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Overview
When Susan Conley, her husband, and their two young sons leave their house in Maine for a two-year stint in a high-rise apartment in Beijing, they are prepared to weather the inevitable onslaught of culture shock. But the challenges of living and mothering in an utterly foreign country become even more complicated when Susan learns she has cancer. After undergoing treatment in Boston, she returns to Beijing, again as a foreigner—but this time, it’s her own body in which she feels like a stranger.
Set against the eternally fascinating backdrop of modern China and full of insight into the trickiest questions of motherhood, this poignant memoir is a celebration of family and a candid exploration of mortality and belonging.
Editorials
Carolyn See
…a tough and gritty memoir…You hear about riveting prose, and this is it. The story is nailed down, noisily, in metal. The Foremost Good Fortune is just about as honest a book as you'll ever read. The trip Conley went on was to a far more complex place that she envisioned. This is a beautiful book about China and cancer and how to be an authentic, courageous human being.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
"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. (Feb.)Library Journal
In 2007, Conley packed up her two young sons and moved to Beijing, where her husband had gotten a job. Leaving behind all that was familiar about Portland, ME, and America, she chronicles her struggles with language and culture as well as her nearly surreal battle with breast cancer, discovered while living in China. Humorous, emotionally up-front, and politically challenging, Conley paints cultural landscapes for others who may not get the chance or choose not to live abroad.What I'm Telling My Friends Plainly, a very good read. I don't imagine I could relocate as far away as China, but I had an excellent time reading about it. I may want to call this a vicarious stress read. Then again, she's been to the Great Wall-and I can't speak any Chinese. She wins. Julie Kane, "Memoir Short Takes", Booksmack! 10/21/10Kirkus Reviews
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 anayi, 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.