River East, River West (2023)

Why this one?

I’m reading selected entries from the 2024 Women’s Prize Longlist. This was another one that I’d seen getting some positive reviews on IG, so wanted to check it out.

Aube Rey Lescure grew up between Shanghai, China and Provence, France.  Her father was Chinese, her mother a French expat.  In her teens she went to an expat high school (named the ‘Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation’, amusingly) in Shanghai, her experiences of which are central to this book. She studied at Yale before working in foreign policy and writing. She has coauthored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She has published short stories and creative nonfiction in a range of publications, and is currently deputy editor of Off Assignment. This is her debut novel. 

Thoughts, etc.

River East, River West takes the form of two parallel narratives, as two characters experience contrasting moments in the recent history of China. The more autobiographical section, set initially in 2007 (shortly before the Financial Crisis), introduces us to 14-year-old Alva, the daughter of American expat and failed actress Sloan, as she navigates being a ‘laowai’ in a Chinese high school and looks on enviously at those attending American expat schools nearby. Her mother has recently married their landlord, the Chinese businessman Lu Fang. The book’s second narrative is from Lu Fang’s perspective, beginning in 1985 (at a period of China’s opening up and embracing of Western business). In it, we soon learn (in contrast to Alva, who is unaware) that Lu Fang has a long history with Sloan. At this point, he’s living in Qingdao, struggling along in relative poverty and escaping from his humdrum existence with long swims out to sea and fantasies of studying in the US.

Both sections cover some serious ups and downs for the characters. Arguably Alva’s remains the central story, and it’s certainly her move to the Shanghai American School and subsequent experience of both the luxury and corruption of the expat world that forms the heart of what Lescure seems to want to focus on. But Lu Fang’s narrative is also compelling, cataloguing his changing fortunes alongside those of China. Both characters harbour fantasies of an America which are heavily mediated through popular culture and based on relatively little of substance. In contrast, Sloan is (to both of the others’ perpetual confusion) committed to her choice to live life in China, and sees herself as ‘local’ in contrast to the expats in their enclaves; she refuses to join the latter-day well-off Lu Fang at his international business functions.

Sloan, crucially, reveals very little of her (genuine) past through the majority of the book’s pages, so even from the most ‘American’ character, we get very little sense of American life. The American School and the expat business communities are a transplanted slice of American unreality, detached both from the norms and laws of the US, and from the harsher realities faced by the local Shanghai population. Through the book’s stories, which I won’t give too much away about, the inhabitants of these liminal spaces are both thoroughly discredited and entirely insulated from any consequences. As the Chinese (and world) economy begins to falter around them (mirrored by the revelation of twin tragedies in the lives of our narrators), they are able to pack up their things and return to their former lives. And although the book’s central characters find their own salvation of sorts in Sloan’s hidden past, there’s no sense of joy in the transition that awaits them.

I really enjoyed this as a debut novel. Lescure has talked in interviews about the book having gone through a very lost gestation period, beginning at an epic length, a more autobiographical tone and focusing just on Alva\s story as a result. Where it’s ended up is as an incredibly well-structured read, with the two narratives working really neatly in conjunction with each other, slowly uncovering the characters’ secrets as they go. Despite this, it doesn’t feel over-engineered and is a really engaging, page-turner of a book. Its world is brought to life brilliantly, fully immersing you its different locations (from tenement housing to colonial-era grand houses, via a trip to Lu Fang’s relatives on North Korean border and a disaster of a holiday by the sea in a practically segregated expats/locals resort.

I thought its characters were consistently intriguing, despite none of them coming out of the book with any great credit. Sloan is clearly a terrible mother, with a penchant for drinking to oblivion that rubs off on her daughter and a real penchant for keeping secrets (some of which we learn about as the novel progresses, and some of which - including ultimately anything that fully explains her characteristics - we clearly don’t). Lu Fang is a dreamer who rides his luck as China gets rich, but has spent much of his life in a sham marriage with a wife he openly disdains, and seems happy enough to let those around him suffer while he dreams. Alva is perhaps the most sympathetic of the three: given her age she has grown up without anything much in the way of a role model, and is an outsider both to the local and expat communities.

What it has to say about the ‘real China’ is an interesting question - its lead characters are all to some extent living fantasy lives that don’t fully engage with the reality of the recent history they’re living through. The older ‘real Chinese people’ we meet (Fang’s family; Alva’s schoolmasters) are largely still peddling their own Maoist fantasy narratives of China’s infallibility, and the younger generation are rebelling largely through self-obliteration into alcohol or online worlds. I guess all of this is part of the point, presenting the specific period of Chinese history that it covers as a kind of aberrant bubble, which was abruptly popped with the financial crisis and led us to a world in which the interaction between China and the US is back on a much more uncertain footing. It ends on an open note for its characters, but as readers we have some knowledge of the kind of future that awaits them (and the China they leave behind) and as such it’s not an especially hopeful conclusion.

Score

9

Another great read from what seems to be a really strong longlist. Probably slightly behind a couple of my other favourites so far but still very much a book I’d be happy to see on the shortlist.

Next up

I think I’ll get at least one more in before the shortlist is announced. Next up is Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder.