Ok Roy
Nothing you said in your reply will satisfy me that you are talking directly to the lady and not building up 'a relationship' with a translator.
I still doubt if any of the three you refer to have ever been to the agency to read an EMF.
Ok the agency may be located in the same city as each of the ladies in Question - but do you know just how large the cities are in China?
Travelling from one part of the city to another takes time and money. Maybe several buses and a lot of time. Taxis will be out of the question. Even the shortest taxi fare one way will feed a person for a day and Chinese women are more finanacially accute than that.
If the questions are answered then why cannot the translator answer them? Your photos probably are never seen by the lady as a translator can make comments on them.
The internet and computer ownership is not as wide in China as one may imagine.
Until you have a face to face meeting by webcam and are able to speak on the telephone then you will never be sure that your lady is real. Even sending email or using messenger you cannot be certain so get a webcam set up. They are cheap in China and can be easily done with yahoo messenger. See and talk with her - even if you do not understand a word each other says.
I arrived in China in June 2009 and the lady I came to see - had no idea about any photos. She had been told about the photos but had never seen them. The agencies do not make a copy and send them to the ladies. That would cost money and money is not gladly spent by agencies.
This lady spoke fairly good English but could not read it - the majority of Chinese ladies cannot read a word of English - from my experience when they say they are learning English that means that they will start learning one day but not just now!!!
There are often reference in various threads to the difficulties the members have with their ladies lack of English even after they have met them once or twice or even more.
We start to learn Pinyin and start using that in letters. The vast majority have no idea of the difference between pnyin and Ping Pong!
They do not read pinyin. it is a way for foreigners to learn to spek the language not to write it. You may get the odd Ni Hao or Wo ai ni.
The phone is cheaper in China than travelling - I would think that every women on any marriage site in China has a cell phone.
But even with every form of communication, and I did use them all, it was not until I arrived here that we both realised that within a week we were not meant to be anything other than friends.
Meeting is the key to the relationship - it will unlock the door or firmly leave it closed.
Willy
Well, I'll have to bow to your superior experience here Willy :blush:
I mean that seriously. I should have said I think or believe they are real. I have done a lot of thinking and have already considered the things you mentioned. It could be a complete scam. The translator could be receiving the EMFs, responding to them point by point, armed with a boatload of pictures and a well worked out life of details, hammered out over years of scamming naive westerners. It could all be made up bs, with no lady at all on the other end. Just a 'translator' receiving and sending emails from the agency office.
But if that is true, how do they stay in business? There can't be that much EMF money to go around. The most they can cost is a little over $6 per credit. I'd bet most buy them in larger batches, in which case they are what, about $3.85 or so per credit? How many ways is that credit pie split? Chnlove gets a slice, the agency gets a slice, they have to pay the translators, they surely have other overhead costs related to this. I guess volume counts-but the emfs I am exchanging with the person in Wuhan are not short notes. They are quite long. You can ask 007, I showed him most of one of them.
I plan on pushing for a webcam meeting shortly with one of the women, the one I am writing to the most. We (meaning me and whoever is on the other end responding) are sending an EMF to each other everyday. That's the one from Wuhan. The one in Tieling is about an every other day thing. Those are pretty long too. The one in Chendu has only been a couple so far; she says she is still on holiday. If that one is just a translator, why aren't they pushing me to write by sending me a reply to my last EMF, which I sent three days ago.
Here is something I've noticed though, and it has made me speculate what it means. When I send an EMF to the one in Wuhan, I watch the delivery status. It changes to delivered very quickly, usually within a few minutes at the most. That includes the one I sent tonight. On the one hand, that makes me a bit suspicous, but on the other, if this is a scam everything else is so seemless, why miss that obvious detail?
Hell I don't know. You say one thing, Mike seems to back you up, Vince says something else, and others say things in between. There's no real consensus here about this issue, except that some agencies are pretty shady, and others seem to be more legitimate.
You are right, and I agree with you completely without reservation on one thing though. Until you meet, you really don't know whether you have met The One, or someone you'll never see again. But that is true whether you are going through translators or actually swapping emails and im chats and webcam sessions. Case in point, a few months ago I met someone on another dating site, swapped an email or two, chatted for hours and hours on im, webcammed, and talked on the phone deep into the night several times. We then went out on a couple of dates, and while a lot of what was there online and on the phone was still there, something was lacking for me, even though it wasn't for her. We've never gone out again. I haven't even talked to her since a couple of weeks after our last date. I guess the difference is, I only had to go 30 miles to find this out, not halfway around the world.
One other thing too. I can sit here and be cynical about it, and keeping a tight check on my emotions, to the point that I am prepared to be dissapointed when I ever go to China. I take all the excitement away at the beginning, and the lady-if there really is one-will notice this, and interpret it her way. That just increases the odds that I will be dissapointed, because I'll already have it in my head this ain't real or going to work out, and that is not the basis for a first meeting with someone. I know from experience the woman is paying close attention to how you look at her that first time. Just going to have to be prepared for a kitn if and when it comes.
BTW, I already understood that speaking english and reading or writing it are two separate things.
