River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure review – all change in China

Shortlisted for the Women’s prize, this immersive debut tells an intergenerational story about coming of age in a country that’s rapidly growing

A country (China) and two characters – Alva, a mixed-race teenager in Shanghai, and Lu Fang, her new stepfather, an older Chinese businessman – come of age in Aube Rey Lescure’s debut. Exploring change, class mobility and capitalism, it is threaded together with dual timelines: Shanghai, 2007, and Qingdao, 1985. Told in turns through the perspectives of Alva and Lu Fang respectively, it follows the story and trajectory of how their “pretend family, a tangled web of transactions”, came to be. What are the consequences of making choices in a world where the “very idea of choice was monstrous”? “Was it so easy, Alva wondered, to pretend yourself into another life, even when the rest of the world knew it was a farce?”

In 2007, 14-year-old Alva – the daughter of an American expat mother and a Chinese father she never knew – is raging with hormones and teenage tantrums. The novel opens with her mother’s wedding to Lu Fang – their landlord – and Alva’s vocal disapproval of their new life. Flashback to 1985 in alternating chapters, where Lu Fang is a young adult in the port city of Qingdao, working as a shipyard clerk with a pregnant wife, and meets Alva’s mother, Sloan, who has recently arrived from the United States. Both Alva and Lu Fang’s younger selves imagine worlds beyond their immediate surroundings and circumstances; here, the border is the self, school, home, district, and even China itself. The pages that follow hold an immersive, intergenerational story situating the social and racial dynamics of a changing and growing China – from its Cultural Revolution and economic boom to the start of the Great Recession. (As Lu Fang says: “I was born in 1949, the year the People’s Republic was founded. I’m as old as the new China.”)

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