Take an ordinary American family: mom, dad, two young boys. Put them through a common American ordeal: packing up their furniture, their books, their toys, and moving it all to a new home.

In Beijing.

Foremost Good Fortune is Susan Conley’s memoir of two and a half years in China which, I don’t have to tell you, doesn’t much resemble her native Portland, Maine.

For one thing, there’s the language.

This is no problem for Susan’s husband Tony. “Back in 1985

[he] took a backpack and a Nikon and headed out on China’s trains photographing border zones. . . . [He] had a knack for conversing with strangers, for hitching rides and getting out of pinches with Chinese police.”

Susan can’t rely on Tony forever; he’s expected at the office, you know. Nor can she depend on Lao Wu, their driver. Sure, he’s kind enough to chauffeur them off to peach farms and national parks. But his real job is driving Tony to meetings.

So Susan’s got to pull off ordinary mom-tasks, like putting the boys on the school bus, alone.

Even the kids are jittery. As six-year-old Thorne rides the elevator down their high-rise, he “begins to yell at me. ‘In case you didn’t realize it, I don’t speak Chinese!’”

And “How will we get help on the bus if we need it?”

And “What will happen if we miss the bus?”

Susan, faking confidence, tells them they’ll catch a taxi. “But I’ve decided we can’t miss the bus. Because in a taxi, we’ll be relying on my Chinese.”

Or, as she calls it, “Chinglish.”

I don’t know about you, but this is why I only go abroad to, say, Georgia.

China is a land of endless permits and rules. (We wouldn’t want employees of our driver’s license bureaus reading Conley’s book, lest they pick up some new ideas.) It is a land of haggling. Conley slowly catches on as her family explores the back country, passing peasant hawking aluminum pots, bike tires and gum. It is a land of antiquity. Four-year-old Aidan struggles to understand how old the Great Wall is. He is finally satisfied when he places it as older than Johnny Cash.

But the most different thing of all is that Conley’s friends and family are not there. It’s one thing to sit in your Portland living room and ponder going abroad. It’s quite another to set up housekeeping in that high-rise tower, and feel what’s absent.

Conley copes by hiring a language tutor and “dating” women, as in working hard at making friends. One of her first attempts lands her at a “sweater party,” making awkward conversation with expat moms ten years her junior.

Meanwhile, her boys master enough Mandarin to chat with the natives while she stutters along with her Chinglish.

Eventually, she meets some great friends, the kind with which she can share a glass of wine and a heartfelt conversation.

She’s going to need them.

Because one day she finds two lumps in her breast.

Conley captures the small moments of an extraordinary two years: Men snooze below an overpass. The Inner Mongolian plains pass beneath her airplane window. Shoppers throng a seedy basement shop, searching through pirated movies.

Her loneliness and distress are almost delicious to the reader because she serves up life, slowed-down enough to savor.

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Lacking the courage to dine on the dumplings, tofu and baozi that Conley learned to eat in Beijing, I’m sticking with the heavenly Vegetable Turkey Hoagie.

It includes garden vegetable cream cheese. This was new to me, so I gave myself points for trying something exotic.

Fry up the veggies.

Fry up the veggies.

Spread on the cream cheese.

Spread on the cream cheese.

Lay on the meat.

Lay on the meat.

Spoon the vegetables over all.

Spoon the vegetables over all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eat!

Eat!