Few days ago we decided to organise our secretary which is filled with many important but also unimportant documents. Mixed in between was one folder with our wedding certificate, Nathan’s birth certificate, other important certificates and also our passports. Okay you might think what’s so special about few passports…well we are three people in the household and the number of passports is a bit higher than that.
Let me start:
Wife: Chinese passport
Me: Finnish and German passports
Nathancuty: Finnish and German passports + Chinese Travel document.
All in all those are 6 passports/ official documents allowing travel abroad and I guess it is a clear sign of having an interracial family.
I understand that the travel document is not 100% a Chinese passport BUT it allows him to travel to China without any visa!
Hopefully China will recognize soon dual/ multiple citizenship as it would mean for my wife that she could apply for the German nationality and maintain her Chinese nationality but also that Nathan would be allowed to keep his current greyish borderlinish triple nationality.
Thanks to the Finnish and German nationality both Nathan and I have a huge variety of countries we can travel to without visa but sadly this does not apply to my wife. A list of the strength of the different passport you can find here. This entire blogpost is partly inspired by a similar one written by Carissa Hickling from Everyday Asia.
Do you have several nationalities?
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Crazy Chinese Family 
My son got a Chinese passport (since he was born in China) and I also got him an American one, though this isn’t technically suppose to happen. I’ve been traveling with him on the Chinese passport. We went to the US last winter and his half-sister needed a US visa so I got him one too–even though he’s a US citizen. So stupid! The police in my husband’s hometown said they can’t issue him a travel doc (like you have for Nathan). I don’t think they know what they are talking about!
The travel doc was started few years ago. In Germany for example you can get it only if one partner got still the Chinese nationality and has only a residence permit for a few years. I know some Germans living in China and they also got the Chinese nationality for their child(ren) and can’t get the travel doc so when they travel to Europe they have to make first a stop in hong-kong or any other country outside the EU and then fly to Germany otherwise the kids would immediately get the Germany nationality and with it lose their Chinese (yes it happened several times and with it the children lost their hukou, don’t know if it’s still happening as the last case I heard is from 2009)
I know others have gotten the travel document in recent years in the Chinese spouse’s hometown (place of hukou). I thought I’ve read reports that Chinese children can now keep their hukou until age 18 and then they have to decide what nationality to keep. I’m not sure if that’s accurate or not and things are always changing!
Indeed they change too quickly in China. I wish they would stick with one method (and hopefully it is to keep multiple nationalities) 🙂
I’m Australian by citizenship. Malaysia does not allow dual nationalities. If they did, I would probably take up Malaysian citizenship. One thing about having multiple passports from different places is that you can travel here and there, over several without a visa and using different passports in between. I suppose that can get confusing at times for the immigration officials and you…
It is strange that there are still so many countries not allowing/ recognizing multiple nationalities. In Europe it was the same until the late 80s so I know many half Finnish people here in Germany who only have the German nationality as it was impossible back then to maintain the Finnish one after they turned 18 (until then they had both).
So far the dual citizenship has brought me really sometimes a little confusion at the passport control at airports but it always worked out in the end
I remember about 12 years ago, my German friend had a baby with his Dutch wife in Belgium. They had to choose one nationality of these three for the baby because the EU did not allow more than one EU nationality. So I am surprised you and Nathan have both Finnish and German passports. But that’s good news for us.
We will be going to our embassies next week to get our son a Dutch and Japanese passport. And once we’ve lived in the UK for 5 years we’ll apply for his British passport as well. Japan doesn’t allow more than one nationality after age 18, so by then Babel can choose which he likes better.
That’s strange with your German friend as this regulation changed actually in the late 80s. However it might happen due to incompetent office staff in the townhall as similar things happened to me before as they just didn’t want to deal with anything out of the ordinary 🙂
Haha, the one annoying part with multiple passports, our kids having Finnish and NZ passports, is that one is about to expire every year… 🙂
That’s actually the reason why that my gwrma one expired years ago and I am too cheap toget it renewed :p
Love this post! Especially the pic of baby Nathan with his passports / visa. 🙂
After reading your blog post I got the idea to make this one but I had to wait for a while till we got Nathan’s Chinese travel document 🙂
Patience is a virtue, after all! 😉
It is a great post! Clearly worth the wait for that gem of a pic with baby Nathan and his passports / travel doc.
Nathan looks so cute!! I thought I had it bad with the two Russian passports, but I can’t imagine the hassle of bringing all of these documents every time you travel!
Two Russian passports? Right now I am wondering if I could apply for a Russian passport also as my mother used to had one it her early childhood..
I have an NZ passport and a UK passport which I think is pretty great for travelling almost everywhere. Plus living in Australia or the EU. So I’m happy with mine haha.
Having a couple of nationalities is always great as it also increases the places you can live, work or study 🙂
When my husband and I met, he already had a green card, which allows one to live and work permanently in the US. You can’t vote or hold elected office. You still get to pay taxes, though. Yay! At some point he started doing more international travel for work. He decided to get a US passport, because with a Chinese passport you need visas for many countries. Now he needs a visa when we travel to China, which annoys him to no end. They are fairly expensive, and the consulate in New York is not a fun place to go. (I secretly like watching people have temper tantrums there.)
If I may say, you mean multiple passports in 1 family means more an cross-cultural family, not necessarily interracial. There are enough interracial couples in North American big cities, where both partners were born in Canada or have Canadian citizenship starting from childhood.
I was not aware of the diplomatic strength of the Canadian passport until I learned from Filipino expats that they had to apply for a travel visa just to visit the U.S., only 40 km. south of Vancouver BC.
In speaking with a Canadian citizen, who was born in Germany but immigrated as a boy, he told me that Canadian and German passports rank very high, in travel flexibility for its citizens.
I admit this: I am VERY grateful to have been born in Canada and hence, enjoy the rights and benefits as a Canadian citizen, including the Canadian passport. A lot of CAnadians don’t have a passport and hence, they don’t travel broad. It’s very easy not to barely travel even in the U.S. because Canada is so large and it takes time to travel/money if you live more than 100 km. north of the Canada-US border.
So honest, I have no interest in adopting a 2nd citizenship at this point in my life. I believe the federal Canadian govn’t has tightened their rules on dual citizenship. I don’t know all the details..but some of it pertains to Canada as part of the Commonwealth countries (former British colonies).
I certainly didn’t consider that many people give up their nationality when moving abroad / were born there and hence never had the chance to get their parents/ grandparents nationality.
I guess its because here in Europe it is much easier to keep multiple nationalities and that more and more countries accept multiple nationalities (hope that China is getting there as this travel document is already a big step).
It helped me a lot to have another citizenship as I could go to Finland to study and get all the benefits there. Studying there is anyways for free but Finnish people even get money every month for continueing beyong high school besides having all insurances for free. In Germany it is also pretty cheap to study but I would need to have a side job in order to manage everything which was not required at all for me in Finland, I could even continue with my sports back then
Interesting. I understand that university tuition in Germany has been raised in past few years.
What is causing a furor in Canada is for CAnadians living abroad, now being denied the right to vote in our federal election for Prime Minister/ruling party this October. These are people who still pay taxes to the Canadian govn’t.
Strange thing about the election, usually this would make any election invalid here as no all the population is able to vote. When I lived abroad I always got by mail the election papers from Germany and from Finland.
Right now it seems that they want to get rid of the tuition fees again in Germany but at any rates they are incredible low with just 500euros per semester if at all, most universities don’t even have th fees anyways already
I should correct myself, if a Canadian citizen declares they don’t own any property, then they can’t vote. Something like that. Anyway a number of Canadian ex-pats are furious about being barred from voting in Canadian federal election.
How on earth can Germany afford to offer university nearly/free to its citizens?
Taxation rates are much higher here in Europe than in Canada I presume. Just imagine that in Finland university is not only for free but Finnish citizens even get money when studying from the government…
Incredible…why? Improve literacy of Finns? Hope they don’t go overseas afterwards that cause a brain drain.
I think this blog article gives some insights about why Finland is doing it (and why Finland got one of the best educational systems in the world) https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/capitalist-us-vs-socialist-finland/
I think China will have to lighten up their restrictions as they no longer have the population to grow the country like they used to. I know that seems odd, but their one-child policy created a lot of problems, as you can imagine…
The one child policy as been a disaster and they slowly started to change the restrictions. However most people dont even want more than one child anymore in China as it is so expensive these days to even have one child..
After my husband became an American citizen, he used that passport exclusively.
When we moved to the Philippines, my youngest daughter was only three weeks old. She needed to travel on my passport, but getting it done on time was a problem. So first I got a passport with my photo together with my two older daughters. Then, as soon as the youngest was born, we took her photo and brought it to the consulate to be made into an insert for my passport.
Ah yes I remember, until ten years or so it was also possibly in Europe for children to travel under their mothers passport. I think this changed with the introduction of this biometrical passports as Nathan was required to get one even on his first journey to Germany when he was just six weeks old. I have high doubts that any passport control officers will recognize his picture in five years…
Ha, our kids have 2 passports, German and Taiwanese, but the tricky part is: using the correct passport when entering! Because when they use German to leave Germany, but use Taiwanese to enter Germany again, they basically never entered Germany again and then there is a “bureaucratic” problem.
Good idea however in mainland China it is terribly complicated as a child needs a hukou for a Chinese ID or passport, so we can’t use that trick 😦