There are much easier ways to write a debut novel, but Aube Rey Lescure has decided to have none of ease. River East, River West is an intergenerational epic, the story of a single family whose lives span a period of sweeping cultural change in China. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Alva and her new stepfather, Lu Fang. Alva was born and raised in Shanghai, China. Her mother is American; her father, whom she never met, is Chinese. And Lu Fang’s entry into her family’s life — his transformation from landlord into stepfather — upends her starry-eyed dreams of life in America. Alternating between their points of view, and exploring lives in China a mere ten years — and worlds — apart, Rey Lescure’s book is a kind of bildungsroman of country and culture. It’s equally a haunting, a novel whose characters carry the specters of promise, often unfulfilled — of youth, of status, of wealth, and of a certain rosy view of American cultural power and opportunity.
— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica
Lu Fang caressed one expensive silk scarf after another at the train station’s Shanghai Tang stall.
“Is it for a present?” the salesgirl asked. “What is the lady’s age? I can give you recommendations.”
“It’s for my mother,” Lu Fang said.
“Old people like flashy colors.” The salesgirl pulled out a bright fuchsia scarf. “This one is five hundred ninety-nine yuan.”
“For a scarf?”
“These are a hundred ninety-nine, sir, if you prefer.” She led him to another row of scarves and unfolded a square necktie. Her face was neutral. “Less material.”
“That’ll do,” he said. But he immediately regretted the decision and wondered if he should have bought the bigger scarf. The salesgirl had already folded the item and was carefully wrapping it in a thin plastic pouch, then tucking it into a red box around which she tied a golden ribbon. “Wait,” he said. “Can you . . . did you take the price tag off?”
She hadn’t. She unwrapped everything and tore off the tiny strip at the bottom of the tag. Then, wordlessly, she began the whole process all over.
When Lu Fang and Old Two were teenagers in Dandong, on the North Korean border, their mother had taken them to visit the ancestors at Dagu Mountain. Their family tombs were in the far eastern corner of the country cemetery. They’d knelt before the tombstones and touched their foreheads to the earth. There was a lot for their mother, which she’d pointed to without fanfare. In between two headstones was a small vase, into which she always put a flower. Between Lu Fang and Old Two, she had given birth to a girl who’d only lived for one day.
“The last time I came to burn paper,” she’d said, “I felt like the dead were watching me. The paper only burned a quarter of the way through, and the lighter was out of fuel. Afterward, in bed, I kept sleeping and waking. But I still remember what I saw in my dreams. I was walking along a rough road to go to the hospital to see my parents. The strange thing was, I had not yet been born. I could not find the way to the hospital. So I trudged to the Eight-Way Ditch and found the old compound building where we used to live. It was dark, and a neighbor came out and said they had stopped the electricity. That is when I woke up. But it was as if a ghost were pressing on me. My limbs could not move. That’s when I saw them. Mother and father wore plain black clothes, and they looked very ordinary. They held a parcel, and in the parcel there was a baby girl. And I knew that girl was me. After that, I woke up for good, missing my parents intensely, my heart heavy as lead. Usually I cannot remember my dreams, but this time I remembered the events so clearly. I felt like I was in a haze, as if I had really set out on a journey to find them, but in the end, disappointingly, I had not.”
The edge of Lu Fang’s mother’s irises had become murky. “Ma—” Lu Fang had started, but she’d interrupted him.
“The dead do not disappear,” she’d said.
Lu Fang had looked up at the Great Lonely Mountain. The paper money swirled up in smoke and ashes, and that night they’d burned a lot of it.
The day before New Year’s, the brothers and their mother needed to take care of housing papers. Their mother wanted to take the bus. She paid nothing for the bus because of her senior card, she said.
When the bus came, Old Two ran ahead a few dozen meters to tell the bus driver that an elderly woman was following right behind. But their mother crossed the road too slowly, arduously. “Come on! Faster!” Lu Fang yelled. His mother started jogging along the road, but the bus was already pulling away. Lu Fang became very pale and walked away, furiously dialing the number on the bus post to place a complaint with the bus company, but no one picked up.
His mother chuckled. “He doesn’t need to be so mad. Another bus will come.” She was still used to another standard of society, one where you did not expect kindness from people who owed you none. They stood waiting on the roadside. The winter sun was warm. His mother’s eyes were almost closed, like a cat sunbathing.
On the bus, his mother suddenly began talking at length about cancer, for any and all to hear. She’d had breast cancer and radiation therapy seven years ago. And now, she said, it had spread to her lymph nodes, to her blood, into her bones. She had never stopped taking the medicine, she said, except for during a two-month period around the summer, because she ran out.
“It’s expensive medicine. I can use a health insurance card with the two hundred yuan the government gives me monthly, heavens bless the Party. But that’s only enough for one box. So I stretch it out however I can. I don’t want to get a checkup this year because it costs one thousand and eight hundred yuan. I have a small tumor in my left breast, but someone told me it isn’t harmful, so I am letting it be.”
“You can’t be stingy about your health,” Lu Fang said. “Why didn’t you ask me? I could have given you more money for the medicine.”
“I know you could have,” she said.
They went to a government building specializing in property ownership. Lu Fang’s mother wanted to transfer the name on the housing certificate to herself, for estate planning. Lu Fang had been the one to buy the apartment in the housing project for her, when he’d first made a small profit from his company a decade ago. It was of little value, and all he cared about was getting the paperwork over with. It was like his mother enjoyed standing in line as a pastime, and the government agencies were more than happy to provide. At nine, the doors opened, and there were already hundreds in line before every counter, snaking around the great hall. They got in line to get a number to get in line. Even here, people were pleading, shoving paperwork at the receptionists.
“Just try to stand in line and get something done,” their mother said. This seemed to be what most people were doing. Armed with all the documents they could throw at a bureaucrat, they hoped to chip away at something.
After four hours, the three triumphantly lined up for their final stamp, a small miracle. But they were told there had been a power outage at the housing authority headquarters. The computer system was down, and the stamp request could not be approved.
“No motherfucking morals,” his mother muttered.
Lu Fang didn’t know who she thought had no morals — the people or the computers.
For lunch, they stopped for North Korean noodles at a busy cafeteria-style restaurant with pictures of dishes on the wall. Extra spicy kimchee. Cold dog meat. The noodles were freshly squeezed from a machine, ten yuan per bowl. They came out in plain, watery soup with chunks of pickled cabbage and only two very thin, very small squares of meat. The broth was flavorful, with a salty fermented taste, and the noodles were slippery and cool, slithering like snakes down their throats.
At Lu Fang’s insistence, they took a taxi home. Koreatown, known here as Gao Li Street, was dour and sad, most of its storefronts closed. The rest of the city center was bustling in small and busy ways, standard for a lower-end Chinese city. Amazingly, there was a development of luxury villas by the mountain. Lu Fang wondered who would willingly live in Dandong, right along the North Korean border, if they could afford a luxury villa. In the central mall, there was a new Starbucks and, wilder still, a Gucci.
He liked the taxi ride. They’d never ridden in cars while growing up here. The driver sped like mad, eager to drop off a load and pick up another. The windows were down as they flew through the elevated highways that curved around the hills. The winter afternoon was crisp and pastel blue. Highway billboards advertised wholesale sea cucumbers. “Wild, North Korean — Organic,” said the signs.
“Except for the radiation,” Old Two said.
Their mother cackled.
Lu Fang asked the driver to stop by the esplanade along the Yalu River. On the broken bridge bombed by Americans, a red education site, Lu Fang paid five yuan to use the military-grade binoculars trained across the river, onto North Korea. A woman in a military uniform — fake, he assumed, just a hustler — said, “There’s a bride. See if you can find her.”
Through the binoculars: Two North Korean soldiers standing on a watchtower, looking down. Looking down at . . . two other soldiers, on the ground below, horsing around like kids replicating a kung fu movie, laughing. Workers on a rooftop like ants. A group of middle-aged women taking pictures by a fountain. They were also smiling. Everybody in North Korea was smiling. At one point, one of the middle-aged women seemed to be pointing this way, at the bridge, at the binoculars. A bride in a ballooning pink dress briefly flashed through a pavilion.
A small North Korean boy, a toddler wearing a puffy jacket and a hat with a pompom, held his grandfather’s hand as they strolled by the riverside. They were also smiling, smiling in the oval of the military-grade binoculars, smiling until they disappeared.
Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, River East, River West, is out now from William Morrow.
