15-Mar-26 (Sunday)

For several days the news Jing had been hearing news from China (via GuiMei, her youngest sister) was that her 88 year-old father was in the hospital with serious problems. Yesterday the outlook was much more positive and perhaps he would even be able to return home soon. But early this afternoon the news shifted dramatically. It looked like her father would die very soon. Jing immediately decided to take the first flight to Zhengzhou that she could find. (Jing's hometown is about a 1.5 hour drive from there.) She quickly was covered so she could leave her caregiver job and she came home with a few hours to get ready before I drove her to SFO at 8:30pm. Sadly, Jing heard the news that her father had passed away while she was waiting at the get for her flight to board. The first thing Jing said to me after telling me she was going to China was "Do you want to come with me?". Our relationship is fairly new, yet I felt it was going to be important to both of us that I be there for her. If I had a visa for traveling to China, I would have joined Jing on the same flight that she tonight. (She didn't need a visa since she is a Chinese citizen with a Chinese passport.) After coming back from dropping Jing of at SFO I started looking into how long it would take for me to get the visa. A friend told me he was able to camp out at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco for a day and was able to apply and receive his visa before they closed for the day. Unfortunately for me, that is no longer possible. The new process is that you have to submit your visa application online. Then after they review it and are satisfied with your information they update your application's online status from "review in progress" to "submit your passport". Only then can you enter the que at the consulate office. I spent pretty much the whole night working on my visa application. The online form was confusing to fill out and required me to make decisions based on missing information. It took me about an hour to take a picture of myself that met all the stated criteria. Since the background needed to be white I took it in front of the white door in my kitchen. But there was a faint shadow in the background which caused the photo to be rejected when I submitted it for my application. I have fixed similar problems with painstaking work in photoshop, but it occurred to me this should no longer be necessary. I found a free image editing website, uploaded my picture, and entered "change background to white". It instantly complied, and the modified image was accepted by the online application.

16-Mar-26 (Monday)

By the time the sun came up, I had submitted my completed visa application selecting "expediting processing" (which incurs a larger fee). I kept checking the application status during the day although I didn't really expect to see anything update that quickly.

BTW, Jing is a fairly recent addition to my life so for those of you who haven't met her I will tell you a little bit about her. I first met Jing a couple of years ago on Match.com, but we were both casually dating other people as well and we only dated each other for a couple of weeks. (I had some reasons for being pessimistic about our chances, but they have turned out to be wrong or irrelevant.) Jing (pronounced as in "jingle bells") was a nick name she had growing up and is easier to pronounce and remember than her real given name (Xifeng). We reconnected in late December and remarkably she moved in with me just a week or two later. She works full time as an acupuncturist, although she also has a side job taking one 28 hour home care shift every week for someone who needs round the clock care. Our ways of thinking are often dramatically different as is our upbringing yet we are finding a surprising number of similarities as well. We have many activities we like to do together, including ping pong, hiking, biking (on my tandem bike), and recently pickle ball. Not long ago we hiked to the top of black mountain - a 10 mile round trip with an elevation gain of 2700 feet which we finished without taking even a single rest. I've dated a lot of women since my ex-wife left at the beginning of 2018 and usually our first or 2nd date was a hike. Not a single one of them would have been interested and able to hike Black Mountain. More often they would be winded after climbing just a few hundred feet.

17-Mar-26 (Tuesday)

I would have to leave by Thursday morning at the latest for it to be practical for me to attend the funeral was scheduled to begin Saturday morning. (One looses a day when crossing westward over the international date line.) So I was really hoping to see an updated status on my visa application today. But no ... at the end of the day it still said "pending preliminary review". I discovered that none of the selections of the automated phone system will connect you to an actual person. The consulate's website indicates that you can ask questions via email, but when I tried that I received a form letter response thanking me for contacting the consulate, but no attempt was made to answer my question. I made plans to head up to the consulate in the morning, even though I expected they probably wouldn't be able to help me until the application was processed. To avoid driving in rush hour traffic I planned to bike to Caltrain and take my bike on the train so I could ride to the SF consulate.

18-Mar-26 (Wednesday)

I was pumping up my bike tires and just about to leave when I got a call from Jing. She had mentioned my visa problem to some relatives and one knew about a way to travel to China without a visa. It's limited to 10 days in China and has a few other strange rules as well. I found some information online about this "visa-less transit" travel although it seems to be rarely used which explains why I hadn't heard about it before. I was originally thinking of staying for 14 days, but 10 days is better than nothing so I decided that the visa-less option was the best approach. I booked some round trip tickets (a required condition) that looked like it would satisfy the conditions I read about. The rules were not that clear, so I decided to visit the SF consulate anyway to make sure my travel plans met the requirements. By now, rush hour had passed and I figured driving to the consulate was now the fastest way to get there. When I asked an agent at the consulate if my plans met the visa-less transit conditions she said ... "yes, probably". This answer was not nearly as definitive as I expected. She suggested I could call one of the consulates in China, or contact the airlines to ask about the required travel documents. I had already tried to contact the airlines (a Chinese carrier) and as with the consulate, it was not possible to talk to an actual human over the phone. Calling a consulate in China sounded pretty difficult and I didn't think I would get any more information that way, so I just decided to go with my current travel plans and hope for the best. I called my friend Laurens who agreed to come to my house at 8:15pm tonight to drive me to SFO. After getting back from the consulate I finished my packing and a few last minute errands. Jing had asked me to get her a ticket on the same flights that I had reserved for returning from Zhengzhou to SFO. I thought this would be a quick task but my credit card was rejected on the Korean Airline web site. A call to Capital One indicated that my card was frozen due to a fraud alert. None of the charges they mentioned seemed that unusual to me. I verified that I had made all those purchases and they unfroze the card. While I had them on the line I told them I wanted to make a report that I would be traveling in China to insure that they wouldn't flag a purchase there as fraudulent. They said they no longer accept such reports, but that my card would work during my travels. I tried again to buy the ticket but the card was still rejected. (I later learned that Korean Air won't attempt to charge a card until 24 hours after the denial.) The web site only saves one payment method, so I deleted that card and entered the information for my Schwab debit card which was denied. They claimed the billing address I entered did not match. (Possibly an extra or missing space in the street name.) Every time a payment is not successful, the ticket information is lost and you have to start over again. This and other problems made the Korean Air website nearly unusable and before I new it I had spent 2 hours on the project and still did not get the tickets. By now Laurens had arrived, so I spent a few minutes checking my packing and headed out the door. I figured the airline ticket desk in SFO would be the most likely place to get turned away if my travel documents were not sufficient, and indeed the airline agent after failing to find a visa in my passport asked me where it was. (This confirmed my suspicion that the visa-less travel option was rarely used, and this question was repeated every time somewhat looked at my passport for the remainder of the trip except for the last time in SFO after my return flight.) I explained that I was using the 10 day visa-less travel option and at least the agent seemed like she had at least heard about it before. It took her, along with another agent 30 minutes (while chattering with each other in Chinese) to verify that I met all the requirements and to issue my boarding passes. (I had printed the boarding passes at home during the online check-in but that was a waste of time. They were fake and could not have been used to board the airplane.) I had Jing write me an invitation letter including the address of her apartment (which she had bought for her parents) where I would be staying, the reason for my travel and other details which she emailed to me. (Actually I wrote it for her.) The invitation letter was not strictly necessary although proved quite helpful here and at immigration on entering China, as was the google maps route I had printed out from Zhengzhou to Jing's apartment. I read that the visa-less travel option was invented to encourage tourism, but if China was really serious about that they would have made the rules simpler and more clear. These suspicion were confirmed by the fact that I don't think I saw a single foreigner during my entire stay in China ... even in Zhengzhou airport!

20-Mar-26 (Friday)

I didn't have any time during my short layover in Taipei, but next I had a 2 hour layover in Hong Kong. The first thing I tried to do was to buy a travel esim so my phone would work in China. It was just a $8 purchase for 2.5GB of data but disappointingly my credit card did not approve the purchase. I soon found a similar esim that accepted PayPal, so I was able to purchase the esim. I figured I would need my credit card to work so I called Capital One to find out what the problem was. Again they asked me about the same purchases I had already confirmed last time and before they would re-enable my card they wanted me to go thru an elaborate process which involved typing in a number that was texted to me, and then submitting photos of my passport and drivers license and finally answering some security questions I had answered when setting up my account. Finally they said my credit card was again functional. I made one more time to by the Korean Air ticket for Jing, but that failed again. I sent Jing a message suggesting she ask her son (living in the US) to help with the purchase. (Her son was able to buy the ticket for her, but by then cheapest fare class had sold out and the ticket price when up from $1000 to $1600. Other airlines were even more expensive since prices had been quickly adapting to the higher oil prices due to the Iran conflict.) I wanted to activate my esim but I ran out of time and needed to board my flight. I wasn't worried about that since I could use the airport wifi at my destination to activate the esim. I arrived at Zhengzhou airport at 3pm. While walking to immigration, I selected the airport wifi. As one expects with airport wifi, a page comes up asking you to agree to their terms, but this page was entirely in Chinese. I tried all the button and checkbox combinations but I couldn't get the wifi to connect. Now at the immigration desk, they look thru my passport and as always happens, they asked where my visa was. I explain about the visa-less travel option and the 10 day limit. They accept this but then say I need to fill out a different entry card from the one I just filled out, so I dutifully did that. I needed to enter where I was planning on staying in China, so I put down the address Jing had given me in the invitation letter. They said they also needed a phone number, so I entered Jing's US number which was working in China. But they said it needed to be a Chinese phone number. The apartment did not have a phone, but I knew I could use GuiMei's number (who was living at the apartment). I said this should not be a problem and I would call Jing to get the number. So I opened the wifi page and asked for help signing into the network. Their response was an emphatic "No Wifi"!. (I later learned the wifi network was only for airport employees, which did not include the immigration agents.) So we were at an impasse. I needed their help getting wifi so I could get the information they needed for the form, and they were not willing to offer any help or give me a pass on this bit of information. A supervisor came over, but nothing changed. By now, all the other passengers had passed thru and I was the only passenger there. I basically just stood there hoping eventually something would change. After an hour of standing around doing nothing they suddenly seemed to get annoyed with having me there and not knowing what to do with me, and suddenly they just waved me thru!. Jing had sent her daughter-in-law's sister (Yvonne is her US name) and her husband to pick me up. I had told them to come an hour late, but I figured they would already be waiting for me. I asked an airport worker how to get to the pick-up area. She said that this was complicated (I guess there might have been several pick-up areas), and I should wait in an area inside the terminal she pointed to labeled "Pick up Area 2". A asked if there was a place I could go to get a wifi connection, and she graciously let me use her wifi security code. That allowed me to contact Yvonne, and her husband found me about 5 minutes later. (I had met both of them once in Sunnyvale when they were visiting the US.) It was about a 90 minute drive to Jing's village and I was relieved and so happy to finally see Jing (at about 5:30pm). Jing had some food for me which had been made for lunch earlier. It was simple and delicious. Happily I would spend every night here sleeping with Jing in the same bed, with tonight being the one exception. Tonight Jing would sleep at her brother's house (where her father had been staying for about the last year, joined by most of her other close relatives. I don't know exactly what was happening tonight, but Jing later reported that not much sleep was actually taking place. She said she got maybe a couple of hours. This happened to be the coldest night of our trip and I was a bit surprised at how cold the apartment was. It didn't have central heating. There was a small coal furnace that they use during the coldest part of winter which warms the living room by a few degrees (C), but it was shoved to the side of the terrace room. I realized I should have brought a light ski hat, but I had enough warm clothing and blankets to keep warm for the night. GuiMei had set up the bed in our room for Jing and me with an extra layer of blankets for padding so it would be soft enough for us. But it was basically blankets over a wood platform with no mattress at all. I used to sleep fine on even harder surfaces, but I'm no longer comfortable that way. I'm very comfortable sleeping upright however, so I just slept on the coach in the living room.

21-Mar-26 (Saturday)

Jing came back fairly early. She had already eaten, so I had some more of the leftovers and we walked over to her father's brother's house where the funeral was already in progress.

Before even getting to the house I could hear the musicians gathered outside the house. As you will see later, the people mourning the passing of Jing's father wore white sheet like clothing over their street clothes. Since these people were not dressed like that I assume they might be friends of some of the family members.

Note: Click on the picture to see the video.
Then click the back button to continue reading.

I believe this singer is the mother of the young singer in the next video. Near the end of this video you can see a view into the court yard. You can see the white garb they are wearing including a white head covering and sometimes even white covers over their shoes. Inside the court yard of his brother's house and to the right was the entrance to the mourning room which included the casket with the mourners gathered around praying. There was also some crying as well as sounds that I wouldn't call real crying. I think I would call it stylized or fake crying perhaps by family that is not as close to Jing's father. There was a little bowing ceremony involving four bows to enter this room. Although I went inside, I didn't feel it was appropriate to take any pictures there.

Click on the picture to see the video.

Jing spent most of her time in the mourning room whereas I was generally on the street. I found this young singer to be quite charming. She stepped up her already admirable stage presence when I stood up to record her. I didn't try to disguise that I making the recording since I wanted to be close enough to get a good shot.

Click on the picture to see the video.

When this barrel of homebrew fireworks was lit I was impressed by how loud it was. I didn't reach for my phone since I assumed it would be too brief to catch it, but it went on for nearly a minute, and finally I opened my camera app in time to record the last few seconds.

Click on the picture to see the video.

Nearing mid-day this man was cooking food from the bowls around him in this huge pot. I was just thinking about going up to get some when someone I didn't recognize placed a huge bowl in front of me with a pair of chopsticks. It looked like way more than I could eat, but it was very delicious and I must have been more hungry than I realized. I finish the whole bowl.

Click on the picture to the full size image.

In the early afternoon, the most dramatic part of the ceremony was about to begin. They started to assemble a procession to the burial site. The man in front was holding a picture of Jing's father. One relative motioned for me to join the procession, but I'm pretty sure that would have been inappropriate.

Click on the picture to the full size image.

Others started assembling a cart which would be in the procession. Here they are lifting a decorated structure onto the cart which I believe represents the house that the departed will need in the afterlife as well as money (not real money) and other things that he may need. Finally all the many pieces of decorations that had been set up were dismantled and placed in a large precarious pile on the cart. Alter the burial, the whole cart and everything on it will be set on fire allowing everything to follow him into the afterlife. I think the casket was transported in the precession using the same cart, but I can't remember for sure. I followed behind the precession as they walked thru the village streets to the field which contained the burial site (perhaps a 10 or 15 minute walk). I wouldn't have guessed that the large field was being used as a cemetery, although there were a few isolated piles of flowers in the field which marked burial sites used by a few other families in the village. The spot where we stopped was the location where at least 4 generations of this family had been buried.

Everything related to his death was handled by the family, from putting his body into the casket to wait for the funeral, to digging the hole in the ground with shovels before the ceremony, to lowering the casket into the ground using wooden poles as you can see in this video. Then the women started pushing dirt over the casket leaving the rest of the work to the men to complete with shovels. No government agency was involved so I don't think there was even a death certificate. It doesn't happen this way in the cities. There are just too many people and so cremation is mandatory in most areas.

Click on the picture to see the video.

During and after the burial, the mourners were praying at the site with some women crying. GuiMei (Jing's youngest sister) was crying for quite a long time in what we would think as overly dramatic, but I don't think this is unusual for them. Her crying was mixed with words although I'm not sure if they were intelligible to the others. Jing was comforting and stroking her sister the entire time. GuiMei was the only one doing this, but also she was her father's primary caregiver during his last couple of years. The ceremony was terminated by setting of a large stream of homemade fireworks on the ground near the burial which went on for an impressively long time and made an impressive amount of noise. That signaled the end of the ceremony and the mourners removed their white over clothes.

Click on the picture to the full size image.

At the same time, the cart I had talked about earlier was set ablaze on the other side of the field producing an impressive amount of flame and smoke. Now that the ceremony was over, Jing's family obligations were completed, and as far as I could tell, so was her mourning period, although I assume she still thinks about her dad often as I know he was quite important in Jing's life. We walked back to Jing's apartment and had some dinner there with GuiMei (who has been living there). I can't remember if we made something or had leftovers and I don't know what we did the rest of the evening. It was such an emotionally exhausting day, I suspect we didn't have the energy to do much of anything.

Click on the picture to the full size image.

22-Mar-26 (Sunday)

        .......... more to come soon ............

23-Mar-26 (Monday)

24-Mar-26 (Tuesday)

25-Mar-26 (Wednesday)

26-Mar-26 (Thursday)

27-Mar-26 (Friday)

28-Mar-26 (Saturday)

29-Mar-26 (Sunday)

30-Mar-26 (Monday)