The friend from Nanchang was a professor there so he wasn't unsophisticated. Don't know why we had such a difficult problem, but we definitely did and it was very surprising. Will check with relatives in Wuhan. Only thing I can think of is that possibly the phone companies didn't want to sell a prepaid phone to a then 15-year-old. If that was the case, I could simply buy it in my name. Again, I don't understand why I had the problem I did, but I unfortunately did. Additionally, the phone vendors did take seriously whatever regulation they were following. One of them was willing to sell us a very, stripped down, close to worthless phone that I decided not to buy.