Aube Rey Lescure: Word Count Matters
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. After receiving her B.A. from Yale University, she worked in foreign policy and has co-authored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics.
She was the 2019 Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, a finalist for the 2018 Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence program, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Best American Essays, The Florida Review online, WBUR, and more. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Aube Rey Lescure
In this post, Aube discusses how an idea for a short story ended up becoming her sprawling literary novel, River East, River West, her advice for writers, and more!
Name: Aube Rey Lescure
Literary agent: Hillary Jacobson
Book title: River East, River West
Publisher: William Morrow/ HarperCollins
Release date: January 9, 2024
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch: Alva is a teenage girl living in Shanghai with her American expat mother, and is blindsided when her mother unexpectedly marries their landlord, a Chinese businessman. The year is 2008, marked by the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing olympics, and the global financial crisis. The novel’s second narrator is Lu Fang, the Chinese stepfather, who takes us back to the 1980s when he is a married shipping clerk who has an affair with a young American teacher. This social novel and family drama examines how the influx of westerners to modern China has impacted different generations of people living there through the lens of a complicated family.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I grew up in between Shanghai and northern China with a French mother and a Chinese father and attended Chinese public schools until ninth grade. It was a time of great flux and confluence in Chinese society–the economy’s explosive growth, a new generation of technocratic leaders courting foreign direct investment, waves of foreigners moving in with their multinationals and expat packages. I attended international school for two brief years in high school and was shocked by the level of condescension and indifference many expats displayed toward local Chinese society. I wanted to write a novel about these socioeconomic and racial dynamics seen through the lens of a complicated family, and characters torn between their perceptions and illusions of China and the West–and to contribute a critical perspective on expat life in Asia, as too many contemporary books in the “expat” genre focus on the glitz within the bubble, but rarely question the troubled attitudes of expats towards their host country.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
My first stab at the book was a short story about a rebellious teenager and her math tutor in Shanghai I wrote in 2017. Then, as I began drafting in longform, I had a monstrous, kaleidoscopic first draft featuring many minor character POVs. In 2019, I had the good fortune of attending the Novel Incubator program at GrubStreet–a year-long workshop course focused on novel revision, where everyone applies with a full manuscript and reads each other’s novels twice during the year. After revising the whole manuscript at least three times during and after the program, I was lucky to sign my dream agent in 2021. We sold the novel to William Morrow later that year. The whole process took 5-6 years, which felt necessary for this novel to morph and settle into the more streamlined, well-paced, essential version it is today.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I first queried with a 140,000-word manuscript in the first pandemic summer, eager to receive any sign of approval from the publishing universe. After reaching out to any agent I had a minimal degree of connection with, the feedback was clear: The book was way too long. All queries fell through. I knew then that the book’s length had been self-indulgent, the narrative bloated and sprawling. I spent the next six months cutting, trimming, honing–questioning whether every sentence and every word was essential. After cutting 30k words, I queried again, this time with success. Nothing had changed besides the streamlining. I now tell my writing and querying friends: Don’t be in a rush to get your manuscript out there just in the hope for a thumbs up. Make sure it’s as tight and polished as possible. Word count truly does matter and often helps shape a better story.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Feedback from early readers helped me realize I’d been missing an essential character POV all along. In early full drafts, Alva (my novel’s biracial teenage protagonist) was the only main POV, and I’d experimented with a smattering of vignettes from other characters. So much of the book centers around Alva’s relationship with her Chinese stepfather, Lu Fang, and yet I’d strangely never tried to write from his voice. My Novel Incubator classmates pointed out that Lu Fang and his unknowability to Alva were clearly the beating heart of the novel–yet we never heard from him. I wrote an entire secondary timeline from Lu Fang’s POV, spanning from the 1980s to present day Shanghai, playing with the dramatic irony of what the reader knew from the braided narrative that Alva did not, and that’s when the story truly came to life.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope they will feel immersed into an adolescence happening on Chinese soil in a way that feels truly inhabited, that the Chinese names and slang and references will become part of a natural reading experience that demystifies the “foreign.” It was really important to me that the whole novel take place in China and presented Chinese characters and their daily lives without excessive explanation and filtering. I also hope readers will find a fresh take on a migration/immigration narrative in this book by thinking about how western emigration—expatriation in modern Asia—is impacting society and individuals in the country receiving these expat communities.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Always have tabs of great writing you admire open next to your draft on your computer. (Or real books next to your ink-and-paper.) When I feel my flow waning mid-writing, I read a few sentences of someone whose linguistic pyrotechnics set my brain on fire, creating an aesthetic charge that makes me antsy to get back to my own document for a discharge of words that bring a genuine energetic current to the page.
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