Reinvention courses through a country in debut novel set in mainland China
While 14year-old Alva Collins is an American citizen with a decidedly un-Chinese name, China is the only home she has ever known.
Born on the mainland to her free-spirited white mother, Sloan, and a Chinese father whom she’s never met, Alva, a protagonist in Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, “River East, River West,” has never once visited the United States. Raised and educated like a local in Shanghai, she speaks Chinese fluently and learns a Maoist version of history alongside Chinese students at her public school.
Her limited understanding of American culture comes from Sloan, who moved to China in the 1980s as an English teacher and never left; and the pirated CDs and DVDs she eagerly purchases on the streets of rapidly globalizing Shanghai circa 2007.
Alva’s city is as bifurcated in its geography as Alva is in her identity. As the novel unfolds, she and her mother find themselves in transition: Although they’ve long been a scrappy family of two, now Sloan has married Lu Fang, their much-wealthier Chinese landlord, a union that thrusts mother and daughter into an entirely new social and economic order.
For Sloan and Alva, the contrast between their old and new lives is stark: “They spent entire weekends in their underwear. They boiled instant noodles in cardboard cups most dinners. That’s how they used to live anyway, in tiny rentals in Shanghai’s older, more decrepit neighborhoods in Puxi, where they shared a mattress on the floor. These habits were hard to shake, even after they moved into his two-bedroom in the uppermiddle-class neighborhood of Century Park. Everything in Pudong was newly developed – the streets wider, the buildings shinier.”
Bisecting Shanghai is the Huangpu River, with Puxi — “River West” — representing Alva’s old life, and Pudong — “River East” — reflecting the new.
To capture such a specific time in China’s contemporary history — and to illuminate how China got there — Rey Lescure alternates in time and perspective between Alva in 2007-2008, and her new stepfather, Lu Fang, from 19852005.
A rich backstory and internal life add dimension to Lu Fang’s character, a credit to Rey Lescure’s imagination and knowledge of contemporary Chinese history. (The author, who lives in Cambridge, worked previously in foreign policy.) When the reader first inhabits Lu Fang’s perspective, he’s a bored shipyard worker in Qingdao who happens to meet Sloan one day. Although he’d once been a promising student who won admission to university in Beijing, his education and his fortunes were dashed by the Cultural Revolution.
“He was a [prisoner], four borders enclosing him, even if those borders stretched for thousands of kilometers, even if they were invisible. They were his laughable monthly paycheck, the university degree he’d never earned, the visa he could never afford, the openness to life he had lost at seventeen, all because he was born in the wrong decade, because a few high-up men’s whims were enough to change the course of a generation,” Rey Lescure writes, using the Chinese character for “prisoner.”
Rey Lescure avoids the trap of predictability as she connects the dots between Lu Fang’s past as a lowly worker and his present as a rich Shanghai landlord married to an American woman. Her writing reflects a gift for vivid setting and distinctive characters, both of which bring to life the heady, wildly optimistic era of mid-2000s China, when — pre-global financial crisis and in the leadup to the 2008 Beijing Olympics — the country was the hot destination for foreign businesspeople, journalists, academics, and tourists. The “expat package,” Alva observes, includes a company-provided villa, “an army of local servants” to maintain the home, international school for the children, and a private driver behind the wheel of a Range Rover, a ride “raised high above the usual dents and potholes of Chinese asphalt.”
Wealth seduces an entire society in “River East, River West,” and Alva is hungry for a taste. Although she often feels disdain for Lu Fang, it’s his bankrolling of her new life that allows her to enter this privileged world of foreign expats and international school in Shanghai, which Sloan vehemently avoided and could never afford anyway.
In one scene, as she explores expat nightlife with a new American friend, “it occurred to Alva that she’d never been served by a white person before. But it made sense: this wasn’t a local spot. Most girls at Kandy, she and Zoey included, were international schoolgirls. … Most of the men at Kandy were older – expats and Chinese alike, some middle-aged, businessmen in suits. Everybody seemed very happy with the underage girls’ infinite willingness to drink and shriek and dance as if their short fifteen years on earth had culminated in precisely this moment…”
The days of unlimited opportunity and promise feel like a distant memory now, as authoritarianism, censorship and government crackdowns in China increase. And for Lu Fang, Alva, Sloan and so many others across Shanghai and greater China, the allure of reinvention comes at great cost.
But in “River East, River West,” Rey Lescure proves herself to be a remarkably humane storyteller, focusing on the ties between her characters and the worlds they inhabit in order to ground an ambitious, multi-generational story of global upheaval in personal, poignant detail.