The Foremost Good Fortune

Starred review from October 25, 2010
"China sat in the rooms of our house like a question," begins Conley in this luminous memoir of moving her family from Portland, Maine, to Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympics. Conley's husband had accepted a dream job in Beijing, and they had decided to say "yes to all the unknowns that will now rain down on us" including common difficulties faced by many families moving to a new city: a new school for her two young sons, finding new friends, and adjusting to a new apartment all compounded by the intensity of learning a difficult new language and adapting to a new culture. Conley's writing is at once spare and strong, and her description of having to present an unflappable front to her children while being hit "with a rolling wave of homesickness" pulls the reader into her world like a close friend. As Conley starts to hit her stride in her adopted city, she discovers lumps in her breast and finds herself on a different kind of journey, which she describes as "an essential aloneness that cancer has woven into my days." She explains in this engaging memoir that after her treatment in the U.S. was over, she returned to Beijing, where she searched for the perfect Chinese talisman to "ward off the leftover cancer juju" and hoping to help her boys move past their own fears of their mother's mortality.

October 1, 2010

A frank, anecdotal memoir about the author's time in Beijing and her battle with cancer.

Conley's husband, Tony, had studied Mandarin extensively and long dreamed of living in China. When his financial business finally sent him to Beijing in 2008, on the eve of the Olympics, he convinced his wife to give it a shot for two years. Conley, at 40, with no Chinese, was reluctant to leave the comfort of her Portland, Maine. Throughout this fairly slow-going chronicle of her impressions, she retains the wary, somewhat supercilious tone of a privileged foreigner who doesn't want to get her feet wet. The first half of the book relates her attempts to get her bearings and her two young sons situated in school. The family lived in a large loft-like, elevator-accessible apartment in the center of a construction site; the boys were bussed to an international school. Conley secured the use of Tony's driver, a kindly, calm local man, and quickly hired an ayi, the indispensable "magical housekeeper." The author offers the requisite observations of an ex-pat in China—no sidewalks, everybody yells, general brainwash about the Cultural Revolution—and can't quite get anybody to delve beyond superficialities, mainly because of the language barrier. Eventually, Conley discovered lumps in her breast and had them removed before a biopsy was taken. When they were revealed to be cancerous, she flew back to Boston to have a mastectomy. Toward the end, the memoir gains momentum and a sense of closure when she and the kids returned to their life in Beijing for the fall school semester, and Conley recognized that she was truly fond of the city, their acquaintances, the food and the landscape.

A straightforward tale of how China won over an American family.

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December 1, 2010
Conley, a writing teacher, and her husband, Tony, an IT consultant, relocate from Maine to Beijing with their two young sons. Her compelling and humorous account of the cultural zeitgeist in which they are suddenly immersed draws the reader in immediately. Its a travelogue, a cultural history, and a memoir of parenting successes and disasters as she and Tony feel as though theyre running a small overnight camp for American boys in Beijing. As their initially reluctant sons gradually make friends, and Susan slowly learns enough Mandarin to negotiate bargaining at the market and trips with visitors to the Great Wall, their lives seem to be reaching an even keel. Then Susan discovers lumps in her left breast. The family returns for Susans mastectomy and follow-up radiation to Maine, where family and friends take over as surrogate moms, shuffling the boys from one activity to the next. Then theyre back in Beijing, where Susan must come to grips with not only a foreign culture but also the haze of cancerland. Beautifully written and insightful on many levels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)