Your Passport Or Your Wife?

Wow! I heard about dating someone for one's passport but what happened to me today was, in some ways, ridiculous.

Today, while I was at class, my roommate, Omer, took a message for me from a woman who was looking for me. After he and I returned from our respective lunches, he gave me the message, and I understood it to the best of my ability (which is currently poor; we can really only communicate in Mandarin because that is the only language in which each of us is able to articulate himself to the other).

The message consisted of a name and a phone number. I went outside and tried phoning the number with my cellular phone, but I received no reply. While I was at class, someone tried calling my cell from another number, but I had set my phone not to ring, so I missed the call; I have yet to learn whether the phone numbers are related. I tried returning that call to my cell phone, but I received only an answering service.

After I returned to my room, I started to prepare myself for a workout and going shopping. I received a knock at my door, and I found a Chinese woman outside, whom I later learnt is 52 years of age. She asked me whether I'm '石黝夫', and I said 'yes'. She told me that she was looking for a Canadian. Then she told me that she was a landed immigrant in Canada; she unsuccessfully sought work there, so she returned to Beijing and is currently employed here. She showed me her residency card and her Social Insurance Card. Then she suggested what sounded to me like we would either marry, or become common-law (which takes a year in Canada, I believe). My final understanding before she asked to get someone to translate, is that she wanted a civic address at which she could claim she was living so she could claim that she's been spending two of the last five years in Canada.

At that point, I decided that perhaps we do need a translator, so I went down the hall to Mihai (Mike) H.'s room to ask for help. After his attempt at translation, we concluded that my final interpretation must be correct. I ultimately told her that I didn't want to do this ('不好意思'), but that I would ask on her behalf, if she gave me her number. Anyone who's interested in doing this can contact me, but I would strongly counsel someone not to do it because it involves lying to the Canadian government.

I have no idea who gave her my name and room number, but I saw on one of the sheets she was carrying that she had my Chinese name and three poor approximations to my given name. Whoever told her about me was definitely not one of the native speakers of English whom I'd met, and is definitely someone who's got a good enough handle on Mandarin to remember my Chinese name. I think that she told me that she was asking-around, and that someone at a bar gave her my name. I'd certainly like to meet whoever gave this woman my DORM ROOM NUMBER and give him or her a short lecture on stalking.

All this time, I thought that those Chinese women who are reportedly looking for foreign passports to date, of whom I have been told to be wary, are nubile and young. I guess that the stereotype is not so 'stereo', in at least one sense. :P