Exploring expat culture
Aube Rey Lescure Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Aube Rey Lescure’s life is hardly typical. Born to a Chinese father and French-American mother, she grew up in Northern China and Shanghai attending public school before moving to an international one. Going back to America for university and working at a think tank she finally switched to her true passion: writing. Such an unusual life might not ordinarily render itself well as material for a popular, relatable novel, but Aube Rey somehow manages it.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction, her novel River East River West is half autobiography and half historical fiction. It explores the lives of a Chinese-American teenager and her Chinese stepfather as they navigate a changing China and a seemingly unchanging expat community. Drawing from her own experiences among white expats who lived luxurious lifestyles far removed from and uncaring of Chinese people’s reality, she critically explores this “neocolonial” culture while reserving a gentle compassion for the children caught in its “dangerous mindset.”
Speaking to the Sunday Times at the Galle Literary Festival, Lescure explains how she managed to write about such a “niche” group, like expats in China, for such a wide audience. To do so, she turned to juxtaposition, alternating between chapters from the perspective of the mixed-race Alva in 2007, and her Chinese stepfather, Lu Fang in 1985. “It opened up the narrative in really wonderful ways,” she said, “I could play with dramatic irony.”
Dual narratives, she explains, allows a reader to cut off an emotional climax suddenly switching to the other perspective, but subtly bringing in those emotional undercurrents into a new context. In doing so, her book creates an emotional continuity even as her two main characters inhabit such vastly different Chinas.
River East River West is firmly rooted in history. Lescure’s characters live through and reflect the country’s economic and social transformations. “I love social realism,” says Lescure, who drew much of her material from her context: her lived experiences, through her academic research, and through consumption of Chinese books and movies. “I really like reading books where there’s a blurred boundary between real life and fiction. Although the characters may be fictional I wanted the social analysis and commentary to be rooted in reality.”
It comes as no surprise then, that Aube Rey is also a non-fiction author and editor of the magazine Off Assignment. Her special focus is personal essay and travel writing. “Rather than travel writing, I prefer the term ‘writing about place,’ the experience of being in a place” she says, “the legacy of travel writing has colonial undertones as westerners used to go to ‘exotic’ places to record what they found.” All kinds of people have travelled at all points in time, she explains, but travel writing has largely been limited to Europeans glamorously exploring other countries.
Through her magazine Aube Rey tries to bring new meaning to travel writing. She commissions works that introduce perspectives of those who historically have not been considered “travellers.” She focuses on travel writing as an expression of journeys – both personal and literal –rather than merely a practice of “trying to capture the place.”
Aube Rey recommends that readers turn to regional sites to find interesting, well thought through, non fetishizing pieces from around the world. Brittle Paper for literature from Africa, Off Assignment for travel writing, Paris Review of Books and Granta for personal essays, are her go-to reads.
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