How to Lose Your Passport in China
A Short Memoir from March, 2003
I recently told this story in a podcast, which you can listen to here.
I haven't always been one to save money (although my wife has a hard time believing me). As a kid, my mom complained that any cash I received would burn a hole in my pocket. I HAD to spend it almost immediately. Somewhere in my teenage years (probably around the time I started to EARN my own money), that changed. So when money was tight during my first year in China, I sometimes spent weeks pinching pennies (or, "mao", as they are called in Chinese) even while traveling almost non-stop. The time that I spent traveling alone in Hubei Province turned out to be the leanest days for me financially during all of 2003, but this was partly my own fault.
Here's what happened:
Arriving in Xiangfan in mid-March, I managed to find a small, inexpensive hotel that would allow me (as an American) to stay. Communist regimes are notorious for forcing hotels to have special permits to be able to lodge foreigners, which usually turns out to be more costly both for hotels AND their guests. In some cities, it is nearly impossible to find somewhere affordable to stay because all of the smaller (cheaper) hotels have been threatened with large fines for receiving foreign guests. So it was no small feat to find an inexpensive place to stay.
When choosing a smaller Chinese hotel, it was almost always our custom to have a look at the available rooms first, just to make sure there were no *surprises and that everything worked properly (ie, water, doors, windows). It was also customary to ask the price of each room or type of room as you were being shown around. In this case, the first room she showed me was a very small single room at the end of an upstairs balcony. The room had no running water or bathroom, but neither did any of the rooms in this hotel. Those were all available in a "common" bathroom downstairs. The single room was only 15 RMB per night (just under $2 at the time), which seems extremely cheap unless you know that my target budget for those days was $3 per day total (lodging, food, transportation).
*I've met with countless surprises in Chinese hotel rooms over the years, the most common being leaky pipes and showers that drained all over the bathroom floor; sometimes even into the hotel room itself. Once, near the Tibetan border, where there was only one hotel available, my father and I were given a room and expressly told "not to lock your door", because there would be no way to open it again. "Uh, ok", we said, not sure whether to believe them or not. When we forgot and accidentally locked the door later that day, we found out that they had been telling us the truth, as we watched a Tibetan maid rappel off the roof down to our 4th floor room using a combination of rope and bedsheets tied around her waist! Yes, we almost killed a maid by ignoring (forgetting?) the command to leave our hotel room door UNLOCKED.
So when the nice lady showed me another room right next door with FOUR empty beds and told me that I could pay for just one of them for only 10 RMB ($1.25), I jumped on that bargain! (Full disclosure: the thought did run through my head that it would be better to pay an extra 75 cents to have complete privacy). The only possible downside was if other guests showed up at the hotel later in the day (or night), the rest of the beds could be sold off one by one, and I would be forced to share my room. I decided to take my chances, since up until this moment in the day the room was completely unoccupied. And it remained unoccupied (besides myself) until sometime late into the night, probably after midnight.
My memory is a bit hazy at this point, since I was sleeping so soundly, but I remember hearing the door open and seeing the light click on. I lazily rolled over and saw through squinted eyes (I didn't have my glasses on) the owner-lady showing a young man (twenty-something?) to his bed at the far end of the room near the door. After chatting with him briefly, she left, and he quickly settled in and the light went off. I never REALLY even woke up. I just vaguely remember, as if in a dream, seeing him being let in, and then after a few minutes all was quiet and I was back asleep. Now fast forward to the next morning...
It was already light outside when I started to wake up. Before I even opened my eyes I remembered that someone had been let in late the previous night. I immediately rolled over in bed to see if the other guy was still there. I was surprised to see he was not! And as my focus moved from across the room back to my own bedside table (which was in virtually the same "line of sight"), a sickening feeling came to my stomach. My backpack, lying flat there on the little table next to my bed, did not look right. It seemed too flat, or somehow not "full" enough. I quickly reached over and patted down on the top of the backpack, and my fears were confirmed. My passport case, which was about 6 inches long and nearly an inch thick, and also contained $200, was gone from the outside pocket where I had been keeping it.
I jumped out of bed and ran out the door and down into the courtyard, hoping the man might still be on the property. He was not. I have no idea how long he had been gone, but probably not very long. There is even a possibility that I was initially "woken up" from my deep sleep when he quietly made his exit from the room just a few minutes before. I will never know. Of course hindsight is "20-20", as they say, but my passport and my money were gone forever; and all to save a mere 75 cents!
When the hotel lady found out what had happened she was very upset (on my behalf) and graciously helped in any way she could. She was the one who contacted the police who came to investigate and file a report, even though the police ended up reprimanding her for allowing me to stay at her hotel without the proper permits (which would have been impossible for her to get). Unfortunately, the police couldn't do very much in the way of solving the actual crime. This was before China decided to install hundreds of millions of cameras at literally every intersection, alley, and business in the nation. So my passport was definitely gone, along with a big chunk of my money, and I wasn't going to get any of it back. My only consolation was that the hotel lady made me an amazing plate of sweet and sour fish (from scratch) later that day as a way of saying sorry.
I contacted the US Embassy in China and found out that the next step in the process was to get a police report explaining how and where the passport was lost. That turned into a multi-day ordeal. I got to ride in a police car to the main station, which was across town, and spent quite some time sitting around expansive PSB (Public Security Bureau) offices, waiting for them to take down all my info. I had to go back across town on my own a day or two later to pick up the finished report, and I remember feeling strange the entire time with the police, because so much of our work and ministry in China relied on staying away from the police and out of their "line of sight". I don't remember for sure, but I might have even discreetly left a few Gospel tracts around the police station. And if I didn't, shame on me! It’s not every day that you have a valid excuse to go hang out in a large Communist police station.
So it was recommended by both the US Embassy and the police that I "travel immediately to the US Consulate in Guangzhou to have a new emergency passport issued". The problem was that I still had a number of towns to visit and research on my to-do list! Also, my overseer (an Aussie bloke) wasn't too thrilled that I had managed to lose my passport, and gave me the green light to continue with my original travel plans. So I continued my journey into western Hubei, but this time with only a Chinese police report and a photocopy of my (lost) passport.
If the same thing happened today, it would be even more difficult to travel. Back then it was tough, but not impossible. There were still enough smaller hotels that would accept travelers without "proper documentation", and buses didn't require passports to purchase tickets, as they do for foreigners traveling in China today. However, I was still somewhat limited on the kind of hotels I could visit. My usual habit was to spend 2-3 nights in the cheapest place possible (once for as little as $1 a night!), and then "splurge" for a night at a place that cost $5-$10 so I could actually take a shower and get cleaned up. But without a passport, it was harder to find places in the slightly higher price range!