French-Chinese author Aube Rey Lescure just recently released her launching book, River East, River West (with William/Morrow/HarperCollins) a book that parallels her own experience maturing in 2000s Shanghai while captured in the cross-section of unconfined expat life and relatively limiting Chinese public school. The tale embodies a sensational turnaround of the east-to-west immigrant story through a bifurcation of both the primary character Alva– whose character is stuck in between her American mom and Chinese daddy– and the city in which she lives, Shanghai– a city divided by the Huangpu River.
The book turns an important eye towards the “expat plan” way of life of Shanghai’s in the early 2000s– a time when numerous immigrants resided in “a company-provided vacation home with an army of regional servants” and were driven around by their personal motorists in vehicles, “lifted above the typical damages and holes of Chinese asphalt.”
The book simultaneously weaves together plot of China’s quickly progressing commercialism over the last couple of years while simultaneously drawing back the drape to expose the mistakes of this busy growth.
We were fortunate adequate to take a seat with Aube, who matured in Shanghai, to read more about what her life resembled simply a handful of years earlier in the city all of us now call home and how those stories came to life on the pages of her recently launched historic imaginary book, River East, River West
Provide us a short run-through of River East, River Westyour launching book with HarperCollins that was launched this previous January.
Fourteen-year-old Alva was born and raised in Shanghai and resides in Pudong’s Century Park area with her American expat mom, Sloan. When Sloan all of a sudden weds their rich Chinese property manager, Lu Fang, Alva frowns at needing to exchange a free-wheeling collaboration for the claustrophobic way of life of middle-class Shanghai.
As Alva browses the test preparation, paranoid competitors, and absentee being a parent that rule over the hyper-regimented Chinese school system, she is drawn to the liberty of Shanghai’s expats, with their vacation homes on well-guarded nation clubs and the delights of a city where immigrants can seemingly serve as they please.
Rotating areas of the unique expose Lu Fang’s history with Sloan, going back from their very first encounter in the seaside city of Qingdao, when Lu Fang was a married clerk at a shipping lawn and China had simply allow its very first wave of immigrants.
Aube Rey Lescure in Shanghai with her Chinese loved ones (circa 1998)
What was the motivation for composing this coming-of-age tale?
I matured in between northern China and Shanghai, and I invested much of my teenage years in Pudong, residing in the Century Park community. My mom was a French expat who had actually remained in China given that the ’80s, and my daddy is Chinese. I went to Chinese public schools for the majority of my youth,