Susan Conley's Blog, page 8

On Biking In China

On our second weekend in Beijing we went out in the blue Buick mini-van to buy bicycles. Tony and the boys thought they'd ride bikes everywhere in the city—to the open vegetable market and Chaoyang Park and the tiny grocery store two blocks down that sold Chinese toothpaste. And before I moved to China, I thought they'd ride their bikes everywhere too. Because riding bikes was what one did in China wasn't it? Every day that I walked that city I saw thousands of one-speed bikes speeding by all the miles of VW Santanas and Jeep Cherokees idling in standing traffic.



But every day I also saw the people riding those bikes almost die of sudden death by collision with Japanese lorries and German Mack trucks and runaway electric scooters...

Podcast Review of The Foremost Good Fortune

Here is a lovely new podcast review of The Foremost Good Fortune.

…From LiveWork Portland

Portland writer Susan Conley is about to embark on a book tour for her debut memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune. The book is about moving from Portland to Beijing for a two year stint with her husband and two sons. What could have been another tale of an American abroad took a poignant turn when Susan discovered that she had breast cancer, and her own body—even more than China—became strange and other.

Mabel the Second

This is only going to partly be a story about Mabel—our chocolate lab-Alabama farm mutt puppy. She came up north last June with thirty other puppies in a white Budget mini-van, driven by Margaret, the pied piper of the East Coast underground dog railroad.

Maine, The Magazine Profile, by Debra Spark

In the summer of 2007, Susan Conley, her husband, and her two boys abruptly moved from Portland to Beijing to take advantage of a job offer. The couple had a single month to pack up and rent their Portland home and to find an apartment and a school for their sons in China. Just as abruptly, Conley returned to the United States in May 2008. The visit wasn't to Woolwich, where she grew up, or Phippsburg, where she has always spent her summers, but to doctors in Boston. While in China, she had discovered a lump in her breast that proved to be cancerous. The Foremost Good Fortune is Conley's memoir of her experience, less a cancer tale than, as Conley puts it, "a close examination of what happens to a family when it is dislocated culturally and within disease." Her surprisingly celebratory book describes Conley trying to adjust to her new circumstances. In China, she purches a Buddha head at a flea market to stave off illness, she roams back alleys for the city's best dumplings, and, in an effort to make friends, she finds herself at a dinner party where chicken beaks float in the soup. "A lot of expats don't like where they are from," says Conley. "They are happy to trade the old life for a new glamorous expat life." But Conley loved her Maine life, what with her good friends and the Telling Room, the Portland creative writing lab and literary hub, which she co-founded. Conley and her family decided to return to Maine early in 2010, and her memoir is due out from Knopf in February 2011.

In Honor of Teachers

I got hooked on writing in eighth grade at Woolwich Elementary School in rural Maine in the 1970's. I had a wonderful teacher who was also the basketball coach, and he let me write stories about girls who wanted to run away and poems about love gone wrong. It didn't matter to him what I wrote about really, just as long as I was writing and using what he called descriptor words. All writing was sanctified to him. Once I copied the lyrics to Springsteen's entire Born To Run album and brought them in to recite to my class and that was okay too. My teacher made writing seem like the most fun you could have all day. He made it seem worthy.

Leaving Beijing

Last November, not long before my husband, Tony, and I and our two boys packed up our apartment to leave Beijing for good, we flew to Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province and then on to Lijiang, where we climbed into a white mini-van and drove five days up into a mountain range that sits on the Tibetan Plateau—long and deep in the countryside that surrounds Tibet. Our van was steered by a twenty-something Chinese pool shark, who went by the Western name Sonny. He had a gold-capped front tooth and long hair that feathers on the sides like David Cassidy from the Partridge Family.

The China Flu Blues

Late in August, while our 747 circled the Beijing haze, I prepared to ply both my boys with pink, chewable Tylenol. I'd heard from friends that the capital had gone H1N1-quarantine-mad: locking up tourists in policed hotels, isolating children in hospital rooms. It was the start of our third year in China. We'd first come on my sinophile husband's consulting visa, and happily stayed, learning Mandarin and walking the hutongs.