Moving Our Family to China: Visas, Immigration Offices, Apostilles, and a Lot of Paperwork

On July 15, 2026, we left Portland with what felt like our entire household packed into suitcases and started the trip to China.

The plan was to spend roughly a year living in China with our two kids, Nikolai, 10, and Gisele, 8. Ziqin grew up in Beijing, and her parents still live there, so China obviously isn’t a completely unfamiliar place for our family. I had also lived in Beijing with her for much of 2014, and we’ve been back for visits many times since.

Still, visiting China for a few weeks and moving your family there for a year are very different things.

We landed in Beijing the evening of July 16 with so much luggage that we couldn’t even fit all four of us and our bags into one taxi. We split up and took two cars to Ziqin's parents' apartment.

And then the real fun started.

Why We Started in Beijing

Our ultimate destination was Hainan, where we planned to spend most of the year near Sanya.

But first we needed to deal with Chinese immigration.

Ziqin’s hukou, or household registration, is in Beijing, as are her parents'. Because our Chinese family connection was officially based there, Beijing was the easiest place to handle our applications for family-reunion residence permits.

We had already spent more than a year preparing for the move.

Among other things, that meant obtaining official copies and apostilles for Nikolai’s and Gisele’s birth certificates. Naturally, the kids were born in two different states and we were married in a third, so that required dealing with the secretary of state for each state to get the necessary documents.

By the time we got on the plane, we had a folder full of documents that had required months of advance planning.

We were feeling reasonably prepared.

Chinese immigration had other ideas.

Our First Trip to Immigration

Our first few days in Beijing were mostly a battle against jet lag.

There were nights, or mornings, depending on how you look at it, when we were all wide awake at 3 or 4 a.m. and simply gave up on sleeping and went outside.

During that first week, the four of us went to the immigration office to find out exactly what would be required to convert our visas into residence permits.

One lesson we learned very quickly was that researching the process ahead of time can only take you so far.

The immigration officials gave us a list of additional requirements.

I needed to complete an official medical examination.

Several of our American documents needed to be translated by an officially recognized Chinese translation company.

And then we would need to come back for another appointment.

Fortunately, the kids didn't have to keep returning with us for every subsequent visit. Once immigration had seen them and their paperwork, most of the remaining bureaucracy fell on Ziqin and me.

The Chinese Immigration Physical

My next adventure was the required medical exam.

The facility wasn't specifically for foreigners. Plenty of Chinese citizens were there as well, apparently completing medical examinations for various international travel or immigration purposes.

The whole operation was surprisingly efficient.

Instead of spending an hour sitting in one examination room while different people came to me, I moved through a series of stations. It actually reminded me a lot of similar processes back when I was in the army.

There was a blood draw, although unlike the private little room I would expect in the United States, this was basically done at a counter alongside other people.

Then came a chest X-ray. That involved standing against the machine, leaning into position and, click, we were done.

There was also an EKG, checks of my lungs, height and weight, blood pressure, and the other usual pieces of a physical.

I paid through WeChat, naturally.

That in itself was a reminder of how dramatically China had changed since I lived here in 2014.

Back then, I remember China as an overwhelmingly cash-based society. In 2026, cash sometimes feels like the unusual payment method. WeChat Pay is everywhere, with Alipay filling in some of the gaps.

Medical exam finished, translations completed, we gathered our growing stack of paperwork and went back to immigration.

Surprise: We Needed More Documents

At the next appointment, we learned that we weren't quite finished.

Ziqin's U.S. green card needed an official Chinese translation too.

More significantly, her Beijing hukou still showed her old marital status. Before immigration would finish processing our family-reunion residence permits, she needed to have the hukou updated to show that she was married.

That meant a trip to the police station.

So Ziqin took our marriage documents to the police station to have her hukou changed.

The police station looked at them and produced the next surprise:

They wanted the apostille on our marriage certificate translated too.

We already had the marriage certificate translated. But the apostille attached to the marriage certificate was a separate piece of English-language documentation, and they wanted an official translation of that as well.

Back to the translation company.

Then back to the police station.

Once that was done, Ziqin was finally able to have her hukou updated.

Then it was back to immigration again with the updated hukou and the translated green card.

At some point the process began to feel less like an immigration application and more like a scavenger hunt in which each completed task unlocked the location of the next document.

Immigration Took Our Passports

Once our applications were actually being processed, immigration kept our passports.

Instead, we were given yellow paper receipts that temporarily served as identification.

This worked better than you might expect, although it did produce one memorable moment.

At one point I needed to stay at a hotel for a little while. Six people were living together in Ziqin's parents' apartment, Ziqin's parents, the four of us, and all of the chaos that naturally comes with that arrangement, and I needed somewhere quiet.

Chinese hotels normally register foreign guests using their passports.

I handed the hotel staff my yellow immigration receipt instead.

There was a fair amount of staring at the paper.

Then staring at me.

Then more staring at the paper.

Eventually, after some explanation, they figured out what it was and checked me in.

The yellow sheet really did function as temporary identification. It just wasn't something the hotel staff encountered every day.

Finally: Residence Permits

After all of the apostilles, translations, medical tests, hukou changes, police-station visits and immigration appointments, we finally got the passports back around August 8 or 9.

Inside were our new Chinese residence permits.

And, somewhat amazingly after everything it took to get them, they were issued for two years.

We only planned to stay for about a year, but it was still satisfying to see those permits after spending so long preparing for the move.

At that point we had accomplished the main thing we needed to do in Beijing.

Now we could actually move to the place where we intended to live.

Next Stop: Hainan

On August 15, we headed south to Hainan.

Ziqin's parents also have an apartment near Sanya, so we stayed there while we searched for a place of our own.

We assumed finding an apartment would be relatively straightforward.

It was not.

One property-management company showed us a furnished apartment renting for roughly RMB 75,000 ($11,158) for the year. We liked it, and the price seemed reasonable, but the company was relatively small and wanted a significant amount of money up front.

That made us nervous.

We wanted to be sure that whoever was renting us the apartment actually had the legal authority to rent it for the entire year.

So we kept looking.

The problem was that apartments we liked had a habit of disappearing almost immediately.

We would look at a place, discuss it, and then learn that someone else had rented it about an hour later.

Apparently there wasn't going to be much leisurely house shopping.

Eventually, after looking at the alternatives, we went back to the original apartment.

Fortunately, it was still available.

After some negotiating on just what went into the contract, we signed it.

And suddenly, after more than a year of planning and a month of immigration bureaucracy, we actually had a home in China.