In a previous post, I wrote a bit about my visa troubles and my need to go to Hong Kong for a visa run. That visa run will be this Wednesday. I will fly out to Hong Kong, stay overnight there, proceed to the visa office very early the next morning and, hopefully, obtain a 60-day tourist visa which will obviate the need for any more visa runs out of the country.
If not, I have this aching fear that, upon returning to Taiwan, I will not be allowed back into the country. Taiwanese law allows anyone from certain countries, America among them, for up to 30 days without any kind of pre-arranged visa. But I am afraid that, having made a trip to Hong Kong and come back so quickly, the government will sniff out that I am not really a tourist in Taiwan. Even with a flight out for 60 days, Eve vouching for her willingness to shepherd me around Taiwan as a tourist, etc., I think there is a good chance that some bureaucrat will be having a bad hair day and decide to take it out on me rather than on her hairdryer.
The thing I hate about this whole situation is that it's so completely unnecessary. I would have been glad to go through the rigmarole of getting a residency visa before leaving the United States. But I was advised by the recruiter I was working with (I did not yet have contact with anyone at my school) that this was standard operating procedure--get the 60-day visa, come over, and then have the school sort out getting a residency visa.
I know in my heart and my mind that the Taiwanese government is not wrong in wanting people who come to Taiwan to work to get an actual work visa before they leave home. They are not wrong in wanting people to show at least basic honesty about their reasons for coming into Taiwan.
I don't know what I'll do this time around if they refuse a visa. I may break down and--gasp--just tell the truth. One poster on Dave's ESL Cafe, a website for ESL teachers, indicated that he had done this once at the Hong Kong visa office, with success. He had just said, flat out, he would have preferred to apply for the residency visa, but his school wouldn't cooperate. I may do just that and hope for the best.
Sometimes, it seems that for the past for years, I have been repeatedly placed in situations where I was forced to lie for no good reasons. Oh, yes, sir--my lifelong dream is to be a cog in the great machinery of corporate law. Yes sir, my lifelong dream is to be in public relations. Yes, sir, I'm coming to Taiwan to see the Chang Kai Shek Memorial and lie on the beach at Kenting.
Maybe it's time to try just being honest.
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