Tricky Territory: on Writing an Autobiographical Novel and Mother-Daughter Relations

Tricky territory: on writing an autobiographical novel and mother-daughter relations

One afternoon in the northern Chinese city of Dalian, I walked out of the school gates and saw my mother’s face on a bus. It was an advertisement for an English language product–textbooks or teachers, I cannot recall–and there she was, plastered in pixels over public transportation. It was the year 2000, I was in second grade, and nobody had warned me about this. “Your face is on a BUS!” I bellowed with unadulterated glee when I saw my mother that night. She merely shrugged. “Oh, that.”

In my debut novel, River East, River West, Sloan Collins is an American woman who comes to China in the 1980s as an English teacher and never leaves–drunk on the attention and easy fame she receives for being a foreigner, she decides it’s far preferable to be special in China than nondescript in the West. She dyes her hair blonder and blonder, hams up the foreignness and claims to be a movie actress. The novel is highly autobiographical–I grew up in China with a French expat mother–so it’s easy to assume that I based Sloan off my mother.

In truth, they are diametrical opposites: my mother also stayed in China after coming here in the 1980s, but she is the most private, self-effacing person I know. She dyed her hair, but it was to a browner shade than her natural chestnut. She wore only loose black tunics and pants–if you opened her closet door, you’d find rows of identical black garb tailor-made at the fabric market, cartoon character-style. She didn’t seek fame or attention. To have her face plastered on a bus was an aberration, the kind of gag that happened in 2000s China, not a norm or a pursuit.

She is so private that writing a character who could be mistaken for her felt like a betrayal. And yet our past is also my past: that of a single mom raising a biracial child in a rapidly changing China. A past full of rental apartments and pirated DVDs, of instant noodle dinners and languorous weekend afternoons exploring Shanghai. It was a Chinese childhood: local public schools through eighth grade, buying hamsters and guinea pigs at the flower and bird markets, eating plastic containers of xiaolongbao sitting on park benches, commuting across the city when my nearsightedness got bad to receive treatment from a sham-doctor who scraped my face with a cow’s horn.

But because of our unconventional lifestyle, it was also full of oddities: her allowing me to scoop up Jackie Collins novels at the second-hand English bookstore by Fuzhou Road, her bringing me to business banquets where people took shots until they were under the table, her dispatching me to the FamilyMart on our block to buy two liters of beer as we binge-watched pirated shows. Back then, I did not know about the fallibility of parenthood. She did not know I would become a writer, that these details were becoming encoded into the folds of my brain for future public consumption. 

In my novel, Sloan and her daughter Alva are mutually dependent for survival: they are partners in carving out a life in buzzing, cacophonous Shanghai, they are free-wheeling and extraordinary, they share the secrets of the dark side of Sloan’s motherhood and fight like cat and dog. These are true of my own daughter-mother relationship without making my mother Sloan. Still, this character was a caricature of a foreigner addicted to being the shiny object in China: would my mother perceive it as a veiled criticism? Would the exaggerated qualities of Alva and Sloan’s slovenly lives, the creeping presence of alcohol, feel like an indictment? 

I was most nervous showing a copy of the manuscript to my mother: I did not want to hurt a person I loved, and yet I’d written a whole book ripe for projection and public scrutiny. During the pandemic, I spent a few months with my mother sharing an Airbnb in rural Tuscany as I revised my novel–the first time we’d lived together since my childhood. I locked myself in the apartment’s little library in the morning and we went on long walks in the surrounding industrial countryside in the afternoon.

One day, after many weeks of laborious revision of the latest draft, I hit an ending point. I’d gone as far as I could, and I wanted her blessing. I sent her the word document by email. We swapped places: she locked herself in the small wood-paneled library to read, and I stayed in bed, staring at the church tower outside my window. I didn’t see her for the next day and a half. When she emerged from the library, her face serene no matter what emotions were roiling beneath, she said what any writer offspring would hope to hear: “I understand that this character isn’t me–we are so different. But in all the ways that this story is true, it is your past, and what is painful to read is also fair.”

We didn’t talk further about Sloan after that. We didn’t need to. And for that I am deeply grateful to my mother: this was an extraordinary gift from the most private person in my life, and one I did not take lightly. But I also knew she must have registered the small, true kernels of memories in the novel, odes to the childhood she’d bestowed me: our shared love for the torrential downpours of Shanghai summers, for the lush gardens and stray cats of our residential compound, for the DVD vendor who hid his loot in a plant-filled minivan, for American burgers at Johnny Moo’s, for the plane trees of Puxi, for dusk walks along the Suzhou creek. It is, she must know, a childhood I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. 

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Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China and the south of France. After receiving her BA from Yale University, she worked in foreign policy and has coauthored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow, a Pauline Scheer Fellow, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, The Best American Essays 2022, The Florida Review online, and more. She is the deputy editor at Off Assignment. www.aubereylescure.com. Facebook: @aube.reylescure Instagram: @aubenoisette X:@AubeReyLescure

RIVER EAST, RIVER WEST

A darkly glittering literary debut that traces a mixed family’s troubled trajectory through developing China.

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A mesmerising reversal of the east–west immigrant narrative set against China’s economic boom, River East, River West is a deeply moving exploration of race, identity and family, of capitalism’s false promise and private dreams.

Shanghai, 2007: feeling betrayed by her American mother’s engagement to their rich landlord Lu Fang, fourteen-year-old Alva begins plotting her escape. But the exclusive American School – a potential ticket out – is not what she imagined.

Qingdao, 1985: newlywed Lu Fang works as a lowly shipping clerk. Though he aspires to a bright future, he is one of many casualties of harsh political reforms. Then China opens up to foreigners and capital, and Lu Fang meets a woman who makes him question what he should settle for…

River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure (Duckworth Books, £16.99)  is available from all good book retailers https://bit.ly/RERWorder 

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Category: On Writing