Book Review: River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure

I received an Uncorrected Proof via the publisher of this book. All opinions are my own.

Alva was born in China and has lived her whole life in Shanghai. This is only remarkable for the fact that Alva’s mother, Sloan, is a Caucasian American and Alva has never left China. Alva’s whole life is in Shanghai but she and her mother will always be outsiders. In 2009, Alva is 14 and when Sloan marries a wealthy Chinese business man, their lives change drastically. Alva leverages this moment to transfer from the local Chinese school to the more exclusive American School, open only to those with foreign passports. Stepping into this expat community opens Alva up to a side of Shanghai she’s never seen before.

In 1985, Lu Fang is a young married man living in the city of Qingdao, his wife expecting their first child. Lu Fang is bitter about where his life has ended up, his hopes for higher education and a chance at life in America foiled by the country’s political regime. But in the 1980s, China is beginning to open up to foreigners once more and Lu Fang is faced with a drastic choice when he meets an American woman.

Alva is a fascinating character – a teenage girl who desperately wants to identify as American despite having never been there. Most of what she knows about the USA comes from movies and magazines and is idealized in her mind. She’s spent her entire life as an outsider amongst her Chinese peers. Her unknown father is Chinese but she’s lived her life with her blonde American mother. And although they live almost in poverty for much of her childhood, they carry a certain type of status simply by being foreigners.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own time in China and Asia. Tourists who are probably entirely ordinary back home in North America are fawned over by store clerks and servers in Manila and Beijing. When you are a white North American and you travel in southeast Asia, it’s often assumed that you are wealthy. And, in a way, you are because you’re working with a different currency. I do think this is changing quickly as international travel has become easier and more commonplace in the 21st century but when I was a kid in the late 80s and 90s, I remember strangers wanting to take photographs of my brother and I. Even as a teenager, on a visit to the Great Wall in 2002, I featured in a lot of strangers’ holiday photos. It’s easy to see how, for some people, this kind of attention might be desirable and a woman like Sloan might choose to stay in a country where her simple existence makes her special.

Alva herself is a troubled but sympathetic young woman. She’s struggling to find her place in the world and, like many teenagers, she has her fantasies but doesn’t yet understand how the world works. It was harder for me to sympathize with Sloan who continues to make poor choices and loves her daughter but never seems to put her first.

Rey Lescure’s choice to highlight Lu Fang’s past rather than Sloan’s is an interesting one (it would feel more obvious to show the parallels between Sloan and Alva) but I’m glad that she chose to go that route. By going backward and seeing China in the 1980s through the eyes of someone Chinese, we get a fuller view of the nation and its history. As a reader, it was easy for me to draw comparisons between Alva and Sloan because they were mother and daughter, because they were both foreigners. But instead Rey Lescure draws our attention to the parallels between Alva and Lu Fang, who are both born and raised in China. Who are both outsiders in certain (but very different) ways.

Really, this is a story about China and the immense changes it has gone through as a nation in the past half century. It’s a story of growing pains and outsiders. It’s a story that pays homage to the city of Shanghai and its immense possibilities while at the same time showing the suffocation that can exist in any large city where you are trapped.