Why a Booktrail?
2007 – Imagine travelling to Bejing for your husband’s work and then finding out you have breast cancer? How do you cope with living in an alien country when you desperately feel you need to come home?
The Foremost Good Fortune
What you need to know before your trail
In 2007, American writer Susan Conley moved to Beijing with her husband and two young sons. When she is diagnosed with breast cancer some six months after she arrives, her whole world falls apart.
The trials of getting to grips with a new country and culture whilst also trying to get to grips with your own mortality is a journey on two levels. As she navigates matters of day to day living, she has to get to know a China that is as alien and strange to her as the day she arrived.
Life with two children and a family to look after must come first but how do you make a home in a place where everything and everyone seems alien to you?
Travel Guide
Moving abroad to any country is a process of adapting, but Susan finds it hard and when she becomes ill, doubly so.
The Beijing 0f 2007/2008 was one on the cusp of holding the Olympics. Bejing living was markedly different due to the focus of the international spotlight on the country but it was also a time of great excitement. Her husband gives his view –
“He says the capital city is reinventing itself, There’s so much reconstruction, whole streets he once lived on are gone”
Susan however focuses on the day to day issues of living in the city and does give several insights into how this was for her. Taking an apartment no 8 in a housing complex, the strange habit of the guards saluting her each time she sees them makes her uncomfortable but there is an insight here –
It’s China’s luckiest number and let me say right now that numerology is intricate to the whole China operation. Numbers here have secret, mystical powers.
There are no fourth floors for example as the word for ‘4’ sounds like the word for ‘death’. Little details like this annoy her but fascinate at the same time.
Bejing reveals itself slowly in many other ways – it’s a dirty city more or less, and the red tape can drive you crazy. If you don’t speak Mandarin, well you might as well forget the whole thing. Everybody seems to ride a bicycle, they get through autumn in China rainfall by rainfall and the pollution suffocates…
So how do you get help for an isolating illness?
The cancer story is one thread of this look at China, fitting in, finding your way and trying to make sense of a new culture and a new city you now call home.
Where Next?
