This is by Aube Rey Lescure. It was published in 2024, and shortlisted for that year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

I listened to the audio-version, which was superbly read by Jennifer Lim and David Shih.

It's a long time since we had a Shanghai story... The last was Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which I read towards the end of 2021... Not that Rey Lescure keeps us entirely in Shanghai (Qingdao, Yunnan, and Hainan also feature). It is, however, the site of most of the action, and the book's title is derived from the dividing line that's drawn through Shanghai by the Huangpu River. Puxi (River West) is the swanky old colonial zone, and the first longed-for step on our young Chinese-American heroine's longed-for way to a brighter future; Pudong (River East), where her home is situated, is the Shanghai of housing developments, malls, and suburbia.



Aside from its primary location, another reason for the book's pulling power as far as I was concerned was its author's position in the ranks of those amazing people who write in a language that's not their first... Rey Lescure defines her native languages as French and Chinese (her mother is from France, her father from China). But she writes in English (which she started to learn when she was 10 or so), "because it's now my dominant tongue".

A lot of her own experience surfaces in River East, River West: "I spent most of my life, up to age sixteen, growing in Northern China and Shanghai while attending Chinese public schools. At the same time, being half Chinese and half French, I had a foreign passport and was raised predominantly by my single mom, an expat who’d lived in China since the 1980s. I always straddled these dual realities -- on the one hand, my Chinese family and the Chinese school system, my Chinese peers and friends; on the other hand, the existence of an expat bubble I rarely partook in but knew took the form of embassies and international schools and business communities." (There's more detail on the autobiographical elements here.)


Shanghai, 2018

The story is told through dual timelines and voices. We open in 2007 with Alva, the 14-year-old daughter of an American woman, Sloan, and an unnamed and absent Chinese man. Sloan came to China on a whim, loved it, and stayed there. But an alcohol problem means she struggles to hold down jobs, and she and her daughter live very much on the poverty line. The opening scene shows us Sloan's marriage to an older Chinese man called Lu Fang (their landlord). Alva is disgusted by this move, seeing little to admire in her stepfather, and missing the old exclusivity of her relationship with her mother.

The second timeline opens in Qingdao in 1985, and gives us Lu Fang's backstory. Contrary to Alva's assumptions, Sloan and Lu Fang go way back -- to an affair that took place when Lu Fang's wife was expecting the couple's first and only child (this being the China of the old days). Lu Fang's university education had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, his dreams of studying in the United States replaced by the reality of labour in the tobacco fields of Yunnan. A cadre there arranges Lu Fang's marriage to Ciyi, an uneducated woman who never departs an inch from her propaganda-fuelled loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. The match turns out to be a source of great frustration. Sloan, on the other hand, represents everything Lu Fang had ever dreamt of. Nevertheless, he breaks off his relationship with Sloan when his son, Minmin, is born.



For all their different backgrounds and their lack of mutual comprehension, then, Alva and Lu Fang share a dream: They have both always wanted to go to the United States. Neither knows anything about this target country apart from what they have gleaned from books, films, and the information supplied by Sloan (who turns out to be something of a fabulist).

Alva decides that her first step in this direction will be enrolment in the Shanghai American School, and through a mixture of wheedling and coercion, she persuades Lu Fang (now a rich businessman) to bankroll this undertaking.

Which he does, partly because he understands this longing for America, and because he has his own demons to lay to rest. Prevented from realizing his educational ambitions, he poured all his aspirations into his poor son, hectoring and pushing and steering and goading Minmin until the boy was driven to suicide (after which tragic event, the parents' marriage also breaks down).

Alva, however, soon discovers that life is not perfect on the other side either. She misses the gritty characters from her previous Chinese school; and courtesy of a schoolmate, Zoey, and her ridiculously privileged expat family, Alva comes to learn at first hand of the dangers and double standards that populate this glitzy world.

Again, this draws directly from the author's experience. As Neeraja Srinivasan puts it, "Aube’s novel is driven by the shock she felt while observing the attitudes and condescension towards China that many expats exhibited and how neo-colonial many of the racial and power dynamics remained."

By the end of the book we're into the Global Financial Crisis, and Lu Fang's fortune is rapidly evaporating.


Sanya, Hainan, 2018. Sloan, Lu Fang, and Alva vacation here, but their straitened circumstances are becoming apparent. Swimming and water have been recurrent motifs in the book, and Sanya is the backdrop for another of these episodes (which helps to bridge the gulf that has opened up between Sloan and Alva)

We leave the little family about to migrate to America, but in very different circumstances from the ones they'd imagined... We can't help but suspect they'll all have trouble adapting, but we also feel that at least the bonds connecting them have been somewhat strengthened by the trials they have faced.

***

I found this novel absolutely fascinating. It's very entertaining -- all the characters are engaging, and you definitely want to keep listening -- but it's also chock-full of important insights: "Rey Lescure takes both real and constructed binaries -- city life/country life, poverty/wealth, America/China, insider/outsider, rise/fall, glitter/grit -- and cleverly closes the gap between them, showing how belonging -- within a family, country, history -- can be messier and knottier. She writes about migration and expatriation, alienation and ambition, family and multiracial identity, h/History and destiny with attentiveness and assertiveness."

She does... And so effectively.

Her fresh look at China seems more necessary than ever in our troubled, stereotype-ridden times. So much of our current predicament is explained by the "open condescension" that foreigners have meted out to China over the years, which Rey Lescure finds uncomfortably reminiscent of colonial times: "It is a book," she explains, "about the influx of westerners to China, the enclaves of corporate expats and self-appointed sinophiles, the assumptions and transactions that define power. It is about race, about grappling with being half or being both. Most of all, it is a book that takes a long hard look at modern western expatriation in a country like China, and seeks to return the word local to its rightful register."

Definitely an author to watch...


Rey Lescure describes here her return visit to China, almost 15 years since she moved away at the age of 16. Among the places she visited was Kunming