Coming to terms with the two big Cs - cancer and China
There is a scene in The Foremost Good Fortune, Susan Conley's memoir about China, cancer and bringing up children, that best summarises the book. Conley is recovering in a hospital in Beijing from lumpectomy surgery. She has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Next door a small seven-year-old Chinese boy is screaming in his own private pain, surrounded by concerned family.
Suddenly, an earsplitting sledge-hammering shakes the building. It's 2008. The sick be damned. China has Olympic infrastructure to build - and even the hospital, supposedly a sanctuary for the ill, is in a construction frenzy.
'So many things in this country were surreal. Without turning your head you could see hundreds of cranes and skyscrapers going up wherever you looked,' recalls Conley, 43, who has returned to China from the US to promote her book, including a visit to Hong Kong last week. She sits, legs crossed and face composed, on the edge of a spacious fawn-coloured sofa at Beijing's Peninsula Hotel. The corporate air-conditioned suite is a far cry from the hospital chaos. 'I was isolated within this realm of disease, and I was isolated from the language. I pulled that scene as a metaphor for the whole experience.'
The story starts in 2007 when Conley's husband, Tony, a Putonghua speaker, is transferred to China for a 2?year stint. Conley, a poet and creative writing professor, suddenly finds herself lost as an American expat mum in Beijing. She is ambivalent about her ability to form lasting friendships in a transitional metropolis; about the stifling pollution 'as thick as leek soup'; and, most of all, about moving her two young sons, Thorne, then six, and Aidan, then four, to an immense, unknowable country across the world.
After a fraught beginning, the family buckles down in their new home just off the vast freeway known as the Fourth Ring Road. The boys learn Putonghua at an international school. They spend freezing winter weekends skating on the frozen Houhai Lake or devouring vegetarian food at a popular Buddhist restaurant near the ancient Temple of Confucius. For Conley 'those were my favourite times'.
Seven months later Conley finds cancerous lumps in her left breast. She undergoes a traumatic mastectomy, breast implant, and radiation - and lives. The Foremost Good Fortune is Conley's musings on coming to terms with searing dislocation: from her home in America and from her own body as a woman. 'China and cancer are both big countries,' she writes in the introduction; this is a memoir that attempts to unravel both for readers skirting on the outside.
The Foremost Good Fortune joins a library of cancer survival memoirs; but it is also a story about travel, the trials of marriage, and above all, the selfless love - and, often, frustrations and guilt - that define motherhood. As such it has hit a chord: O, The Oprah Magazine recommended the book as a top-10 pick. Conley thought hard before delving into such a private experience. 'I did not take the decision to write this book lightly. My life's calling was not to write a cancer-based memoir,' she states emphatically. 'Then I just felt compelled to write again. And I knew you can't go half way. You just can't. I had to go really deep.'
'Deep' means trying to cross the bridge between people who have experienced cancer and those who haven't. Conley describes her illness like 'bobbing in a lake where only people with cancer swim'. Tony is waiting on the shore; as someone who doesn't have cancer, he can never join her.
'My modest hope was that there were things to say about being a woman and a mother on the river's journey. I wanted the voice to be humble because I'm no China expert,' she says warmly.
While China comes alive, Conley is at her most confident, and moving, when describing her illness. Before we leave the suite I ask her about mortality - and the loss of her breast. Conley moved back to China after her surgery, back to a country with little regard for the privacy of the body and where nakedness in changing rooms is ubiquitous.
'That was hard,' she says with a smile, 'no naked gym for me any more'. She looks out of the window and fiddles with some black and gold bangles around her wrist. 'It's a plain and simple anatomical thing,' she says finally. 'I mean, my god, we're talking about a part of the body that is so mythologised. It's very feminine, nurturing. It was very ... a lot of absence. A feeling of lacking. And then you just get on with it. When you are a mother you have no choice.'
Today, Conley is three years cancer free, about to finish a new novel, and looking forward. As she says in the book, she has 'made peace with both countries' - neither China nor cancer seem nearly as daunting as before.
