Coming of age novel set in QINGDAO and SHANGHAI

13th March 2025

River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure, coming of age novel set in Qingdao and Shanghai.

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2025 – Fiction With A Sense of Place

There are three significant players in this story, to wit Lu Fang, Sloan and Sloan’s daughter Alva.

The novel opens as Lu Fang and Sloan are getting married and it is a ceremony described largely through the eyes of 14 year old Alva. It is 2007. She has never known her Chinese father and therefore is going to have to get used to a new family set-up, living in Lu Fang’s apartment in the compound known as The Garden of Heavenly Peace. She is desperate to leave her municipal school and attend The Shanghai American School but she would have to choose her campus carefully: “Puxi” (River West), the old colonial zone or Pudong (River East) with its “rabid housing development and family-friendly malls“. She engineers her expulsion and soon her most fervent wish comes true. She will be hob-nobbing with her contemporaries, students who gravitate towards Western ideologies and values, and she soon falls in with Zoey, whose family heads back to the States for their holidays.

The author also takes readers back to 1985, where Lu Fang is cobbling together an existence with his wife Ciyi. His eye, however, is caught be a Western woman who happens to be swimming, and he soon engages her in conversation, dinner, a massage and the inevitable intimacies. As this relationship develops as much as it can, highlighting his lowly origins, Ciyi goes into labour bearing him a son. That Westerner was, of course, Sloan. Their relationship soon petered out but a couple of decades hence the two reunite.

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Part of the story is told through Lu Fang’s eyes, his initial infatuation with the Western woman and how he is trying to hold his life together. I guess I wasn’t altogether convinced by the dynamics and therefore felt ambivalent when the two hooked up again, this time with Sloan’s daughter in tow.

The author very competently describes the highs and lows of Alva’s life within a new circle of rich students, funded as she is by Lu Fang, until the economic crash starts to bite.

I felt I learned a lot about China and Chinese society and it was an interesting take to experience an unusual expat situation, to wit the reverse east-west immigrant story. However, I didn’t feel wholly committed to the unfolding storylines because I struggled to really see the characters in full 3-d colour, humans in flesh and blood with feelings and responses. I struggled ultimately to buy into Sloan and Lu Fang’s relationship. Sometimes the style was extremely descriptive, swerving the emotional elements and a deeper understanding of the couple’s highs and lows would have enriched the narrative for me.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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