River East, River West – Book Excerpt

Welcome friend! Today, I am excited to chat with Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West, an upcoming literary fiction. Let’s welcome Aube and learn about the book.

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Get to know the author: Aube Rey Lescure

Hi Aube! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!

Hi! I’m a French-Chinese-American writer currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m a novelist and essayist, and deputy editor of the literary magazine Off Assignment. My first novel, River East, River West, is a social novel and family drama set entirely in China, and looks at Western emigration to China across generations through the lens of a complicated family.

What inspired you to write this book?

I grew up between northern China and Shanghai with an expat mother, and attended both Chinese public schools and, briefly, international school. It was the late 1990s and early 2000s, at a time when Chinese society was undergoing seismic change–the borders had opened up, foreign investment and foreigners were rushing in, migrant workers from inland provinces were arriving in droves in the big “first-line” cities to seek out economic livelihoods. There was a frenzied sense of ever present opportunity, of living fast-and-loose. At the same time, life in Chinese public schools was highly regimented, with a single-minded focus on discipline and educational advancement. Expat communities, on the other hand, were living free-wheeling lives on their corporate relocation packages and flouting local laws. With so many racial and socio-economic dynamics simmering and often erupting around me, I wanted to write a social novel that captured the complexity and specificity of coming-of-age in Shanghai in that era. 

How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?

The first kernel of this book was a short story I wrote in 2017–a writing workshop draft that never saw the light of day–about a teenage girl in Shanghai locked in with her math tutor on a Saturday afternoon. She’s positively seething, of course, and sees a car zigzagging out the window in the compound below. Three drunk students, still wearing their school uniforms, emerge. This was a real episode from my upbringing in Shanghai, and my first attempt to turn such a memory into fiction. From there, it took me about 4 years to write and revise the novel–many, many drafts later, in 2021, I signed an agent and we sold the novel. Editing it with my brilliant editor took another two years, a necessary process–the novel is much tighter and better paced as a result. 

What makes your story unique?

There are very few novels about contemporary expat society in China or Asia, and the ones that do exist often suffer from the “expat bubble” syndrome–they are mainly interested in the glitz and drama of the western characters and their privileged lives, and rarely confront the problematic relationship and attitudes between expats and their host societies. Some of these novels feel like they could have interchangeable settings, that they could describe parties and international schools and golf clubs in any Asian metropolis–that’s how indifferent the characters, and sometimes the author, can be to the societies where the story is set. I wanted to upend that, and write a novel that could be a searing satire of the expat lifestyle while centering Chinese characters, their preoccupations, and their perceptions of the racial dynamics around them. 

Who would enjoy reading your book? 

Readers interested in coming-of-age stories, family dramas, social novels that really immerse you in an environment so that you feel a proximate, familiar, insider perspective about the granular details of that world. Readers who like stories set in China, or Asia, and deal with themes of migration, identity, and belonging.

Did you bring any of your experiences into this book?

I’m a nonfiction writer first and foremost–an essayist, and I like to say I really don’t have the imagination to be a fiction writer. So yes, this book is highly autobiographical, though I always stress that it’s the small details–the scent on the street, the cultural observations, the tiny specifics–that are almost always true. The big plot points and dramatic tragedies–those, thankfully, were functions of making the narrative more interesting through the medium of the novel. 

Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?

I especially love the scene where Lu Fang, a Chinese shipping clerk living in 1980s Qingdao (and the protagonist’s stepfather in the present timeline), learns how to drive in a fruit orchard. In a novel where cynicism or danger or heartbreak is always lurking never too far, it is one of the few scenes where the characters are experiencing genuine joy. Lu Fang sees driving as a symbol of mobility, with freedom of movement and exploring the larger world. For an afternoon, for a few hours, he lives in a suspended world with his American lover when he is able to indulge in this fantasy, and allows himself not to question it, not to question whether this vision or relationship is inherently fraught, whether he’ll ever drive a car again. He just drives, and feels joy from the deepest well of his heart. 

What is something you have learned on your author journey so far?

Don’t rush something out when it’s not ready–that might actually set you back more months or years than you imagine. It’s truly like the tortoise and the hare! 

What’s the best piece of advice you have received related to writing?

Tighten, tighten, tighten, then tighten some more. 

If you could give a shout out to someone(s) who has helped in your writer journey, please feel free to mention them below!

I’m grateful that writing is a craft where one is always a student and one can always improve–and the teachers I encountered along the way have been some of the most transformative forces behind this novel. Michelle Hoover, who teaches GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program in Boston, leads a literary community that was essential to this novel’s existence. And Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness, is simply one of the most beautiful stylists and deepest literary thinkers writing today. I had the good fortune of taking a workshop on What Sex Can Do with him, which alchemized the way I thought about writing sex. He blurbed the book, and seeing his name on the cover still makes my heart skip a beat every time.

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Book Excerpt from
River East, River West

After the American girls, Alva took the subway and walked home in the cold. She found the apartment empty. Sloan and Lu Fang were off on a business trip tonight, visiting a factory in Dongguan. Someone had left a pink Mao on the table.

The bill filled Alva with rage. Were Sloan and Lu Fang delusional? Not even a note, so smug in their presumption that she’d take care of herself, do her homework, and sit around while they jetted south and stayed in hotels with plush, starched beds. Did they know what happened in the movies when teenagers were left home alone? They trashed the house. They threw ragers. She bet the girls at Super Brand Mall did it all the time. It didn’t even cross her mother’s mind to worry about that.

A plan was percolating in her head. She’d throw a house party and invite . . . well, she’d throw a house party for herself. She didn’t even need a fake ID. She could stroll right into FamilyMart and buy booze and no one would bat an eye. She used to be eight when Sloan started dispatching her to corner markets for beer.

She pocketed the hundred yuan and headed out.

FamilyMart kept its tiny selection of wine and spirits on a small shelf by the checkout desk. A bottle of Ballantine’s whiskey was only forty-six yuan. The girl working behind the counter barely glanced at Alva’s basket when she set it down. “And a pack of Hong Ta Shan too,” Alva said, emboldened. The girl turned around and snatched a pack of cigarettes off the shelf.

Alva handed over the hundred-yuan bill. When she walked out, the automatic doors opened with an electric jingle. Alva waited to hear “Thank you for your patronage,” which FamilyMart employees were supposed to say to every customer. But the girl was quiet, staring out the window to the already darkened streets.

Alva hurried past the security kiosk on her way back into Heavenly Peace, worried the compound guards might spot the bottle through the plastic bag. The man on duty gazed at her blankly and said nothing.

At home, she opened a Pepsi-Cola Lu Fang kept in the fridge. He’d moved in the weekend before, and his soft drink collection was one of the few signs of his presence. Fridge doors stocked with forgotten bottles of Pepsi, Fanta, 7Up, a graveyard of flattening American sodas. Besides that, there were few traces of Lu Fang in the apartment. He kept a pair of ostentatious red Nike sneakers on the shoe rack, a flashy vintage model similar to the ones Gao Xiaofan wore. Further proof of Lu Fang’s lack of 

taste—the Nike craze had swept through the boys at her school, but it was a bizarre vanity for a businessman over fifty.

She filled half a glass with Ballantine’s and poured in the mixer. The whiskey’s edge was soft behind the Pepsi’s fizzy sweetness. She pulled off her shirt and slunk on the silky camisole. It felt like wearing air.

She unwrapped the new Linkin Park album she’d bought from the DVD man the week before. Even its cover art was a perfect replica of the one she’d seen online. She put the CD in the player, and eyes closed, she swayed to the music, imagining bodies all around her, red Solo cups sloshing. She danced over to the master bedroom. The curtains there were drawn and the air smelled foreign, like a man’s sweat. She knew Sloan kept the Box of Important Things somewhere in the dresser. Alva had to shove Lu Fang’s clothes aside to reach it. In the second drawer, he kept a stack of button-downs and two soccer jerseys still in plastic wrap. Besides this stack Alva found the Box. She took it back to the living room and set it on a clean patch on the table.

The Box of Important Things had accompanied her and her mother in every move crisscrossing Shanghai. They had few physical possessions, no furniture, only cardboard boxes and ratty suitcases. For as long as Alva could remember, though, Sloan had always held on to the Box of Important Things.

It was an old tin that once housed British shortbread cookies. At the very top was a cardboard DVD sleeve. Sloan’s favorite movie: Thelma & Louise. Alva eased the disc out of its plastic pouch. They’d watched it together so many times. The dust and sepia of the Southwest, a road bisecting the screen. “That’s where I grew up,” Sloan said. She came from a place where trucks lined the road, where everyone wore flannel and cowboy hats.

Alva pushed the play button and the familiar opening greeted her like a well-worn memory. Louise the neat one. Thelma the wild one. The women in the movie wore bright red lipstick and drank like her mother, like Alva right now.

The whiskey warmed her insides. Sloan had always told her they were partners, just like Thelma and Louise, and Alva loved to role-play the famous bar scene. “Let’s go to Johnny Moo’s and pretend to be Thelma and Louise!” she would beg on her birthdays. Johnny Moo’s was a real, bona fide imitation American diner that’d opened a few years ago across from the supermarket. They wore jean cutoffs and black sleeveless tops with embellished skulls and roses, big sunglasses and shiny lip gloss. They ordered black coffee and cheeseburgers.

The Box of Important Things also contained print ads Sloan had done in her twenties, photo shoots for Chinese companies, one for a skin-whitening cream, the other for an English dictionary box set. Alva used to marvel at these pictures, which implied her mother was famous. At one time, Sloan was not only a model but also an actress, a real movie character. She said she used to travel with movie crews, all around the world and then stayed in Asia. She was even a lead once, a film set in Indochina, but it was never released.

Sloan didn’t talk too much about the lead-up to her acting days: she’d moved to L.A. as a teenager after her parents died. Alva knew Sloan was fourteen when she lost her parents in a car accident. This, to Alva, seemed both incredibly glamorous and incredibly tragic, a movielike fate that could only befall someone as extraordinary as her mother. Alva couldn’t imagine the sadness of losing your parents, of being adrift in a big city, and she understood why Sloan didn’t like to talk about that time, 

or America. “All I know,” Sloan would say, “is I’m glad to have broken free of the US of A.”

Alva didn’t see how living in their old grimy apartments, where the toilets didn’t flush, was freedom. But her mother had a wildness about her. On good days she was a dazzling, feral creature, prowling the streets of Shanghai as if she could mark the whole city as hers. That wildness used to exhilarate Alva, like when they snuck into Jinjiang Park, boarded the ricketiest roller coaster, and screamed at the top of their lungs. Or when six-year-old Alva said she wanted pets and Sloan bought some sugary Taiwanese sausages, threw them at the stray cats, and said, “Pick one!”

But there were bad days too. Sloan often came home dog-tired from her shifts teaching English classes, kicked off her heels to reveal reddened feet, cracked open a Tsingtao, and stationed Alva in front of the TV. Then, curtains drawn, she’d feed one DVD after another into the player, measuring time by ninety-minute increments, while Sloan nursed two six-packs of Tsingtao and provided running commentary, words increasingly slurred. The movies were always American. When Alva 

looked alternatingly at her mother drifting into stupor and the saturated landscapes on-screen, she felt like a character in a dramatic sequence, a secret life. She knew this wasn’t how her classmates lived.

The mornings after nights like these, which had become increasingly frequent over the years, Alva quietly opened the windows before leaving for school to let out the stale smell. Later Sloan would be waiting at the school gates, showered, perfumed, in heels and makeup, handing Alva a jumbo-size pearl milk tea. And Alva’s little schoolmates would whisper excitedly, “Your mom looks like a movie star!”

Though most treasures in the Box of Important Things were artifacts of Sloan’s past, there was another piece of crinkly paper, a certificate Alva had gotten for achieving the highest marks in fourth grade. Sloan had attended the ceremony in sunglasses, her left eye swollen and colored like an eggplant. She’d fallen and crashed into the kitchen counter three nights before. For that reason, she missed two days of work, and Alva knew her mother couldn’t afford to get fired from another job. After Alva had returned from the podium, Sloan kissed her forehead and said, “I’m proud of you, partner.” It was then that Alva realized as long as she got good grades, as long as one of them kept a baseline of order, they would somehow survive. In contrast to the chaos of weekends, school was an organizing principle, a relief. It made clear what was wanted of Alva: follow the rules, study hard, and nothing too terrible would happen to her or her mother.

But now there was a man, a stranger. Alva lit a cigarette and exhaled through her nostrils in what she assumed was a chic way before collapsing into coughs. It had the same tarry taste as the secondhand smoke from Lu Fang’s Double Red Happiness, official brand of Chinese graft. Li Xinwei’s words resurfaced in her head: Is it that bad to have a rich stepdad?

Alva paused the movie, walked to her bedroom, and fumbled through the stack of contraband literature she kept in her closet. Two glossy magazines—That’s Shanghai and City Weekend. The expat magazines featured restaurant reviews, bars and concert recommendations, and places where foreigners could find one another in China. Alva took them to the couch and flipped to the page she’d dog-eared. An advertisement for the Shanghai American School, multiracial children with 

gleaming white teeth and even whiter lab coats, the campus grounds green as a prairie.

Sloan had explained to her that these magazines were the Cocacolonization of China. People were kidding themselves if they thought colonialism was over, when it was all around them in Shanghai, as advertised by the mags. Embassy parties, French Concession bars, international schools.

The teenagers at Super Brand Mall went to the Shanghai American School. So why couldn’t Alva, a legal American teenager, go there too? A foreign passport—that’s all one needed. A foreign passport and money.

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Interested?

Find River East, River West on Goodreads and Amazon. Thanks for taking the time to join us for this interview! Connect with Aube on Facebook, X and Instagram.

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