In China, there are five legal religious bodies: Buddhist Association of China, Chinese Taoist Association, Islamic Association of China, Three-Self Patriotic Movement and Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. My church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is obviously not included in that list. I've never been in a place where my religion is illegal, but I guess I halfway am now. It's not illegal that I go to church since all foreigners can go. But it is illegal for Chinese citizens to go unless they are married to a foreign passport holder. Our church service is held on the second floor conference room of a skyscraper in the financial district of Shanghai. There are staff and security outside that kind of keep an eye us as we're walking in, but they are pretty friendly if you speak to them. Every Sunday before church starts, we get the same notice read aloud telling us that we are lucky we can be Mormon as foreign citizens in China, but all missionary work directed to Chinese citizens is strictly forbidden. We can reach out to other foreigners, but we are not to discuss religious matters with Chinese citizens in any way. Everyone in the branch is in and out so quickly, I lose track of who has left Shanghai to go which part of China or the world. Despite our small numbers, we have members from all continents except Antarctica. Our institute classes are held at someone's house, and we usually only have 3-10 young adults. Our last institute class was awesome since we had a Japanese investigator who can't really speak English but can speak Chinese. We realized that we had good luck as all 9 of us foreigners sitting around the dinner table could speak Chinese. That doesn't usually happen since we get Americans fresh out of college teaching English for their gap year/semester. The problem is that no one's Chinese pronunciation was good and I couldn't understand them very well. They couldn't even understand each other very well. One American girl told me she has a hard time understanding Chinese people speaking Chinese but can easily understand American people speaking Chinese. I guess that's kind of like when my dad was learning English and couldn't understand Americans speaking English but could understand Chinese people speaking English. A step in the right direction, but totally not the point of learning a foreign language.