Hi folks. We just got out (kind of) from a bad situation with the Jilin Province Tianshuo office. It all started a few days ago when we saw a "positions available" post on ChinaJobs.com and other Chinese ESL job hunting grounds. The posts were written in decent English and the contact, Theresa, was easily reached and communicative, far more than our previous job's contacts.

Man, were we fooled. We arrived and met the infamous Kiki at the airport. My girlfriend instantly disliked her, but for reasons she couldn't quite place. I noticed she kept twitching and glancing around, but I put that up to just a nervous tic of meeting new people. We went to the office and spoke to Maggie, Theresa, and the owner (I think her name may have been Ms. Wan or something to that effect). We talked about contract terms and they said they would need our passports to fill out some paperwork. Then we were handled around and finally put up in the apartment.

We were put up in an apartment that looked like a dump and had cockroaches in the kitchen. "Okay," we thought, "it's just that the last guy left over a week ago." Then we discovered cockroaches in the bedroom (heck, in the bed itself!) and launched into all-out war on the little sons of guns while repeatedly calling the contacts to get us into a hotel room. Kiki was sent to take care of the situation and she led us on a merry hunt around the city. We must say, Kiki nearly paled at my girlfriend who nearly ripped her throat out. She could tell that Kiki was repeatedly lying to us; I didn't quite pick up on it immediately, but the next day was hilarious. I'll get to that later. Long story short, we were put up in a sex hotel. Yeah, a sex hotel. Better yet, we got an offer at midnight by someone selling sex. Crazy but true, folks. Furthermore, while I was setting up the luggage in the room, Kiki took out a number of stolen hotel card-keys and tested them on the room's electricity slot. Another mark against her, petty theft. Kiki again refused to give us our passports and enrolled us into the hotel using an expired (or false, I don't recall) identification card /and/ our money.

Since Kiki and an unnamed friend of hers had taken us to the hotel via a "shortcut", we left early so we could get our bearings straight and escape the trap. We headed outside and called 110 and got a ride to the local police station and told them the situation. The police were friendly, and we communicated with Yahoo's online translating service. Eventually Kiki came in looking rushed and panicked, and we recovered our passports. We then spoke with the police chief with the help of one of our friends in Shanghai. We certainly didn't trust Kiki to be our translator! Kiki seemed quite affronted when my girlfriend outright declared, "No, I don't trust you" to Kiki. The matter was resolved at the station, and when Kiki said we "should be thankful that the police chief came in on his day off," my girlfriend said, "So, you bribed him to be here, huh?" Kiki didn't dare look at either one of us in the eye afterwards.

We then met Maggie and her mother, aforementioned Ms. Wan, where they put up more lies and contradictions than certain religious texts. When I had earlier confronted Maggie with the declaration, "We actually live right behind the police station. What if one of them asks us for our passports?" she said, "Oh, that sort of thing never happens in Jilin! Maybe on the internet, but not here!" After we got our passports, they completely changed their story, saying that sort of thing happened "all the time" and "they had to keep our passports all the time." While Ms. Wan put up a front of being disappointed as a mother and business owner, she had a shifty look to her, even more so than Kiki, whose eyes kept flying all over the place. Now we're semi-free and we leave Changchun tomorrow to Beijing, where we'll talk to the American embassy tomorrow, where we hope we'll be able to help all foreigners stuck in this situation, not just Americans. After that, we'll be taking a flight back to the States. We don't have enough money to stay in China and do a bunch of guesswork and job-hunting when the visa situation is so difficult.

I just wish we'd seen this sooner than we did. We wouldn't be out a bunch of money from "fees" to make everything "legal".