River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This novel switches between the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Qingdao, and Dandong, and between the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. However, in my calculations, over half of the book takes place in Shanghai in 2007. This was important to me because I lived there then too.
Shanghai is a big place, but the 14-year-old, half-Chinese, half-American, Alva buys her alcohol at the same Family Mart on Yingchun Road in Pudong as I did. Alva likes her bottles of Ballantine’s Whiskey. The 28-year-old me preferred tall cans of Qingdao or Asahi beer. I also used to walk past the experimental school she attends, usually on my way to my boss’s place so we could share a taxi to work. I’m still not sure why it’s called an experimental school.
I’m not a fan of reviews which begin, ‘I don’t normally read this kind of book’…so I’ve saved this for the third paragraph: A debut novel published this year by Harper Collins isn’t what I usually go for, but I’m glad I gave River East, River West a chance. From the acknowledgements in the back, Lescure seems to be an industry insider, someone big publishers can get behind in 2024. But in her, they’ve made a good choice.
Alva lives with her blond American mother, Sloan, an alcoholic English teacher with an excellent grasp of Chinese. The male equivalent of Sloan has featured in many books I’ve read…so I liked the reversal of the usual trope. We learn about Sloan from the viewpoints of Alva and Lu Fang, a native of Dandong, and a successful businessman in his 50s in 2007. Lu Fang has a familiar backstory. A gifted student, the Cultural Revolution scuttled his academic ambitions.
In the 80s, Sloan and Lu Fang kick off an affair at a foot massage parlour when Sloan gets extra services from the woman massaging her. The woman performs oral sex on Sloan, and Lu Fang, who has refused extra services, gets turned on observing. Again, usually, it’s the foreign or Chinese male getting these add-ons at the massage parlour. I thought the reversal was clever and well-written. Make no mistake, such scenes are hard to write!
Alva goes to a local school but dreams of changing to the American International School. Her conception of America is unrealistic but it makes sense that she wants something else as she can’t accept the propaganda-based curriculum at her Chinese school. Despite spending her entire life in China she will always be an outsider. In Alva, we have an interesting investigation of being bi-cultural and bi-racial in China. Her Chinese classmates call her the laowai (the foreigner). And the following happens when she wants to befriend a group of American girls:
‘“Their gazes drifted over her face like the shadow of a plane on flyover land. Why? Alva thought. Then it dawned on her. They think I’m Chinese.”’
Shanghai, the city, as I knew it, is well brought to life in River East, River West.
‘The narrow alleys dripped with drying laundry hanging from crisscrossing ropes. There was the wet smell of a dysfunctional sewage system.’
I found a couple of minor missteps. For example, the subway lines were not ‘dense like spider veins’ in 2007 IMO. Spider veins? or spider threads?
As one might expect, the biggest baddie is a middle-aged white man, but I found him nuanced, more scary because he’s a seemingly well-adjusted rich expat. Some reviewers have complained about unlikeable characters, but I found them realistic, no heroes but no psychopaths either. Alva tells the baddie something very telling about his behaviour in China.
‘“This country turned you into nothing,” she said. “Nothing you weren’t already.”’
A clear five stars from a writer with more left in the tank.
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