I’m posting a photo of a statue near the waterfront in Strömstad, Sweden, where my husband has a summerhouse. I love the fact that this Bo Darnell statue looks as if it involves reading. Actually, it shows David Hellström and Göran Svenning busy writing a famous local waltz entitled “Kostervalsen.”
This week, Writing.ie published a review I wrote of Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel. I discovered Aube through her essay in the Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. Here’s my review:
“Reading Aube Rey Lescure’s mesmerizing debut novel is like watching slides taken by a close friend who has just flown back to the United States after spending many long years in China and is eager to share a fabulous adventure. River East, River West feels intimate and personal. It’s a literary page-turner that doesn’t disappoint.
Aube Rey Lescure adeptly introduces her main characters. The year is 2008. We meet Alva, a fourteen-year-old American girl who is half Chinese, and Alva’s single mom Sloan. Sloan is a laowai, a foreigner. She’s described as a beautiful former actress with ash-blond hair. Alva and Sloan live in a skyscraper in Shanghai, where Sloan teaches English language courses. We first glimpse the third main character at Sloan’s wedding. Lu Fang, the groom, is an international businessman wearing a three-piece suit that ‘fits like a sausage casing.’ He happens to be their landlord, which young Alva finds particularly disgusting. None of Sloan or Lu Fang’s friends attend the wedding. Alva has learned to pay close attention to her surroundings and knows to eavesdrop on the guests—all international businessmen with ‘little honeys’ rather than wives—who dump on Sloan and speculate about why a rich older man would marry an American and conclude the marriage cannot be a love match. For the next 300 pages, readers will learn how wrong the conclusions drawn by these catty women proves to be.
At the wedding ceremony, Alva realizes her life is going to change. She doesn’t know what to think of her new stepfather. She has always enjoyed a close relationship with Sloan, who repeatedly calls her only daughter ‘partner.’ Beginning with this strange wedding scene, Lescure sets us up for Alva’s rebellion.
The novel, divided into ten parts, alternates between the points of view of Alva and Lu Fang. In Part II, we slip back in time to 1985. Sloan spots Lu Fang swimming in the Yellow Sea off Qingdao, the two meet, and a romance develops. But Lu Fang is already married, and his wife expects a child. Readers must wait while he attends to his fatherly duties, which include becoming a successful businessman so that his son Minmin will be able to study abroad and obtain access to the class of privileged bureaucrats, his country’s elite.
Much of River East, River West explores Alva’s coming of age in modern China. She copies her mother’s bad habits, drinking more than she should whenever it seems possible to skim off some of the yuans that Lu Fang gives her for bus fare without receiving a rebuke. It’s fascinating to observe the differences in the two high schools she attends, one a public school for the Chinese and the other the Shanghai American School, an expensive international school that caters to the children of the numerous expats who have taken advantage of China’s new opening-up policies. For the local kids at Mincai Experimental School, the day begins with morning calisthenics and Communist Young Pioneer red kerchiefs. The skyscraper compounds in Alva’s neighborhood have names like the Garden of Heavenly Peace or Prosperous and Beautiful Family. The air is polluted and the night sky an orange glow of artificial light. After classes finish for the day, young people gravitate to the malls, especially the Super Brand Mall, where they can ogle the clothing a modern teenager in America or Europe might wear, a teenager who has the wherewithal to afford such luxuries. It’s also at the mall that Alva and her friends brush up against the flow of humanity they sense is missing from their well-ordered lives.
The Lu Fang chapters contain fascinating details on life in China before Xi Jinping. The ancestral rituals, the Chinese proverbs, the foods (steamed silkworm larvae, anyone?), the holidays, the offensive insults of a canine variety, the one-child policy, the tow-the-line mentality that motivates the Chinese to avoid creating ripples at all costs.
Aube Rey Lescure often treats readers to Chinese logograms that she translates into English for us. The three to say, ‘I do’ (I’m willing), the four required to request a Coca Cola (‘pleasing to the mouth and worthy of joy’), the six shades of green available in the Chinese language, the four appropriate to condolences (‘restrain the sorrow and adapt to change’), the logographic character for romance.
What a delightful read!”
