Despairful Consultation

Hena, nail-biting day hey, I hope you were able to get Internet access today. If not, let me be the first to tell you the good news… Donald Trump is President of the US!

Let this be an inspiration to you and all of us, that anything is possible if you put your heart and soul into it.

Okay, okay. I can condone a little exuberance or despair spilling over into the Legal forum on this historic occasion.

Now seeing as there are already half a dozen threads about the US election, there is no need to politicize this thread any further, since the Donald’s election changes nothing for the situation described above (except possibly the economic prospects of the US, but that still doesn’t belong here).

Thank you in advance for your co-operation. :bowing:

Hena, if you can, find a way to establish your status in Taiwan before you leave.

The reason I say this is because the Taiwanese passport and indeed any second passport is quite valuable, even if you never go back to Taiwan. If you do traveling in the future, you may be surprised to find out how convenient it makes things. For example, when you are staying in one country and you want to apply for a visa to travel to another country, you can send your other passport away to a visa agency (or directly to the embassy if possible) to apply for a visa with comparatively little risk compared to sending the passport you entered the country on away.

Holding Taiwanese citizenship as well as USA citizenship and thus both passports is a nice combination indeed. Rather prestigious.

Don’t pay attention too much attention to the fact that you cannot be a citizen of Taiwan and a citizen of another country ‘de jure’. China also has this law, but in practice many Chinese who are citizens of another country and hold that country’s passport still hold their valid Chinese passport. You just need to be careful.
Plan your travel carefully so you don’t get caught out and get your Taiwanese confiscated and your citizenship canceled, because that is what happens to Chinese when they are discovered to be holding another country’s citizenship. Which is not so much of a consequence for them as it would be for a Taiwanese passport holder given how comparatively useless the Chinese passport is.
Of course, this may not be applicable to you at all if you never plan to even leave the USA. But you may want to one day, perhaps not so far in the future.

In general I agree. There’s another reason to have a second passport, besides convenience: to be able to prove you’re something other than American, in a worst case scenario. (Some people carry “fantasy passports” or put their US passports in non-US covers for the same reason. Having a real non-US passport is obviously better, because it won’t be discovered as a fake.)

However, with two legitimate passports you still need to be careful. If you enter a country/region with one passport and then apply for a visa in your other passport, you may be refused. If you exit a country with one passport and enter the next country with another, you may be refused, even if the immigration officer understands you’re not committing fraud, and so on. It depends on how fussy a country decides to be about this sort of thing.

Sorry haven’t been actively checking lately since there was a period without any responses.

Yeah having two passports does sound nice although I don’t really have much plans of travel so it’s not too important for me at the moment. I’ll do it if it’s possible though.

If anyone wants to know, the current situation is that convincing my father hasn’t been productive and his finances are still spiraling downwards. In any case I’ve already done preparations and planning for what I need to do (mainly just get myself to the AIT office) when everything falls apart so I feel somewhat more comfortable than before but this situation is still… Eh, I don’t know how to describe it, feels like things are crumbling apart and yet I don’t see much that I can do anymore.

The important thing to realize is that it’s his situation that’s spiraling down and crumbling apart, not yours. He’s the one in financial dire straits, not you. It looks like there’s nothing you can do for him, and you need to focus on just yourself. This is what you need to change your mindset to instead of being preoccupied with your father like he’s your other half. If I was in your shoes, I would want somebody to tell me that I need to tell myself that I don’t need or want his approval and I don’t need or want his help. Of course, he’s your father. So, it’s hard. But, you need to move forward. He’s the one who ultimately created the situation that you are in now. You are not at any fault and no blame can be put on you for leaving your father to his own devices. In the long run, you’re only making things worse by humming and harring about what to do about your father. The answer to the question of what to do about your father is to do nothing about your father and do everything about you. I’m sorry if this is hard to take, but that’s the way it is.
I know you think you can’t get help from your relatives, but contact them anyway and just see what happens. If you do, I think you will be surprised by the outcome, in a positive way.

I understand what you mean, to be frank if this was purely just a problem of the status quo being unchanged I would just give up and move on as this is obviously going to get nowhere. However the fact that he’s currently struggling at the moment makes it much harder for me to just give up on him and leave without acknowledgment.

It just doesn’t quite seem right to leave in the middle without doing what I can until everything completely collapses (which I estimate should happen within a month or two at the current speed).

However if I had to be honest, it is also true at the same time that I don’t really know what he would do when it does come to that point. Perhaps I’m still a little wishful that he can at least get things together a bit so I can depart with a peace of mind. After all, assuming things do collapse and I have no choice but to go for loans to get my own life back on track through AIT, it still inevitably means I’d be doing the same thing to him either way.

For relatives… In order to take a loan apparently I need to sign in 3 people for them to call so I’ll tentatively use the relatives I know of for that (not like I know anyone else I can use for it). However I’m not sure how clear I made this before but…

With how it’s not the first time my father is meeting financial difficulties, his reputation within the family is not very high due to rampant cases of borrowing money in order to get over financial problems. Though of course no one really minded initially… There is a limit to everything. The final nail in the coffin was likely a case several years back where he used his credit card all over the place in order to purchase things as an investment to earn the money back and more later. Most of it ended up as deadstock or sold far too slowly and he ended up being chased by debts which… Were all inevitably cleared by my relatives instead.

Though this may be obvious, he “borrowed” money but not a single dime was returned to this day.

All of this essentially came back to strangle him now as he completely has no one but himself to rely on in order to get past this wall but what I want to say here is, being his son it means my own reputation isn’t that great either. Probably doesn’t help that I haven’t done anything that would make my reputation any better either. He has been trying to contact people to borrow money from but the result is plainly being ignored.

If there is one thing I can say about this entire thing, it is that you should keep money clearly separated from relationships as hardly anything good comes from placing the two together. Or at the very least, manage it strictly unless you don’t care about ruining things.

any update?

Update?

Oh, sure.