Over the last thirty years, Shanghai has been demarcated by the two sides of the Pudong River, the almost-futuristic Pudong and the historic Puxi. These two areas inspire the title of Aube Rey Lescure’s impressive debut novel, River East River West, a story of people more complicated and layered than they may first appear, set alternately in the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, times in which people from around China and abroad moved to Shanghai to reinvent themselves.
Alva is the daughter of American Sloan Collins and an unknown Chinese father who has never been in her life. Born and raised in Shanghai and educated in local schools, Alva speaks fluent Mandarin, Shanghainese and English. Yet from the movies and television shows she watches, she dreams of a childhood in a country she has never visited. For Alva, the next best thing to growing up in the US would be to attend an international school in Shanghai, but her mother cannot afford it. The two have lived just above the poverty line for most of Alva’s childhood thanks to Sloan’s low salary teaching English and her high consumption of alcohol.
That all changes when Sloan suddenly marries their landlord, Lu Fang. It comes as a shock to Alva because Sloan has had lots of boyfriends over the years and their landlord seems the most unlikely candidate for a husband and stepfather.
He was in his fifties, chewed with his mouth open, wore suits with cheap satin sheens. He liked quoting poems in his thick Dongbei accent. Alva had noticed these traits with the distant condescension of a teenage girl when he’d come to their apartment for regular checkups. Technically, he’d been their landlord, a businessman leasing a spare property in Pudong. In the two years they’d been renting his apartment, Alva had seen him five or six times at most. Clearly, for her mother, it’d been a different story.
The guests at Sloan and Lu Fang’s wedding assume their marriage won’t last because the two barely know each other. But soon it will become apparent that Sloan and Lu Fang are neither strangers nor just renter and landlord.
Sloan had moved to Qingdao in the mid-1980s after filming an epic Indochina film in Cambodia. Orphaned as a teen, Sloan broke into acting in LA and was cast as the lead in this unnamed film that was never released. Or so Sloan tells Alva and everyone she meets in China. Lu Fang is from Dandong, a town on the China-North Korea border and had just finished his first year at Renmin University in Beijing when he’s sent to Yunnan to labor in the tobacco fields in 1966. On his return to the northeast, he settles in Qingdao, where he later meets Sloan in 1985 and the two start a relationship. She is attracted to him because his life seems like a story from a novel: his childhood during the Great Leap Forward and his late teens and early- to mid-20s during the Cultural Revolution. Lu Fang finds Sloan exotic—there are few foreigners in mid-1980s Qingdao—and feels comfortable talking about the loss he feels after his education is cut short.
He did love the green hills that gave the city its name, the smell of roasted yams in the northern winter, the shores of the Yellow Sea at dusk, the roaring laughter at comedy performances at old teahouses, the poems traded on drunken nights with his colleagues. These were the very small pleasures woven into the fabric of his memories, but they did not make a life when his life could have been so much bigger.
When they meet, Lu Fang is married with a child on the way. Once his son is born, he decides he needs to focus on his family and breaks things off with Sloan. This decision will set them both on journeys that bring loss and trauma. Sloan stays in China and moves to Shanghai, where she becomes pregnant and gives birth to Alva.
As Alva, now in her teens, learns more about the history and the film, she starts to question her mother’s reasons for moving to China in the first place. Why film a movie in Cambodia in the early 1980s and one that seemed awfully similar to the film adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel, The Lover?
Rey Lescure writes the characters of Alva, Sloan, and Lu Fang with great empathy, perhaps drawing on her own experience of growing up in Shanghai as the daughter of a French mother and a Chinese father. It’s an inverse of the “standard” cross-cultural China story in that the mother is a not-so-well-off foreigner and the father Chinese. And aside from anything else, River East River West is a reminder that China has been “open” long enough now—a generation and half—for such a story to be possible.