The Travails of Renewing My Son Tony’s Passport

My son Tony's passport expired on March 13.  It is now July 7, and he still doesn't have his new one.  A lot has happened to cause this to be so.

I started the process back in February.  I sent out the application to the Canadian consulate in Shanghai, but made some mistakes and so I had to redo the application.  The mistakes caused me to change the applicant for Tony's passport from myself, his father, to Jenny, my wife and his mother.

The second application arrived in Shanghai just on the eve of the city's great 63 day lockdown.  The staff weren't able to go to the consulate to do any work.  There was uncertainty as to where the second application package was.  The consulate staff I wrote an enquiry to said the package may not have been at the consulate.  My wife contacted the delivery company and they said it was there.  Nothing for us to do but wait for the lockdown to end.

When the lockdown finally ended, I sent an enquiry letter to find out what the status of Tony's application was.  I got a response saying that it was being processed.

Yesterday, my wife got a phone call from the consulate saying that Tony's passport was ready, but the they couldn't deliver it to us because Wuxi was now classified as a high risk area by the pandemic authorities.  It seems our options were to wait for Wuxi's high risk status to end or go to Shanghai to pick up the passport ourselves.  How we can go to Shanghai with the travel restrictions in place and quarantining is beyond me.

I asked around on WeChat about deliveries to Wuxi being stopped.  At first, no one knew of this and many reported that they had gotten packages and documents from Shanghai very recently.  But soon others started telling me that the deliveries were being stopped.  It seems that again a stage in the process of getting Tony his new passport met up with bad timing.