It's that darkest time of the year in Seattle again: wet, cold, and with almost all indoor kids places closed due to Covid. It's the hardest time for parents with little kids, and it's long, almost 4 months, from November to February.
The summer of 2019, when I was pregnant with my second kid, I swore to myself that after he would be born in October, I would take both kids to escape the winter in China, visiting my parents there. Covid crushed that. I had the darkest months of my life, severely depressed from postpartum and pandemic. My body also suffered. With the help of au pairs, I survived the first year as a mom of two kids, and when the winter of 2020 loomed near, I swore again that I would go somewhere warm with the kids. Covid was still here, and nearly all borders were still closed. Now we are in the heart of the winter of 2021, and again, I have been dreaming about somewhere warm. Covid is still here, but most of us have been vaccinated and some borders are open, but my husband cannot put down his work (our family's only income) easily for a couple of months, and I do not have the guts to single-hand two kids by myself in a foreign country during these uncertain times. So we will just go for a few days to Los Angeles in January and that's it. Better than nothing, I guess. My biggest frustration though is not about failing to go somewhere warm for vacations, but about not being able to go back to China with the kids to see my mother - who was diagnosed Phase Three cancer one year ago, and went through a huge operation and several sessions of chemotherapy. I was absent from all these turmoils, because Chinese government didn't allow people - not even its citizens - to go back to China at that time. My mother survived and has been taking a handful of medications every day since she was done with the chemotherapy. Because of her low white blood cells and platelets, her doctors don't advise her to be vaccinated against Covid, which means, even though the US has opened its borders to Chinese citizens since November, she cannot travel to us, or to anywhere out of China. As far as I know, only Mexico doesn't require vaccination, and there's no flight between China and Mexico now, and even if there was, connections are needed in a third country, usually the US. Meanwhile, China has allowed its overseas citizens to go back to China, which means me and my first kid can go but not my second kid or my husband. The Chinese rule (the most bewildering of all) is: if the child is born in the US before the Chinese mother has got her US permanent residence permit, the child can still apply to be a Chinese citizen by the age of 18 when the child needs to make a decision to join which citizenship. Which means, the door of China is still open to the child, and because of this, when the child applies to travel to China, s/he is not issued a visa as a foreigner, but a "travel document" as a Chinese citizen. With this "travel document" which needs to be renewed every two years, the child can stay in China for up to 6 months at one time. But if the child is born after the Chinese mother has got her US permanent residence permit (but still keeps her Chinese citizenship), the child will have nothing to do with China. S/he is regarded as a foreigner and will need a visa to visit China, and usually cannot stay over 3 or 4 months at one time in China. The child who has a mother of Chinese citizenship is no different from an American child, in the eyes of the Chinese government. In either case, the status of the father (whether Chinese or not) matters nothing. So though my heart aches for my mother, I cannot toughen my heart of motherhood to leave my 1-year-old child here with my full-time working husband and go to China with my 4-year-old child. I would consider doing it if it was a quick trip of one or two weeks, but just the mandatory quarantine in a government-designated hotel room takes at least two weeks, sometimes even three weeks, plus another one week of home quarantine, and countless deep nasal tests for several weeks. I could not justify the month-long imprisonment to my first child, and then, it's my second child that my mother misses the most. I talked to other moms, Japanese ones for example. Japan also doesn't allow dual citizenship, just as China. But the children born by a Japanese mother (before or after getting the US permanent residence permit) are treated equally and are allowed to go back to Japan when it's closed to foreigners during the pandemic. I pleaded to the Chinese embassy, explaining the critical health condition of my mother, and asked for a special visa for my second child, and just got a short and blatant "no, please wait". To go by myself or to stay here with my kids was a tough decision to make, with all those silent or poorly disguised moral pressure from my Chinese family, not from my parents, but other relatives. Never did I feel my trivial personal life to be so significantly and directly affected by the grand Chinese policies of "serving the people". I haven't seen my mother for two years, and my father three years. I hope Time would be more merciful to me and we could meet before too late.
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