River East, River West, Aube Rey Lescure
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024
Aube Rey Lescure’s assured debut is a dual-time narrative, told from the perspectives of half-Chinese half-American teenager Alva and her businessman stepfather Lu Fang. In Shanghai in 2007, Alva reacts to her American mother’s marriage to Lu Fang by becoming a rebel: she starts drinking, gets expelled from her Chinese school and insists on her parents moving her to an international one. Back in 1985, Lu Fang is an unhappy young husband, working as a shipping clerk in the port of Qingdao. When he meets a beautiful young American, they begin an impetuous affair. Gradually, we realize the unexpected connections between Alva and Lu Fang’s stories.
Rey Lescure vividly depicts the profound effect China’s turbulent politics have had on ordinary lives. Lu Fang is left emotionally scarred by his experiences during the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, when he was forced to leave university and undergo ‘re-education’ in the remote countryside. Although he eventually makes a fortune during China’s 1990s economic boom, his frustration at his lost dreams persists, with tragic consequences. In 21st-century China, Alva struggles to comprehend how her peers can both venerate wealth and remain in thrall to the all-powerful Communist Party, its labyrinthine rules, and the ‘hero worship’ that it passes as fact. She believes becoming ‘a true American teenager’ will bring her liberation, but her friendship with a family of wealthy US expats only leads to further disillusionment.
However, River East, River West is ultimately hopeful rather than pessimistic. Despite their unhappiness, Alva and Lu Fang never lose sight of life’s small joys: poems, films, the beauty of the ‘Yellow Sea at dusk’ and Shanghai’s ‘willows and manmade lakes’. Their deepening compassion for each other and for Alva’s troubled yet brave mother, Sloan, helps them to eventually make peace with their pasts, ending the novel in a mood of tentative optimism.
Editorial Picks
