split the bill in a restaurant even after going out a long time, which rarely happens with Chinese men.”

Aside from the fact that at least one of her Western boyfriends was a tightwad, and assuming there is a trend taking place in the decline of attraction to foreign men among single Chinese women, is this because the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt last year (in terms of what that represented to the world-at-large) or because, by comparison, fewer female Chuppies (Chinese upwardly-mobile professionals) are willing to struggle through the language barrier and other cultural differences as Chinese men are increasingly able to provide them with comparable or even greater stability later on in life? I suspect the latter, which is to say if there is an association between the economic meltdown in the West and a gradual decline in Chinese women’s attraction to foreign men, it’s probably because the schism between Yuppies and Chuppies, which once spanned the width of the Grand Canyon, has narrowed considerably.

The other point worth mentioning is that, as it appears the lion’s share of the women surveyed were from Shanghai, these data are most likely not representative of the majority of Chinese women who live in second- and third-tier cities, no more than a survey study of young, single, upwardly-mobile women from New York City would represent the average single American woman across that country.

Nevertheless, the inferences we gleaned from our study regarding which subgroups of Chinese women would be the most attracted to foreign men appear to be more valid today than they were a few months ago when we first wrote them (see Attraction to Foreign Men).

Notes

Chen, Jane (2009, March 25) Foreign Men not so attractive. Shanghai Daily. (Retrieved May 4, 2009 from http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200903/20090325/article_395437.htm)

Mavrides, Gregory (2009). An Exploratory Study of Dating and Marital Preferences Among Chinese Young Adults. Work in progress registered with cogprints.org.

Moore, Malcolm (2009, March 26). Chinese women find foreign men less attractive in financial crisis. U.K. Telegraph. (Retrieved May 4, 2009 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5054057/Chinese-women-find-foreign-men-less-attractive-in-financial-crisis.html)

Schwarz, Brian (2009, March 26). Foreign Men Placed on the Discount Rack by Shanghai Women. China Challenges. (Retrieved May 4, 2009 from http://chinachallenges.blogs.com/my_weblog/2009/03/foreign-men-placed-on-the-discount-rack-by-shanghai-women.html)