The actual Hall of Preserving Harmony sits on the north side of the Forbidden City—one of those awe-inspiring Beijing landmarks—a towering, ornate wooden temple, lacquered in shiny red paint, where emperors feasted at imperial banquets. I stole the name of the hall for the final section of The Foremost Good Fortune, my memoir about raising my two boys in China with my husband, and what happened when breast cancer followed me to Beijing and complicated everything.

Before I went to bed last night I read an article in the New York Times about a convoy of people in the States who are eschewing Smartphones.

There’s a line in The Foremost Good Fortune about a small room that I built inside my head to get some distance on my boys when they began to make me crazy in China. This is the line that so many good people have repeated back to me at book readings around the country this year.

We hit a deer on a dark, empty road near Gorham a few weeks ago. All of us, including the giant stag, seemed to make it through okay, except our Prius, which has been doing a great deal of rattling ever since. Then last week the car temporarily died by the side of I-295, north of Portland.

I’m writing with thrilling news that The Foremost Good Fortune made it to the Goodreads Final Round of Ten Best Travel Books for 2011.

On Saturday I had the treat of driving two hours up the Maine coast to teach a memoir writing class at the Rockland Public Library. It is a beautiful, historic library—with high, white plaster ceilings and Oak floors and gorgeous, meticulous moldings. I opened the class by saying that memoir writing often unveils its subterranean meaning to us while we are in the very act of writing it.

This is the part of the blog that gets kind of awkward for me where I ask you to do me a favor. There is a great online rest stop for book lovers called Goodreads, and every year Goodreads nominates its favorite 15 books in a whole lot of categories, called The Goodreads Choice Awards.

Susan Conley is interviewed on blogger Kristin Bair O'Keefe's Writerhead Wednesday, a weekly feature in which a brilliant, charming, remarkable author answers three questions about her/his writerhead… a precious opportunity for looky-loos around the world to sneak into the creative noggins of talented writers and (ever so gently) muck about.

In San Francisco, I loved a tall African man named Devta who wore black Buddy Holly glasses and a tan waxed overcoat. He was the easiest to love. He came from the Congo and worked as a political science professor at Berkeley. He stood at the table where I signed books after the reading and talked to me about poetry and the music of non-fiction.

When Tony and the boys and I went back to China this past June, the trip was part homecoming, part book tour and part detective work. What I wanted to uncover were the pieces of China that we’d missed the most since we moved away. Was it the food? The dumplings that were steamed or pan-fried or boiled in soups, and filled with shrimp and tofu and egg and chive? Home-made knife noodles that Mao Ayi cut with the scissors in our kitchen and served with small bowls of chili sauce? The warm baozi rolls with red bean paste? The fresh ginger tea with sugar?

“Yes, yes, yes.”

In the 1970s my parents bought a Maine summer cottage from a tiny bird of a woman named Helen. She was the type of maverick that the coast of Maine is still lucky to attract, a stalwart who loved the land and lived alone, deep in the woods, without running water or electricity every summer of her life until she died there.

During our second week in China this past June, Tony and Thorne and Aidan and I took the overnight train from Beijing to Zhongzou and then drove in a mini-van to the small village of Song Shan in Dengfeng. We were there to visit the Shaolin Temple that sits in this valley along with dozens of Kung Fu schools. We'd come with our Beijing friends Ken and Vanessa and Eric and David to do some of our own family style martial arts training.

We have been back from China a week. One short week to climb out of the jet lag and blink at the sun and the explosion of green that is this summer in Maine. Our trip to China was about seeing our old friend Lao Wu and about my boys reconnecting with their friends at school in Beijing and about my book readings and about learning Kung Fu.

We’re going back to Beijing one week from today. China, we keep saying in our kitchen and in our driveway and in our car. We are going back to China. This time as real tourists. And as ex-pats looking to reclaim some pieces of our past life. Because Beijing is where we left first grade behind. And second grade and kindergarden too. Is there any way to get our hands around those years again?

When the advance copy of my book landed on the front porch, it came in a thick, cardboard envelope that I had to cut into with a bread knife because I couldn’t find any scissors. Then I stood there at the kitchen counter with the book in my hands and was happy for how it looked—the round white bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and those slim, red chopsticks.

The boys ran into the kitchen from playing basketball in the basement. There’s a low, metal hoop down there and they lunge towards it and do smash dunks over and over after school. So the boys were sweaty and thirsty but before I got them anything to drink, I held out the book to them. “Look,” I said. “It’s here.”

Three and a half years ago my husband, Tony, and I and our two young sons moved to China. My husband is one of those fluent Mandarin speakers who speaks Mandarin like he’s lived there all his life, and when he got the chance to open his company’s office in Beijing, we jumped at it.

I’ve been a writer for as long as I remember and when we climbed on that jumbo jet to China and flew over the North Pole and down into the next hemisphere, I was already scheming on the book I’d write about our trip. It would be one part travelogue of our adventures in China and two parts parenting handbook of my successes and disasters as a mother in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language.

Last night at 8:15, just before my younger son, Aidan, fell asleep in his bed, he said, “One of my most favorite things to do in the world is read.”

I was lying on his bed next to him, trying to help him choose what to dream about, and I nodded in the dark and smiled. Then I pinched myself. Because Aidan’s words were the ones I’d been secretly waiting on these past years—words that were part of the whole sentences I’d been hoping to hear since before Aidan was born.

Last week we were in San Francisco for two book readings, and Tony and I got up on Saturday morning and walked down Geary Street and then over to Grant and up through the shiny red gates that mark the entrance to the city’s own Chinatown. 

Tony had his camera. He always has his camera. And I had my memories of downtown Beijing. We walked slowly—taking in the storefront windows with their enormous Buddha heads and carved wooden bonsai trees and chopsticks and Chinese lanterns. “Hey,” I said out loud and pointed at the sets of majhong. “We could be back in Beijing right now.” The entire block seemed to me like some smaller, cleaner version of Beijing’s crazy Silk Market.

Page 99 of The Foremost Good Fortune is one third of the way through the book. Which means the page lives in a chapter that is still cancer-free, and the book is still a journal of a great family road-trip—part travelogue and part parenting handbook of successes and disasters after my husband, Tony, and I moved our two boys to China.

But in just ten more pages the book paints an uncomfortable scene in an ultrasound room at a Beijing hospital when I begin to learn I have cancer. So what page 99 does is crystallize a few themes the book has been circling: mortality, family history, and candor with kids. On this page the boys and Tony and I have just seen where Mao’s body lies embalmed in an enormous tomb in Tiananmen Square. We’re back in our Buick minivan—partly fascinated by what the Chinese have done with their dead leader and partly creeped out.

Writers Read asked me to write a guest blog on what I've been reading:

The book that I want to talk about is one that I read kind of by accident. I mean I bought the book. But that was at one of those airport bookstore kiosks when I was on the run last fall. How Tracy Kidder’s beautiful, resonant stories even end up at LaGuardia is a mystery to me but there was one Strength in What Remains and I grabbed it because Borders was having a two for one book sale. It’s not that I didn’t want to read Strength in What Remains. I love just about anything Kidder writes.

This Interview with Teresa Rhyne for her wonderful blog “The Dog Lived (and so will I)” was first published there on March 6.