by Susan Conley
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Susan C. Conley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley, Susan, [date].
The foremost good fortune / by Susan Conley.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi Book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59520-1
1. Conley, Susan. 2. Conley, Susan —Family.
3. Conley, Susan, 1967– —Health. 4. Beijing (China)—Biography.
5. Beijing (China)—Social life and customs. 6. Americans—
China—Beijing—Biography. 7. Cancer—Patients—China—
Beijing—Biography. 8. Cancer—Treatment—China—Beijing.
9. Portland (Me.)—Biography. I. Title.
DS795.23.C66A3 2010
951′.15606092—dc22
[B] 2010036000
Jacket photograph by Stephen Lewis
Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde
v3.1
To Tony
and to Aidan and Thorne
DHAMMAPADA 15
Hunger: the foremost illness.
Fabrications: the foremost pain.
For one knowing this truth
As it actually is,
Unbinding
Is the foremost ease.
Freedom from illness: the foremost good fortune.
Contentment: the foremost wealth.
Trust: the foremost kinship.
Unbinding: the foremost ease.
—translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Qianmen: The Front Gate
I - Hall of Celestial and Terrestrial Union You Should Have Come Earlier
The Jingkelong
The Great Wall Is Older Than Johnny Cash
Building a Chinese Boat
I Don’t Speak Chinese
Xiao Wang
Chabuduo
“How to Handle the Stress of an International Move”
Mongolian Hot Pot
Piaoliang
The Bag Lady
How Long Have You Lived Here?
II - Hall of Mental Cultivation Houhai Lake
Human Migration
Stuffed Like Mao
The Three T’s and the One F
I Love You. End of Discussion.
III - Hall of Martial Valor Tell Me in Centimeters
Inner Mongolia
The Cruelest Month
IV - Palace of Tranquil Longevity Clouds or Butterflies
Decade by Decade
Chinese Blessing
You Are Here
Spaceship
V - Palace of Earthly Tranquility How to Hire an Ayi
Science Experiment
No Assembling
Ecological Farm
Starter Buddha
Beijingren
Yashow Market
Breast Behavior
Homework
Foreign Intelligence
The United Nations of Second Graders
VI - Hall of Preserving Harmony Homing Pigeon
Israel
Top Gun
Office Party
Rose
Glitter
Chinese Basketball
Caskets
Tiger Leaping Gorge
Houmen: The Back Gate
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Qianmen:
The Front Gate
It’s late on a cold April night in Portland, Maine, and I lie on the couch staring hard at a glossy pullout map of Beijing. My two boys are asleep upstairs in their beds, and my husband has just landed in China to buy swivel chairs for his new office there. I want this map to offer a clue of what a life in Beijing would look like. But the more I gaze at street names, the more distant they feel: would we live on a road called Yongdingmen Xibinhe? Or Changchunqiao?
Tony calls me from the crowded lobby of the Grand Hyatt Beijing. He says the capital city is reinventing itself. There’s so much construction, whole streets he once lived on are gone. I pull the map closer and trace one long Chinese highway with my finger while he talks. The black line winds around the city center like a snake. “I can’t get a feel,” I say out loud and try to laugh into the phone, but the laughter sounds forced. “I’m staring at the Forbidden City. It’s smack in the middle of everything, isn’t it?”
There’s a slight delay on the line—a second of silence that neither of us fills. “It’s a city within a city,” Tony says. “With shrimp dumplings so good they may change your life.” I close my eyes and listen to his voice. I’ve been hearing China stories from my husband as long as I’ve known him.
In the eighties he hitchhiked in China for a year on a college grant and became so curious he stopped out for another stay. When I married Tony, I felt China’s tidal pull. In San Francisco I pretended to be invested in a legal career, while Tony taught photography at a Chinese community center—walking old men and women around Chinatown, cameras dangling from their necks, and then back to the darkroom he’d built.
We drove to San Diego, where Tony wrote grad papers on Sino-American trade treaties, and I got a master’s in poetry. When we migrated to Boston, I taught at a downtown college and Tony put on a consulting tie. But the closest he got to Beijing during the Boston years was our favorite dumpling house. Then we moved to Maine—as far east as we could go in the continental United States. China sat in the rooms of our house like a question.
I can hear Tony say something fast in Mandarin to someone in the hotel lobby. He has what people in China call “pure tones.” That means he speaks Chinese almost as if he’s lived there all his life. And I don’t mean to imply that my husband didn’t study his brains out to get a handle on a quadrant of Mandarin’s fifty-five thousand characters. But he’s good at it in an uncanny way. It’s the main reason, really, why I’m still awake at close to midnight, pulling a green wool blanket over my legs, trying to decide if I can transplant my kids to a country where they don’t have one friend.
It’s time I gave Tony some kind of sign. I’ve been stalling. There’s an apartment lease in Beijing waiting for initials and a work contract that needs negotiating. The question is about geography. But it runs deeper. Given the choice, our two little boys would say they’re doing fine, thank you. They are four and six and believe life in Maine means clear oceans and no reason to tinker. No cause to climb on a jumbo jet and fly into the next hemisphere. Or to start over in a new school, in a new city, where they do not speak the language.
No one has to explain to me that the journey will be about confronting unknowns: the nuanced language, and a history so rich that Marco Polo and Genghis Khan both sharpened their teeth there. But also the unknown of the person I’ve most recently become—a mother still unsure of her new job description. A nap czar and food commandant. Who is she? That woman who keeps a pencil drawing of a thermometer taped to the fridge to remind her kids that her temper is rising?
“You haven’t asked,” is what I finally whisper into the phone.
Tony is confused now. “Asked what?”
“You have to ask me to come to China.” I speak louder. “I need you to ask.” Then I smile to myself beca
use I am a person guided by words and he is not. But when he starts to talk, I can’t detect even a trace of impatience, and that’s how I know my answer.
“Okay,” he says slowly, and there’s a lilt to his voice. “I’m asking if the four of us can move to China.” I hear him take an excited breath. “I’m formally asking if you’ll come.”
That’s when I hear myself say yes. Yes to the cultural zeitgeist that living in China the year before the Olympics will surely be. Yes to an exit from the grind of Tony’s commuter-flight life. Yes to all the unknowns that will now rain down. Because that one small word sets our family in motion. A month later I resign from the creative writing lab I’ve been running. We rent out our Portland house and truck old high chairs and baby strollers and frying pans to a storage facility with a corrugated metal roof. Then we ship boxes of rain boots and soccer balls and Early Readers on an airplane to Beijing.
What unfolds in China is the bounty we hoped for: the universe is much bigger once you leave New England. We are meant to grow as a family in that way you hear Americans do when they head east, to become bigger risk takers and deepen our connections to one another. And we do. We eat jiaozi and baozi and brown, pickled tea eggs. We drive the crooked hutong alleys with screaming taxi drivers and climb remote mountains on ancient horses. What’s more, the boys and I learn how to speak beginner Mandarin, while Tony dusts off a few vocabulary words.
But what happens while we’re there is that one of us gets cancer. It turns out to be me. This is my excuse for why I haven’t held on to more Mandarin grammar. For us, cancer becomes the story within the China story. China and cancer are both big countries, so there’s a lot to say about each. But let me start back at the beginning. It’s Monday in Beijing, and I have to go pick up the boys from their first day of school.
I
Hall of
Celestial and
Terrestrial
Union
You Should Have Come Earlier
Here’s the setup: I’m in the passenger seat of a blue Buick minivan driving through downtown Beijing at three o’clock on a blistering afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old Beijing local named Lao Wu is driving. He will always be the one driving in this story. He wears pressed high-waisted blue jeans and a sharp tan Windbreaker. Driving is his job; that is to say, he’s a full-time driver. When Lao Wu came back home from the fields after the Cultural Revolution, the high schools had been closed. That was the week he learned to drive a Mack truck, and he’s been driving ever since.
This is my third day in Beijing, and jet lag still pulls me down by my ankles. I lean back in the seat, my mind thick with sleep, and the van slows so I can count twenty waitresses lined up outside the Sichuan Xiao Chi dumpling house. The girls wear blue cotton qipaos and do jumping jacks on the sidewalk, then they salute a head waitress who stands on a small, black wooden box. Next they let out a cheer and march in a circle on the sidewalk. The head waitress calls out more instructions (How to fold the napkins? How to take a drink order?) and the girls yell back in a call and response. Then they salute their leader one more time and march into the restaurant.
People don’t march much where I’m from. Maybe the occasional high-school band at the annual Bath Memorial Day parade. But marching is very much the way here—some kind of simulation of the hard-nosed Chinese army way of life? Some kind of leftover from the Communist heyday? Except we’re still in the Communist heyday, aren’t we?
At the apartment complex where we live there are more marching guards. They salute me every time I come back to the building. It’s creepy. I want to tell them I’m not their senior officer. No. I am a forty-year-old American wife and mother of two who can’t remember how to pronounce the number eight in Mandarin. This is a problem, because eight is where we live. It’s China’s luckiest number, and let me say right now that numerology is intrinsic to the whole China operation. Numbers here have secret, mystical powers. There are no fourth floors in China because when spoken, the Chinese character for the number 4 sounds too much like the character for death. So what good fortune that our apartment sits on the lucky eighth floor of a building called Park Avenue, across the street from Beijing’s biggest city park. It’s mostly Chinese families at Park Avenue—well-off Beijingren, the term used for people born and raised in the capital. Many are people who somehow got out during Mao’s reign and have returned because China’s prospects now look so good. There’s also a big handful of Taiwanese here and Hong Kong Chinese and a smattering of Europeans.
We could have lived in Palm Springs or Champagne Villas, Yosemite or Central Park, Park Place or the Beijing Riviera—vast compounds whose names move beyond kitsch into the surreal. To get through the front door of our apartment lobby, we say “Ni hao” to the teenaged guard. He says, “Ni hao” back and salutes us. Then we say “Xie xie,” which means thank you, and he says “Bu keqi” (you’re welcome), and lets us on the elevator. He salutes us one more time to make sure. We play out this Beckett-like scene of absurdity many times a day, until the humor in it has dried up and flown away on the winds of the Gobi Desert.
Tony has come to introduce credit-rating systems to the Chinese state-owned banks. This means that he meets with senior financial officers, trying to explain in Mandarin why buying complicated American computer programs is crucial to China’s success. Sometimes Tony has to pinch himself to make sure it’s him and not an imposter wearing that blue banker’s suit. Because when Tony lived in Beijing the first time, he had a different gig.
In 1985 Tony took a backpack and a Nikon and headed out on China’s trains photographing border zones—places the government here officially calls “ethnic minority regions.” Tony started in Yunnan where it meets up with Laos and Burma, and then went northwest to Xinjiang Province where it rubs shoulders with today’s “stans”: Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. Next he went south to Tibet and got an early visa for Lhasa. He’d been schooled in Mandarin and had a knack for conversing with strangers, for hitching rides and getting out of pinches with Chinese police. In many towns he was the first laowai the locals had seen. He’d arrive in a village and make friends there and find it hard to leave.
Years ago in San Francisco, when it got so I always wanted to be in the same room with Tony, he gave me one of the photos he took on that trip. Some of the prints had won awards in galleries by then. Mine was of two women sitting in a crop of Hami melons by the side of a dusty road. I hung it in my bedroom and it marked the beginning of my own quiet fascination with Asia. The natural beauty of those women startled me, and so did the way they looked right into Tony’s camera. The photo made me want to understand him more. He knew himself well. There was a quiet self-sufficiency. Where did that come from?
I have never been to China. I do not speak the language. I’ve bought a wooden Chinese desk. My plan in Beijing is to finish a novel—two hundred pages of a rough draft set in Paris. The boys are here to go to school. It is what boys do. Or at least that’s what I keep telling them they do. Their school is a twenty-minute highway ride south of our apartment. It sits down the road from the underpass that marks one of Beijing’s busiest intersections: a six-way juggernaut of rickshaws, one-speeds, VW Santanas, and horses and wagons. Today, a horde of teenage vendors has set up shop on the sidewalks to sell chestnuts and lychees, and baked sweet potatoes. These streets are not pedestrian friendly—they’re long blocks of strip malls and food stalls and mid-rises in all stages of rehab and post-hab. Throngs of people walk in the roads buying and selling like mad. There’s Tsingtao beer for sale, and turtles, and athletic socks, and phone chargers. How strange and dazzling.
The more I stare, the more arbitrary those marching waitresses back down the road begin to seem—like some kind of imposed order. Finger in the dam. There’s so much humanity here; a dozen men take a snooze on the strip of concrete below the overpass. There’s a woman walking just ahead in a bright Mickey Mouse T-shirt who pauses to blow her nose into the gutter. To the right of the gridlock, hundreds of peo
ple wait in line for buses. A large floral display stands next to the ticket kiosk—something you might see in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, made entirely of yellow chrysanthemums that spell out the words “Beijing 2008 Games.” Next to the sign a woman sells slices of yellow Hami melon on wooden skewers. A line of black Audis weaves in front of our van with their lights on and a rose garland battened to each hood. Lao Wu smiles and points to the bride and groom who ride in front of the procession in a blue Hummer.
I’ve never seen so many people riding bicycles—all helmetless and willing to risk their lives dodging cars. Many women wear black office pumps and knee-length polyester dresses; lots of men are in nylon business slacks with white-collared shirts. At first, the joke would seem to be on the cars, because they can’t get through the mess. But it’s the cars that will prevail here—one thousand more on the road every day, which makes the bicycles begin to look like living artifacts.
We’re creeping through a series of traffic lights, and I’m sure the words I hear on the radio are in English. I ask Lao Wu to turn up the volume by making a circular motion with my right hand. “Ying yu?” I say excitedly. Is it English? Then I repeat, “Ying yu?” and then I’m hit with a rolling wave of homesickness.
Lao Wu shakes his head decisively and says, “Han yu.” Chinese.
But I’m sure I can hear English on the radio. I will it to be English. A motorbike passes—the driver’s wife sits behind him with a baby in her lap, and a toddler sits up front on the handlebars. I want to be driving I-95 north from Portland to Phippsburg, listening to the local radio. I want to be sitting in my mother’s kitchen in West Point while she reminds my brother, John, on the phone how to make chocolate fudge. John’s a very tall man now and one of my best friends, and in the 1970s he made a lot of fudge.
I want to listen to any single conversation I can understand. Because this is too much—an entire country that doesn’t speak English. City of fifteen million with no readable road signs. City of marchers. That’s when Lao Wu turns up the volume and laughs, and I think I’m going to really like him. I laugh too and nod my head, because of course. Of course it’s Chinese on the radio. We are, after all, in China. It’s Monday in Beijing and we’ve got work to do. Children to pick up from school. The first day is bound to be rocky.
