“The question is: are you getting hustled?” A Conversation with Aube Rey Lescure

By Liz von Klemperer

Aube Rey Lescure’s debut River East, River West is a searing social commentary that spans decades and perspectives. The novel is split between Alva, a fourteen-year-old girl raised by her American expat mother Sloan in China, and Lu Fang, their wealthy Chinese landlord, who Sloan ends up marrying. As the novel moves between the 1980s and early 2000s, we see how each character yearns for the American Dream—Alva with bootleg CW shows and the American School in Shanghai, and Lu Fang with Sloan. But as Alva is thrown into a world of entitled expats who abuse their power and Lu Fang contends with his past, we see the false promise of the American Dream. This debut is a historical snapshot of a country experiencing tumult and economic rise, but it’s also the story of an unlikely familial union that adds some tenderness to its biting social commentary.

In conversation with Liz von Klemperer, a Columbia MFA graduate, Rey Lescure discusses the influences of Gossip Girl, the Alienation Effect, and her experience growing up across cultures.

You dole out unflinching scenes, each saturated with power dynamics across race and class. Very often people of vastly different backgrounds are forced into the same room. What motivated you to portray these dynamics?

The socioeconomic, race, and status dynamics that I grew up around in Shanghai were the driving force behind writing this book. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Chinese society was undergoing a huge transformation. Not only were western expats flooding into China after China opened its borders, but migrant workers from the countryside were coming to work in cities. These dynamics were the subject of the Chinese art and culture that I grew up around. A lot of contemporary Chinese literature, comedy, and satire—from Yu Hua’s novels to Jia Zhangke’s movies to skits performed at CCTV galas—was often about how wealth, inequity, and opportunism were shaping society. Social criticisms and satire about the ‘get rich quick’ mindset flourished, and social commentators worried about a moral crisis for the nation’s soul. In this sense my book is actually well in that tradition of social novels about Chinese society—from Lu Xun to Qian Zhongshu, from Mo Yan to Xu Zechen. Every scene is about characters of different social statuses exploiting each other or not exploiting each other. The question often is: Are you getting hustled? Is the relationship exploitative? Or can we find sincerity, authenticity, and humanity underneath it all?

The novel moves seamlessly between two very different perspectives and time periods. I'm curious about your process. Did one perspective emerge first? How did you blend them?

I started with just one main narrator, Alva, the fourteen-year-old semi autobiographical stand-in for myself. I wanted to write about something I have the most to say about: observations about racial and socioeconomic dynamics I've been marinating on since I was a teenager living in Shanghai. My messy first draft was eighty percent Alva, and then fragmentary POVs from secondary characters, none of which were Lu Fang. I wrote from Alva’s mom Sloan’s perspective, as well as Alva’s Chinese classmates. It didn't occur to me to include Lu Fang as a main POV character, even though in hindsight, I knew he was the beating heart of the book. At the time, I was part of a novel revision program called The Novel Incubator at GrubStreet—a year-long workshop where people actually read your whole novel instead of chapters or excerpts. The first-round feedback I got culminated in the question: What if Lu Fang became a POV character? Clearly there was a center of gravity around him that was still unexplored, and it just felt very obvious once said out loud. So I spent a good part of the year weaving in a secondary narrative from Lu Fang’s POV. It made sense, because a lot of what I wanted to explore was a sense of expansion or contraction of personal and national history: Alva first thinks Lu Fang is an inconvenient parenthesis in her own life, a stepfather to be endured for a few years, until she realizes her own existence is a parenthesis in Lu Fang and her mother's complicated, decade-spanning love story. A love story that, in many ways, parallels seismic events in modern Chinese history: the reform and opening of borders of the Deng Xiaoping era, the incoming rush of foreign capital and globalized enterprises, the student political movements that culminated in 1989, the global financial crisis of 2008. Every time Lu Fang appears, we leapfrog to a new stage of China’s opening and development, from the first trickle of foreigners to the economic boom to foreign corporations rushing in. I wanted to give him an Oliver Twist rags-to-riches story and play with bigger reversals of fate through his storyline.

As a self-centered teenager, Alva has little awareness or interest in her parent’s larger context. When she discovers that her mother and Lu Fang do have a tangled past, that he's not just a sleazy businessman her mother marries out of transactional motives, Alva's sense of her family, and her place within it, crumbles. 

You really capture that self-centered teenager perspective, and the minute of what’s important in a young life. You mentioned that Alva is loosely based on your life. How much did your life play a role in creating this character, and in what ways did you differentiate her as a fictional character?

I love reading very autofictional work that captures the graininess of daily life. That’s what I was going for when initially drafting this novel. For context, I grew up mostly in China until I was sixteen with a foreign expat mother. We moved around northern China and Shanghai, and I was in the public school system until the beginning of ninth grade. Then I went to a very budget international school in Shanghai for two years. I joined the soccer team, and because we were part of the same soccer league, we would take buses and play games all over Shanghai’s international schools. It blew my mind how wealthy and otherworldly the other international schools seemed—Etonian red brick and white pillars, or modern tech campus vibes. It was a huge shock to see how expat society, and especially expat children, operated in Shanghai. I always knew I wanted to write about how regimented, ridgid and sometimes suffocating the Shanghai or China of that era was for Chinese teens, and how the expat community had this self-congratulatory sense that they were living in the ‘wild west.’ There’s this common expat trope people have about China, Bangkok, Southeast Asia, or backpacking culture, in general—this idea that westerners can go to Southeast Asia or Asia overall and act as they please. Even though a lot of expats in Shanghai were more rooted than backpackers because of corporate packages, that attitude was still very obvious. The impetus behind writing the novel was to explore how a place could be so free for one group of people and be the opposite for another group of people. That said, I understand freedom is a loaded term. I don't want to fall into this easy dichotomy that China isn’t free for Chinese people and is free for foreigners. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

Alva does feel constrained by the large gaps in her education from studying in a Maoist system—she doesn't even know 1989 is a number of any importance until she hears a foreigner mention it—but she also understands that her Chinese classmates and teachers are aware of the propagandist elements in the textbooks, and take them with a grain of salt, knowing limited information and the firewall is part of their lives. Some live with it, some are motivated to find other outlets of truth, some see a value in building patriotic pride through controlling historical narratives. Lu Fang similarly suffers from constraints on his dreams as he becomes collateral damage from the country's political reforms—he is forced to give up his university career, marries only to escape rural re-education, and must follow the one-child policy, but he benefits from another kind of bargain as China's economy rapidly grows. A rising tide lifts all boats. He transforms from a shipyard clerk to an import-export magnate. His financial wealth gives him opportunities of comfort and access within China that Alva and Sloan, two foreigners struggling to keep afloat in Shanghai, cannot initially afford.

Speaking of expats, I’m fascinated by Sloan’s character, as well as her dynamic with Alva. There’s so much camaraderie between them, but also so much misunderstanding. That beach scene in particular is so devastating—they’re trying to connect, but can’t.

I wanted to portray a fundamental divide in how Alva and Sloan lived their lives in China. Sloan is white, and Alva is biracial, and certainly looks a lot more Chinese than her white mother. Sloan describes the Shanghai she inhabits as ‘freedom’ at one point, and Alva says she doesn’t see how toilets that don’t flush or her mom struggling to keep a job to pay rent is freedom. With Sloan, I wanted to explore an expat stereotype different from the ‘corporate expat’ living in a villa with chauffeurs and maids and never learning Chinese. That’s very easy to criticize. I was more interested in trying to portray a character who is more invested in living what she sees as a ‘Chinese life,’ who considers herself an old China hand. Sloan thrives off of the attention her fluent Chinese gets, even though it's clear to Alva or a real Chinese person that she still speaks with an accent. It's just polite to compliment a foreigner on their Chinese. Time and time again, Alva delivers an acerbic comment to remind you that how her mother perceives herself isn’t necessarily how other Chinese people perceive her. Although the two are mutually dependent for survival, as Alva grows up throughout the course of the novel, she starts confronting very adult problems that lay bare the tensions with her mother and their respective statuses.

Bertold Brecht’s concept of the Alienation Effect comes up a few times. One line, delivered by the bootleg video guy who Alva gets American movies from, particularly stuck with me: “you know you’re putting on a show but you still get lost in it sometimes—too lost.” How did you come across the Alienation Effect? How did that idea become a central theme of the book?

I’m so glad you picked up on the Alienation Effect. It was an obsession I had in college, but as novel editing often goes, you cut out the stuff you’re just nerding out on that doesn’t necessarily move the plot forward. I did try to keep elements that felt more essential thematically. The question of movies and fictional portrayals and performance play a huge role in this book. I grew up with a DVD man living on my street corner and consumed a gargantuan amount of his DVDs. My perception of the western world and American adolescence was shaped by CW shows in vogue at the time. The late 2000s was the golden era of Gossip Girl, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and Glee. At that time my life was oversaturated with these shows, and even though I knew they were shows, they definitely affected what I perceived adolescence could be outside of China. They fed into this sense that I wasn't living life fully, or by virtue of being in China, I was being denied the wild thrills of an American adolescence as portrayed in this media. 

The Alienation Effect proposes that it’s a bad thing to become so immersed in a fictional portrayal that you temporarily forget it’s not reality. Brecht posited that what theater or film should do is remind the audience that what they are viewing is artificial—so they can maintain a critical distance between what they’re seeing and reality. I play with the Alienation Effect when Sloan becomes an actress, playing the role of a ‘foreigner’ in China. Attention is her drug. She didn’t plan on staying in China all these years, but once she arrived and she got an endless shower of attention, she started playing up her westernness. She got so lost in the performance that what was performance and what was real life started blurring. Alva is more aware of the distinction between performance and reality, especially with her mother, but then she begins to enact the same patterns that her mother fell into when Alva starts international school. She doesn't know how to be an American teenager, and Alva embraces the fact that she needs to play this artificial role. But soon enough she starts getting too lost in it and starts losing track of reality.

Is there anything you’d like to be asked about this book? Anything I missed?

This book feels like historical fiction in some ways, not just the parts that go back to the 1980s, but the parts that go back to 2008. China has changed so much. That was pre Xi Jinping, and also captured a particular so-called golden era for the expats. Nowadays there are still expats in China, but their numbers have dwindled—an exodus prompted by the pandemic, by the changing landscape of foreign investment in China, and by geopolitical fears about the current regime. So I still think about relevance: Does this social critique have a contemporary relevance to today's China? But there are still expats in China, and when I think about it, the people I most want to read this book are expats themselves because a lot of them still live in a bubble where they don't really question their own behavior and attitudes. They are not often the subject of social satire. When I started my project, I was setting up to write a critique about expat behavior and mindsets, but pure satire often misses a sustainable driving force for a novel. The book still has an exaggerated, satirical flair, but I really wanted it to also be a story with real heart about an artificial family that overcame performative, exploitative mindsets, and by the end, in some ways, became true to each other.