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

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.”)

It is easy to see why River East, River West is shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction. Rey Lescure takes both real and constructed binaries – city life/country life, poverty/wealth, America/China, insider/outsider, rise/fall, glitter/grit – and cleverly closes the gap between them, showing how belonging – within a family, country, history – can be messier and knottier. She writes about migration and expatriation, alienation and ambition, family and multiracial identity, h/History and destiny with attentiveness and assertiveness. River East, River West is at once autobiographical fiction and historical fiction, a Shanghai novel and a novel of the American dream, and a story in which families and countries fall apart, but also have a chance at fresh starts.

Rey Lescure’s prose is cinematic, compelling, perceptive and poignant. Even as Alva thinks of “how fast things changed all the time, how pausing to wallow only left you in the dust as the world moved ahead and converged around you”, she often finds herself standing in front of the mirror and facing her own reflection. At one such time, she strips down to her underwear and examines herself for stretch marks. Soon, “this body would no longer contain her”. She was “half-and-half, but entirely different from the rest of us” as her former friend Li Xinwei had remarked, accusing her of being a laowai (foreigner).

Shanghai’s two main districts are divided by the Huangpu River: Puxi, “River West”, is the old colonial zone, while Alva’s home is in Pudong, or “River East” which, with its rapid house development and family-friendly malls, was the Chinese equivalent to suburbia, writes Lescure. In Alva’s dreams and desires, the bisected Huangpu River can be crossed – but at what cost? By the end of the novel, Alva is no longer half-and-half – she sees herself fully. She can be anyone and anywhere.

• River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure is published by Duckworth Books (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.