How could someone leave their life behind and start over completely in a place with no one but their three relatives? This is exactly what Susan Conley did for the sake of her family. After an offer of a lifetime arises for Tony, Susan’s husband, it’s ‘sayonara” to Maine and hello to Beijing, China. Susan and her family experience a multitude of changes as they move, and with the new surroundings and environment, Mrs.Conley learns more about herself and her family than she ever did before.
At first, Susan barely knows a word of Mandarin. She feels isolated and confused and she hardly knows where to start. She spends most of her days working on her novel and taking her two sons, Thorne and Aidan, to the bus stop. There are many days when the only adult she comes in contact with is her husband. After several weeks pass, Susan gets a Chinese teacher named Rose. Every week the language barrier between Conley and the rest of China seems smaller. At the bus stop she meets several other mothers and is eventually invited to a “sweater party”. This seems like a great opportunity to meet other women, but unfortunately, it turns out to not be what she expects, though she didn’t really know what to expect at a sweater party. The Sweater Lady cancels the
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Loneliness holds fast to Susan for a very long time. Cancer separates her from everyone else she knows. It’s a thing that no one around her really understands and it eats at her not only physically, but mentally too. She feels like she’s stuck in a lake that she can’t get out of. Her family waits patiently on the shore for her, but they can’t go in after her, they must simply wait. Susan endures a mastectomy and goes to live in Boston for six weeks of radiation everyday. Eventually the cancer is gone, she is in remission, but it still lingers in her mind. She is out of the lake, but she still needs to dry