Blue skies. An airplane prepares to touch down at the Toronto Island Airport.

One of them is helping my husband, a Dutch citizen, apply for permanent residency here.

A few days ago, we sent in an application to Immigration Canada. The package was nearly 50 pages long and it took us more than a month to assemble. There was a pretty extensive questionnaire, addendums to the questionnaire, supplementary documents like tax records, various forms of ID, results of a medical check-up my husband had completed here in Canada, and 70+ photos documenting our relationship, from our first date until present day.

We did it all with the help of a lawyer. It’s a pricey option. The forms can be completed on your own, for sure, but the lawyer served as a sort of supervisor, making sure we had all the right documents, telling us how to go about getting the right documents, and making sure all the forms were filled out correctly. Most of all, I think you’re really just paying for piece of mind.

There’s still more to be done — the most time consuming being police checks in all the countries he has lived in for more than 6 months (3 police checks are needed in three countries in our case).

And we’re told the process takes 13 months on average, from time of submission to end.

It may sound like a lot, but I know we have it easy compared to most. For the last 8 months I was on the east coast of China in a place called Qingtian. I spent most of my time listening to Chinese migrants tell me gripping stories of how they ventured abroad.

Some had traveled with snakeheads (Chinese smugglers), crossing borders in the moonlight aboard boats, in the back of vans, and sometimes even on foot. Others were lucky to get work visas. All of them had moved from town to town, restaurant to restaurant, factory to factory. Life was lonely and work was tough. Indeed, life was work.

It’s good to be home, here in Canada. I am reminded, especially after nearly a year living in the Chinese countryside, how good we have it here, and how many migrants risk life and limb for a chance at what we sometimes take for granted.

Qingtian 青田 is mountainous county in Zhejiang 浙江 Province, 300 miles south of Shanghai. For more than 200 years, its people have sought to escape a life of wretched poverty. So they went out. Today, more than 200,000 people – amounting to half of Qingtian’s current population – live in more than 120 countries around the world.

Qingtian’s migrants are spread out all over South America, in the United States and Canada, across Asia and in Africa. But, most of the migrants have ended up in Europe, working in restaurants and factories. For years they have sent their hard-earned cash back home, lifting their families out of poverty and transforming Qingtian County beyond recognition.

Over the last year and a half, with my trusty Canon DSLR, I’ve captured a changing Qingtian. New homes, apartments and yes, even a KFC have opened in the county’s biggest and most prosperous town, Hecheng Town 鹤城镇 (also called Qingtian City).

See how the old is clashing with the new in this album: Qingtian through my lens.

Chen Fengyi’s 5-year-old son was kidnapped from outside her apartment building in Huizhou. She said the police never came. Source: NYTimes

An article in today’s New York Times brought me to tears this afternoon.

The story tells the plight of parents in the south of China whose children have been abducted and sold to other families in want of sons.

The children don’t travel far. From the city, many are brought to the rural areas, where demand for young boys is especially strong and where the one-child policy has further encouraged the tradition of favoring boys over girls.

The article interviews a number of families. The Chens talked about their frustrations with police indifference:

…When she is not scouring the streets at night for her son, Ms. Chen and her husband go to the local police station and fall to their knees. “We cry and beg them to help,” she said, “and every time they say, ‘Why are you so hung up on this one thing?’ ”

Many parents take matters into their own hands. They post fliers in places where children are often sold and travel the country to stand in front of kindergartens as they let out. A few who run shops have turned their storefronts into missing person displays. “We spend our life savings, we borrow money, we will do anything to find our children,” said Mr. Peng, who owns a long-distance phone call business in Gongming, not far from Shenzhen. “There is a hole in our hearts that will never heal.”…

And we learn that parents have brought their case to Beijing:

…For the parents of missing children, the heartbreak and the frustration have turned into anger. Last September, about 40 families traveled to the capital to call attention to the plight of abducted children. They staged a brief protest at the headquarters of the national television broadcaster, but within minutes, dozens of police officers arrived to haul them away.

“They dragged us by our hair and said, ‘How dare you question the government,’ ” said Peng Dongying, who lost her 4-year-old son. “I hate myself for my child’s disappearance, but I hate society more for not caring. All of us have this pain in common, and we will do anything to get back our children.”…

This website, called “Baby Come Home” 宝贝回家，is a website set up by the parents to encourage the exchange of information and gather support for their cause.