Some European diplomats in Seoul are weighing whether they can still trust South Korea as a like-minded partner if it grows closer to Russia, the Financial Times reported on 28 October, according to South Korea’s Financial News. One European diplomat also told the FT that Seoul wants to resume trade with Russia as soon as the war ends.
As Russia presses its war against Ukraine, Kyiv’s partners count on each other to keep up the pressure on Moscow. The doubts about South Korea now come from its European partners, not only from Kyiv. The report lands eight days after Seoul said it would withdraw about half its staff from Kyiv over a dispute about two North Korean prisoners of war.
An Arctic voyage, a new adviser, and signals from Moscow
According to the FT, European diplomats saw a South Korean pilot voyage along Russia’s Arctic sea route as a sign of a tilt toward Russia, since the voyage required extensive cooperation from Moscow.
Meanwhile, on 1 October, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung appointed Song Young-gil, a six-term lawmaker and former chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, as his special adviser on peace diplomacy. Song once served as a special envoy to Russia, the FT noted.
On 20 October, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said Seoul had signaled it wants to normalize relations but says full normalization can come only after a change in the geopolitical situation, which he said means the end of the war in Ukraine.
Fuel for Russia loaded at South Korean ports, but Seoul denies direct exports
The FT also cited reports of fuel shipments to Russia. A Guardian analysis published on 6 October found that more than 176,000 tons of fuel, mostly diesel, were loaded at South Korean ports in July and August. The fuel went onto seven tankers bound for Russia’s Far East, three of them under UK and EU sanctions. The Guardian said the trade does not appear to breach South Korean law.
On 8 October, South Korea’s foreign and trade ministries and customs service said no diesel, jet fuel, or gasoline had been exported to Russia through customs. They said they would examine the tankers’ routes and any divergence from their declared destinations before judging whether the law had been broken.
Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said the shipments helped Russia offset refinery losses caused by Ukrainian strikes. South Korea’s presidential office called the claim inaccurate and inappropriate, saying the key facts of the transactions had not been verified.
In a statement to the FT, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said concerns in some quarters that the country was leaning too far toward Russia were not based on fact. It added that Seoul supports international efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
Seoul cuts its Kyiv embassy staff over the POW dispute
At the same time, relations with Ukraine have deteriorated over the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea, which Zelenskyy disclosed at the UN General Assembly in September. Seoul says the disclosure broke a confidentiality understanding. Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, wrote in a Facebook comment on 25 September that “there was no such agreement.”
On 20 October, Seoul said it would withdraw roughly half its diplomatic staff from Kyiv, citing Kyiv’s failure to take “positive steps” on the POW dispute and continued Russian airstrikes, Yonhap reported. A chargé d’affaires and all consular staff will stay.
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Aube Rey Lescure | Longreads | October 29, 2026 | 5,562 words (20 minutes)
When my father proposes a road trip to admire fall foliage along the Yalu River, the natural border separating parts of northeastern China from North Korea, I am skeptical for several reasons. First, it appears his inspiration comes largely from Douyin, the Chinese TikTok, which has been feeding him videos of regional autumnal splendor, with hypersaturated reds that carry more than a whiff of artificial enhancement.
Secondly, I don’t know how to drive, and neither, really, does my father. He would dispute this, as he did earn a driver’s license recently from a shoddy driving school in Dandong, a border town on the Yalu and our ancestral bastion. He’s already bought a brand new car, a Chinese domestic bestseller, for the bargain price of eight thousand US dollars. In the days since owning it, he’d only gotten into one accident (ramming into a neighbor’s parked car, as captured on the compound CCTV).
Thirdly, our visit to northeastern China (my father lives in Shanghai) is largely for the purpose of seeing my grandmother, who is minded by Sanshu, my youngest uncle, and I’m fairly sure neither has heard of a fall foliage road trip in their lifetimes. Furthermore, my grandmother is allergic to most forms of financial expenditure. At home, she plugs the bathtub and gathers water from a faucet dripping at a volume feeble enough to go undetected by the water meter. With that reservoir and a plastic bucket, she flushes the toilet and fools the utility company. Imagine how she will feel about gas money.
Fourthly, at the time he raises this idea, my father is recovering from cancer, one month post-op from the removal of a malignant tumor in his colon. He did not tell me until after the operation.
“We’ll just drive very slowly,” he says.
Weeks before my visit to China, my father had called me from a hospital bed to let me know about the cancer. This was our first phone call in years—usually, our exchanges are constrained to happy birthdays on WeChat or confirming the travel logistics of my infrequent visits. After I arrive in Shanghai, despite his efforts at dissuasion, I accompany him to the Fudan University Cancer Center for a follow-up appointment. The cancer is diagnosed, retroactively, as stage II. The doctor recommends preventive chemotherapy to deter recurrence. My father says no. The doctor recommends chemo pills. My father says no again.
When the doctor notices my increasingly discomfited expression and asks, “Who’s this?” my father says, “This is my niece.”
“It’s too complicated otherwise,” he tells me afterward. I am half-white; he is Chinese. I want to retort that it’s not complicated; I am his daughter. But I bite my tongue.
Since my teenage years, after my parents divorced, a distance had wedged itself between my father and me, further exacerbated by my move to the US at 16 years old. You might say we are estranged. Once or twice in the past decade, he’s given me a stiff hug, but mostly he greets me with a quick wave at airport arrivals, then hurries off to find a taxi. At his home in Shanghai, I dine and go on outings with my stepmother and sister while he sits out most communal activities. We barely make eye contact, him perpetually positioned in front of his computer screen, watching political commentary videos, me mumbling a greeting as I skulk by. The road trip proposition is, for all these reasons and more, preposterous. The two of us, in a car for days, physically proximate despite the emotional Mariana Trench between us? Maybe that’s why the idea also feels strangely enticing.
I am half-white; he is Chinese. I want to retort that it’s not complicated; I am his daughter. But I bite my tongue.
When he feels recovered enough, though his stomach is still bandaged, my father and I fly north to Dalian. Nainai, my 81-year-old grandmother, is unaware of my father’s illness. She knows he’d been hospitalized, but he paid a copy shop man to photoshop a report saying he had a stomach infection, not cancer. (The copy shop is located right outside the hospital, and business is booming.) The first evening we arrive at the apartment my grandmother shares with Sanshu, Nainai cooks a feast of homemade fennel dumplings and pork trotters. This is a special occasion: Usually, she spends her days holed up in her apartment, watching reels of web soaps and fake news on her phone at high volume while Sanshu shuts himself in his room. Her ideal granddaughterly visit would be me sitting next to her at home, force-fed like a foie gras goose during intermissions from the reel-viewing.
This can be arranged on the road as well, and my father, as eldest son, has his sway: To take his family on a car trip, or “self-driving tourism” as it’s known on the Chinese internet, is the new pinnacle of the Chinese dream. For a family that once subsisted on meal tickets, whose children collected metal to sell at a scrapyard, car ownership still feels like a fantasy. “Don’t you want to see me practice my driving, Ma?” he asks Nainai, and this seems to erode her defenses. Sanshu listens with quiet eagerness. His days as Nainai’s caretaker are monotone in this seaside city, and like my father, he spends most days on the internet, his only portal to a larger world. Now, here was a chance to drive through it ourselves. Finally, Nainai sighs and agrees. “But we have all this food at home,” she adds with petulance.
On the train trip to Dandong, where the car is to be retrieved (from the compound, scene of the accident), we carry plastic bags of grapes, cabbage, steamed taro, sweet potatoes, and corn. The pork trotters are in there somewhere. The train travels north, making stops at rural towns in the waning light of dusk. The land is mostly flat, low hills hazy in the distance. The moon rises in the pale blue sky and the wind turbines are still; herons graze the glassy surface of a low-lying river.
At the train station in Dandong, my father announces he has “booked a leg of lamb.” It turns out he spent the entire three-hour train ride on Douyin, where he learned that a Mongolian restaurant’s leg of lamb had gone viral. He tried ordering it for takeout, but it has to be spit-roasted at the table. He announces our dinner plans to Sanshu and Nainai. “But what about all the food we have with us?” Nainai says, pointing to all the plastic bags. “Why spend money?”
“We’ll eat those later!” My dad commandeers a cab by the roadside as we exit. I can see he wants to start the trip on a high note, with a proper feast. I remember the childhood vacations when he sat pale as a restaurant bill arrived. Once, on Hainan Island for Chinese New Year, we ate instant ramen in the hotel room to save money. This is different. He is trying.
The Mongolian restaurant is in the city center, dingy and depressing. The tables around us fill up: each with a crate of beers next to it and an ashtray for the chain-smokers. I order some er’guotou for $2. The liquor tastes like synthetic ethanol, but goes down well with the roast lamb, which is succulent. I also order a cold salad of jellyfish and cucumber strands in vinegar, as well as Korean cold noodles in a kimchi-gochujang broth. This is a true borderland meal. Nainai sits with arms crossed across from me, refusing to eat a single morsel of lamb. “We’ve got food to eat at home,” she repeats.
Ignoring her hunger strike, my dad announces the plans for tomorrow: We will drive to Donggang, a nearby city, where Nainai will obtain some medicine she’s entitled to from her health insurance. This was, it is revealed, her primary motivation for agreeing to this trip.
After dinner, I hail a taxi, shamefully, to go to a hotel. I tried to convince Nainai to spend the night at the hotel with me, as I’ve booked myself a “superior riverside room.” I feel guilty for acting like I’m too good to stay at the housing project with the rest of my family. The apartment is small, with a single bathroom. There are not enough beds, I say, a wan excuse. “I’m not going to a hotel,” Nainai says. “And you could sleep in a bed with me.”
“Let her go,” my dad says. “She wants to see North Korea.” I am grateful for this diplomatic intervention. On the riverside avenue in Dandong, many hotels, including mine, are high-rises, which offer views across the border to North Korea. (On a review page for my hotel, someone asked: Do the rooms come equipped with binoculars?Sadly, they don’t, was the answer.)
After failing to convince me to take pears and boiled peanuts, my grandma shoves a mooncake my way before I close the cab door. The car drives along the riverside boulevard and its nighttime plaza dance. This is also an area of nightclubs, rent-by-the-hour karaoke, and entertainment centers. Hotels that double as banquet halls. The agricultural bank runs an LED message against border-zone money laundering.
Furuide, my hotel, is past this seedy stretch. When I walk in with my disintegrating REI backpack and tote bag (containing a plastic bag of Korean noodles doused in lamb soup, and the er’guotou), the reception staff eye me with suspicion. I show them my booking number. Since I’d reserved the superior riverview room, it turns out I’m on the top “executive” floor. They dutifully note my visa number, take a picture of the border entry stamp on my American passport, none of it casual. In my room, I find a free unrefrigerated peach yogurt, a little tub of cookies, and four bottles of water.
Someone sets off fireworks outside the window. And there it is, North Korea, across the bank. I can see deep into its dim night from the height of my 28th-floor room. As I stand by the window, I feel bewildered. It is perverse, this voyeurism into the pariah state, and yet I cannot help but look.
Instant coffee, powdered creamer, dense fog outside. I take a deep breath, put on my sneakers, and go down for a morning run along the river. The wind is fierce, and my Spotify running EDM playlist feels wrong—the soundtrack of American college parties. The North Korean shore has been built up tremendously in the six years since I was last here. A curious massive round tower, shaped like a rising moon, dominates the skyline. There are many new white towers nearby: modern condominiums. A lot of them are purportedly just for show, built for the Chinese to see, ghost towers with no lights at night. They call Kim Jong-un “Kim Three Fat” here, and word is that this year he’s come into some fortune shipping North Korean weapons to Putin, funding these real estate flexes. Along the Yalu River, here on the clean, wide promenade, there are panda-shaped binoculars you can use to look at North Korea by scanning a QR code. A little girl runs up to one, but she’s too short to reach the lenses.
The fog begins to recede, and the river sparkles in the sunshine. I shower quickly at the hotel and get a call from Sanshu that they are in the car downstairs, waiting. My father is cleaning the windshield of his grey SUV while blasting a groovy dance-pop Calvin Harris track on the stereo. I’ll come to learn he won’t drive without EDM, though I’ve never known him to be aware of the genre’s existence, let alone listen to it. Nainai is in the backseat propped against three pillows, and hands me a plastic bag of soy milk and fried dough sticks. She doesn’t have her seat belt on. I force her to buckle up. “But why?” she whines loudly. “Why are you tying me up?”
“She won’t want to take the car again if you do that,” my dad says. But I remain adamant. As retribution, she begins sending and reciting a series of voice memos on WeChat to her old medical school classmate: “Your daughter has found a partner? Wonderful! She’s 30 already? They’ll be married next year! Soon you’ll have a grandson in your arms!” She shouts into her phone over the music. I am 31, unwed, and childless, facts she likes to bring up often.
We drive south along the Yalu River. There is a new bridge into North Korea, but no cars driving across it. As we leave town, the compounds morph into fields and factories. On the riverside is a continuous barbed-wire fence. Every hundred meters I’m blinded by a sharp white flash: security cameras. “Foliage!” I point to a red shrub on the roadside. Besides occasional skinny trees, there are only mounds of dredged sand and stones along the road, stray corn stalks lining canals, shipyards clotted with destitute, rotting fishing boats. Men in faded camo pants search for crawfish in the swamp.
Dad drives at about 30 miles per hour, which I learn is his highest speed. Air that smells like fish and shrimp rot gushes through the open windows. We turn onto a small country road and drive through rural development zones before reaching the city of Donggang, where my father’s cousin Yin lives. She is helping us with Nainai’s medicine haul today. My dad parks, half his SUV jutting out into the sidewalk, in front of a hotel advertising “upscale, middle-scale, and low-scale rooms by the hour,” and an LED sign flashing no to drugs Yin and her husband arrive. They haven’t seen me since I was 3. “Lunch is on me,” my dad announces. We buy pounds of crab, clams, shrimp, jellyfish, giant sea slugs. Now, where to cook it?
We drive back to cousin Yin’s compound. It turns out my dad has never driven in a city, doesn’t know how to turn at a large intersection, or park in moderately narrow spaces. He drives with his foot on the brake the whole time, stopping and starting. Eventually we make it to the compound, and he and Nainai immediately park themselves on the couch. Sanshu goes into the guest bedroom to look at his phone. Who is going to help cousin Yin steam all this seafood we’ve invited ourselves to her house to eat? Me, of course.
The shrimp are ready first, then bowls of crabs, and clams and sea mollusks. We eat without plates, mounds of shells amassing in front of us as we hurl crabs at each other: “You eat, you eat.” Yin’s husband is a taxi driver who sometimes works for North Korean organizations that bring laborers to Chinese factories where they process seafood. They live in military-style dorms and are not allowed to mingle with the Chinese. He shuttles them from the factories to the dorms. “Do they prefer China, or do they want to go home?” my dad asks. “Home,” the cousin’s husband says. “They cannot stay here; there’s no future of marrying and settling. They’re not allowed.”
It is unsettling to think of the North Korean women living here as forced laborers, not quite emigrants, not quite immigrants. I know that for a long time, while growing up in this border town, the only North Koreans my father knew were ones rumored to work at restaurants or night halls. They had successfully gone west of the Yalu River, to the comparatively prosperous land of their Communist big brother. He himself had harbored dreams of going further west, leaving China, crossing borders, forging a life for himself in America, which he saw as a beacon of limitless opportunity.
The feast winds down, and my dad clamors that it is time to go. We are not going, I tell him, before we help clean up the mounds of trash we’ve just created on these relatives’ tables. Nainai is happily recording videos of the food and the leftovers, arranging the crab shells and cakes to fit her directorial aesthetic. I know she will mass-send the videos to every contact on WeChat. After a few tussles over us not taking the leftovers (“we already have many bags of food,” I promise cousin Yin), it is finally time for us to hit up the pharmacy. Nainai has 150 renminbi (RMB) to spend on her medical insurance allotment, except not on prescription medicine, only over-the-counter supplements. Still, she is like a child in a candy store. She peddles it all: TUMS equivalent? Caffeine pills? We end up with two enormous tubs of protein powder (which, alarmingly, she keeps calling “milk powder”), a dozen boxes of cough drops, and a jar of honey.
“Enough! Enough!” my dad is shouting. “I don’t want to drive when it’s dark!” It’s 4 p.m., and we left Dandong at 10:30 a.m. At his driving speed, we have a long journey back.
He himself had harbored dreams of going further west, leaving China, crossing borders, forging a life for himself in America, which he saw as a beacon of limitless opportunity.
My dad hooks up a video of hardcore techno from Douyin for our drive back. He meets my amused gaze and explains: “Driving is more epic this way.” I don’t tell him I feel the same about thunderous bass, a soundtrack to so many of my runs. Nainai reveals to cousin Yin, on WeChat, that she’s hidden 200 RMB under a photo frame on their dresser, for the trouble of our lunch. She hates spending money, but is constantly hiding it in others’ houses. In the oncoming dusk, we drive past the same decrepit shipyards, swampy riverside, canals behind barbed wire. “Is your grandma asleep?” my dad asks over the techno.
I look over at her. Her eyes are nearly closed, but her thumb is swiping up the screen in a familiar motion. “No,” I say. “She’s watching reels.”
It is getting deeper into autumn, and the night comes fast. They drop me off the highway by the hotel, stopping illegally as I dart off. Alone in my room, I watch a show on salmon farming in the western borderlands, a movie on old Shanghai mobsters, and a dubbed documentary on “the most lethal animals in Africa.” I watch a giant iguana eat a snake, and a scorpion dissolve a grasshopper with acid. Something, perhaps the magpie I saw this morning, periodically whacks against my window. I drink last night’s er’guotou. Where am I, I think, where am I? I look across the river, but there isn’t much to see in the darkness. A Chinese island called Moon Island—a slim landmass of condominiums, a luxury hotel with a name that translates to Venice Country-Building Hotel, and one viral coffee shop—stands between my line of sight and North Korea. Its bridge is illuminated in bright blue. place of wellness, it says in red neon characters.
On our second day in Dandong, my dad has mapped out an itinerary that will take us into Manchuria. “Can we do that in a day?” I ask shortly after we’ve set off in the car.
“Probably not. We’ll find a hotel.”
“Does Nainai have her overnight medicine?”
Silence. I repeat the question. Finally, my dad says: “Ask your Sanshu.”
“Sanshu?”
He shrugs. “How would I know?”
“How are we going to sleep away if she can’t take her pills?”
“We’re sleeping away?” Nainai looks up from her phone. “Why?”
“A road trip, Ma. The fall foliage, remember?”
We turn the car around, back to the housing project in the Eight-way Ditch neighborhood, so that Nainai can assemble an overnight bag. The apartment is on the 20th floor, with an exposed communal balcony that gives me vertigo looking down. The staircase is blocked with discarded household items, a disastrous fire hazard. Nainai packs a towel in a plastic bag and asks Sanshu, “Three Baby, did you bring clean underwear?”
I dart out of the apartment before the ensuing scene. We drop back down in the elevator and hop into Dad’s car. It’s a gray and rainy day. We set out from Dandong, north along the Yalu River and the sinister towers under construction on the North Korean side. The river is a muddy greenish gray, but the skinny gingko trees along the road are turning gold. We pass by impoverished farm compounds, restaurants boasting North Korean specialties. The river banks are strewn with huge amounts of trash. The roadside eateries are decrepit, mostly empty or closed. There is a sign saying, we collect toads, make toad oil. My dad pulls a rotisserie chicken out of his backpack, and I tear into a thigh as we drive along. He must have bought it this morning, before picking me up from my hotel. My love for rotisserie chicken is a longtime family joke, but not one he nor I have mentioned in over a decade.
The two of us, in a car for days, physically proximate despite the emotional Mariana Trench between us? Maybe that’s why the idea also feels strangely enticing.
We enter an area known for its peach orchards, and the river widens. There are mountains on the other side, terraced fields, not lovely exactly, as the slopes look brown and vegetation poor, but it’s a relief to see what resembles normal nature after the hellish construction. The barbed-wire fence continues all along the river. The only actual North Koreans I see are along a river jetty some miles earlier, many of them laboring in dark clothes. We stop at a rural compound with gates open and three cars but no one around. My dad wanders through an empty banquet hall with tables pushed to the side. We stand outside in the lot. Everyone eats a peach. Finally, we stop by a decent hotel restaurant. There is no one in the dining hall except for a table of cleaning staff, sitting and gossiping. We eat a simple vegetable-heavy meal: shredded cucumber, sour cabbage and pork, salted duck eggs, and a chicken-and-mushroom stew. “I’m craving noodles,” my dad announces. “Simple noodles in clear broth.”
His tone has a childish insistence. The drive has made him hungry. He’s never hungry in Shanghai, where he eats leftovers alone late at night in front of his computer. So we order him noodles, and he slurps them with contentment. When was the last time I’ve seen him content? Maybe when I was 16, when we went to a beach and a wave slapped into him so suddenly he’d let out a peal of laughter and turned to me, bewildered. For a flash, I’d seen the little boy in him. That memory always makes me sad, the rarity of such a glimpse of defenselessness.
After leaving the restaurant, we wind along a narrow road, climbing in altitude, and some orange foliage begins to appear. It’s three in the afternoon when we turn inland, west toward the mountains, toward the Manchurian nature preserve area where we will spend the night. The cloud cover is gray and low, the rain intermittent. There are corn fields everywhere, and little hut-like mounds made from harvested stalks. Fog shrouds the bases of dark mountains. The atmosphere is gloomy and melancholy, but in the car, an EDM remix of “My Heart Will Go On” is blaring, and spirits are decent. My grandmother is off her phone because she’s received a message that she’s used most of her data. I’m directing and co-piloting my dad, and it occurs to me that this—right now—is probably the most we’ve talked in decades: Turn left, turn right, merge onto this state road.
He’s driven a long time now, probably more hours than he’s ever driven since learning, but he is in a good mood. He’s on a road trip in his home province where he grew up in poverty. He’s following open roads, taking his family on an adventure, a foliage tour.
In his 20s, my father met an American missionary who helped sponsor his visa and brought him to Bridgewater, Virginia, where he cleaned the hallways of a community college. He never learned how to drive there. America, it turned out, was not the place he thought it to be. Something had happened during his few years there, a fractured fantasy. After I was born, he returned to China. He never left again. He has, so far, survived his cancer; the operation had removed a 12-centimeter tumor. He paid for lunch, he’ll pay for the hotel tonight, they’ll be the nicest places we can find, which in this area won’t amount to much cost. Within these borders, he can summon a version of infinitude. I feel it, too, this freedom of a loose itinerary, of just driving north along the Yalu River, meandering among these tiny hamlets, chasing the sights of leaves in this bizarre borderland. So much bleakness, and yet when a mountainside is covered in layers of reddening leaves, a spark of yellow, a cluster of orange, there is beauty nonetheless.
We must get on bigger highways to cut west, into the Kuandian Manchu Autonomous County, and the fog gets heavier and the rain denser. I scroll on my phone to find a hotel near the park and show it to my dad, who nods. I plug it into his GPS. As night falls, it seems like the reserve and the hotel will never appear, but suddenly, a sharp left turn, and we enter through a gated kiosk. It is raining hard. At the visitor center, we are able to book a whole villa for less than $200, four rooms, each with our own bed, part of a gargantuan lakeside development. Cheap construction, no gas, water running rusty red out of the taps, waterbugs everywhere. But a whole house just for us! Three floors! We run up and down and up and down, Sanshu is taking a video, even Nainai is curious, wandering, climbing down stairs, opening every drawer. “How much?” she asks, and my dad lies: “400 RMB,” or $65 dollars, past acceptability for Nainai already. But we each get a breakfast voucher, and we have a massive dining table to eat at—no need to consume outside. We’ve brought our plastic bags of leftovers from lunch, the rotisserie chicken, and Nainai produces a plastic shower cap full of steamed taro. There are no plates or cutlery here, so we eat with our hands and out of mugs. A detached house is a foreign structure in these parts, where people are used to narrow apartments in towers. Nainai and Sanshu cannot stop commenting on the scale of the kitchen. There is clear wonder on their faces, and I can tell my father is pleased.
No one else wants to go into the national park tomorrow because tickets cost too much, so I’ll go alone. He brought us all the way here, and I will see some fall foliage. Since the water runs brown, I wash my face upstairs with bottled water, like a princess. The lampshades are a coarse imitation of a Coach handbag’s two-tone, brown-checkered fabric. Downstairs, an imitation fireplace. Outside, a man in a neighboring villa’s yard smoking, staring into the night.
It’s a cloudy, frigid morning, but there it is: fall foliage on the mountains around the artificial lake, right outside my bay window. It’s 7 a.m. and people are already outside, bundled up, posing for photos. We drive bright and early to the visitor center with our breakfast vouchers, just in time as tour buses unload hundreds of other diners. Breakfast is a feast for Nainai: braised tofu, seaweed salad, fermented cabbage, salted duck eggs, sweet potatoes, and hot soy milk, into which I mix a pack of instant coffee. Under duress, I eat the mooncake Nainai gave me two nights ago, while she watches triumphantly. I’m planning for a run in the national park, and since I’m the only one going in, the rest of the family returns to the villa (which Nainai keeps calling “the dorm”). I’m under strict orders to return in two hours—we have to drive back to Dandong and then make the train to Dalian.
Being one of the first visitors in the park, I have the fall foliage all to myself. It’s freezing cold, but the river flows over mossy rocks, and fiery red maples line the banks. The walkway ascends deeper and deeper up the valley, and I’m slow-jogging up the wet leaves. The employees opening up the morning stalls look at me with curiosity. This is it! Fall foliage! Nature! It’s marvelous. Suddenly I feel very proud of my dad and his TikTok vision, his months-old driver’s license. This may not be the most famous national park in China—it’s ranked only 4A, though every display outside the park is a genius advertising sleight-of-hand of striving 5A national park—but it’s beautiful. I run uphill until I have no signal. It’s foggy and drizzly up here. Downhill, downhill then. The scent of pines in the cold air. I’m flying. I make it back to the park gate by 10:30 a.m. The SUV pulls up. I’m ravenous and exhilarated. I hurl myself at the rose cake and red bean bread in the trunk. Then I buckle up Nainai, who cries: “I’m being tied up!” “That’s the whole point!” I shout. This is our bit by now.
I’m directing and co-piloting my dad, and it occurs to me that this—right now—is probably the most we’ve talked in decades: Turn left, turn right, merge onto this state road.
We drive back toward Dandong, this time under a resplendent blue sky, the cornfields and multi-colored mountains a cinematic bucolic backdrop. Sanshu tells Nainai: “Ma, stop looking at your phone, look at the leaves outside!”
“My eyesight has gotten better these past two days,” Nainai says, “because I’ve been looking at my phone less, and the scenery more.”
“Then look!”
“Look at what? I’ve seen enough leaves.”
Basking in the sun, I could doze off. My dad’s driving is smoother and faster now, more confident. There is an ease to the SUV’s rumble. Soon we’re back along the Yalu River, and the hilly shore on the other side is also in bloom with a fall palette. The way back goes by fast. We return to Dandong by 1.30 p.m., up on the 20th floor of the housing project, and Sanshu is dispatched to bring back freshly boiled dumplings, chive and egg filling, from a hole-in-the-wall my dad likes downstairs. A sense of accomplishment hangs around the room, though no one says anything out loud. I eat a glutinous rice zongzi dipped in sugar. I could eat the whole world. Nainai looks on approvingly.
I did have one last wish for this trip, before our borderland jaunt concludes. We drive to the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. He died when I was a freshman in college, and I have never been to his tomb. “Row 14, number 11,” Nainai calls after us. She doesn’t go because it’s considered dangerous for older people to visit cemeteries—they may get pulled in by the ghosts beckoning from the underworld.
We stop by a flower shop at the bottom of the compound, where a young man carefully arranges 11 chrysanthemums. We drive in the brisk, cloudless afternoon to the cemetery up on a hill, semi-feral dogs scampering off the wide paths. It is golden hour when we descend a staircase bisecting rows of densely packed tombstones. My dad and Sanshu, not having listened to Nainai, meander into row 12, searching and scanning each headstone for their father.
I’m carrying the flowers, and I walk straight to row 14, number 11. There he is. Wang Mingjun. I call my dad and Sanshu over. They are in a terrible rush because we have to catch the train, but Sanshu brushes some pine needles off the grave. I set down the flowers, and my dad tells me to kneel and touch my head to the tombstone. I do, feeling the cold black marble. I am his child then. I remember the old, smiling man who waited for me outside school gates when I was small, his face the face of my father and my own. I breathe in deep and start back up the stone stairs after my uncle and my father, who are waiting under the pines.
In the following weeks, back in Shanghai, my father returns to his computer, to long hours staring numbly at internet videos, his SUV parked tightly in a compound up north, thousands of miles away. But something has shifted between us. In the final days of my visit, he brings me plates of peeled pomelo. Sliced apples await on the dining room table. We return to another hospital by bike, and though he mostly doesn’t wait for me at intersections, occasionally he glances back as I pedal to catch up. In the examination room, when the doctor gazes at me curiously and my father opens his mouth, I brace myself.
“My daughter,” he says.
Again I stay silent. And I know what has shifted: the winding road along the Yalu River, a fast-coming bend, a flash of crimson in the hills. When he was a young man, this might have been the essence of what my father dreamed of: open roads, miles and miles of unknown potential ahead. No true destination. Handing his mother a peach, watching his daughter race down a slope, amid splendid leaves, back to her family. I don’t know if I had ever seen him more alive than on that drive.
And I was alongside him the entire time. Carefully reading out instructions for the road as he listened. Navigation, the only mode of speech we shared, unfamiliar but safe.
Turn right, turn left, slow down. It’s coming up ahead. We are here.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American author and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Off Assignment. Her debut novel, River East, River West, was shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Carol Shields Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Maya Angelou Book Award, among others. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Guernica, AFAR, LitHub, Electric Literature, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for The Best American Essays 2022.
North Korea fired around 10 ballistic missiles toward the sea off its east coast on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, as tensions run high ahead of Pyongyang’s end-of-month deadline to activate propaganda loudspeakers along the heavily armed border.
The short-range missiles were launched at around 12:30 p.m. (0330 GMT) from around Wonsan on North Korea’s eastern coast and flew about 250 km (155 miles), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
South Korea was strengthening surveillance and maintaining readiness for additional launches, while closely sharing information with the United States and Japan, it added.
Japan’s Defence Ministry said North Korea had launched what could be a ballistic missile and that it did not appear to have landed within Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
South Korea’s presidential National Security Office convened an emergency meeting to assess the security implications.
It urged North Korea to halt its repeated ballistic missile launches, calling them a “serious violation” of UN Security Council resolutions, a presidential statement said.
“The launch can be linked to the tensions along the border as part of a broader series of North Korean shows of force, although it is difficult to say the border situation directly prompted the missile launch,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean Studies at Seoul’s Dongguk University.
Kim said the launch also appeared intended to demonstrate North Korea’s increasingly advanced ballistic missile capabilities to the US, Japan and the broader international community.
TENSIONS RUN HIGH
The launch came as tensions along the inter-Korean border have risen sharply since two mine explosions in the Demilitarised Zone on September 21 wounded three South Korean soldiers.
Seoul says the mines were planted by North Korean forces and has called the incident an armistice violation and demanded an apology. Pyongyang has denied responsibility and accused Seoul of fabricating the incident.
Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, announced last week that Pyongyang would place loudspeakers capable of blasting anti-South Korean propaganda on standby across the border within days.
She had earlier said the broadcasts would operate along the entire border by the end of October, though analysts in Seoul questioned whether the devices would be activated.
“Rather than being a firm decision to begin broadcasts, North Korea seems to be saying it will have everything ready and watch how South Korea responds,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University in Seoul.
ARTILLERY BATTERIES
North Korea’s military has also deployed artillery batteries visible from across the border, which South Korea’s military said earlier on Thursday appeared largely intended for show.
“We assess that North Korea has several intentions, but the exposure of older weapon systems should be understood as being for show,” JCS spokesperson Jang Do-young told a briefing.
Defence Ministry spokesperson Chung Binna said placing artillery where it could be easily seen “makes little tactical or military sense”.
Reuters witnesses this week saw three North Korean armoured vehicles, identified by South Korean experts as self-propelled 122-mm howitzers, positioned near the border with their gun barrels pointed south.
North Korean soldiers were also seen erecting fences inside the DMZ.
Jang said North Korean activity near the Military Demarcation Line bisecting the DMZ was continuing, while South Korean forces were issuing warning broadcasts and firing warning shots during incursions.
Seoul was awaiting a response to its two proposals for military talks and had urged North Korea to return to dialogue, the Defence Ministry said.
North Korea last fired ballistic missiles on October 12. Pyongyang has conducted missile tests on more than 10 occasions this year.
In Seoul, Hayley Spencer finds a 24-hour city with exciting neighbourhoods, historic palaces, scenic hikes, a dynamic food and drink scene, and world-class shopping and wellness
In Seoul, Hayley Spencer finds a 24-hour city with exciting neighbourhoods, historic palaces, scenic hikes, a dynamic food and drink scene, and world-class shopping and wellness
Bereaved families have urged the publisher of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 to remove a clip from the game that shows a figure performing CPR and bodies lying in the street
Bereaved families in South Korea have demanded that the makers of Call of Duty remove harrowing footage of the deadly 2022 Seoul crowd crush from the latest instalment of the video game.
The clips, which are seconds-long, appear in the opening moments of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and are used to represent a scenario of civilian casualties during a fictional North Korean invasion.
Kylie Genter moved to South Korea after graduating from college in New York with no career plan.
Provided by Kylie Genter
Kylie Genter graduated from college with no career plan.
At 22, she moved to South Korea to teach English and became fascinated by female freedivers who harvest seafood.
Now, 37 and married, she spends around five days a week diving with women in their 70s and 80s.
This-as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kylie Genter, 36, a Haenyeo diver on Jeju Island, South Korea. It's been edited for length and clarity.
I'd been teaching English in South Korea for four years when I learned about the Haenyeo — female freedivers who harvest seafood without using modern equipment. I was interested. So, in the summer of 2018, I completed diving lessons with the hopes that maybe I could work with them one day.
A few years later, my Korean husband, a scuba diver, read on a diving group chat that a small village on the southwestern side of Jeju Island was recruiting new divers. Their youngest diver was 68 — I wanted to give it a try.
At first, I was rejected, but I got invited back a month later. I don't know what changed in that one month, but I guess they suddenly became open to it, and I went in for an interview.
In January 2024, I started as a diving intern, and after two years of training, I received my Haenyeo license in April.
Finding my footing in South Korea
I was born in upstate New York, the middle of three kids. I went to SUNY Oswego and graduated with a degree in communications.
After graduating in 2012, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I applied to a few graduate schools and jobs, but nothing worked out. I was stressed out and wanted to leave. I thought about going to Japan to teach English, as I'd studied Japanese for a year while in university.
Genter decided to move to South Korea and teach English.
Provided by Kylie Genter
Instead, I settled for South Korea, where some schools offered housing. I didn't know much about Korea at that time — I wasn't really a big K-pop fan before I came.
So, just four months after graduating, I moved to Jinju, a three-and-a-half-hour high-speed train ride from Seoul, to work as an English teacher. In the mornings, I'd do 20-minute lessons with kids. In the afternoon, I'd have speaking classes.
I continued teaching until August 2020. That same year, I got married and started a pension business with my husband, while still teaching English on the side.
To get her Haenyeo license, she had to dive 50 days within a year.
Provided by Kylie Genter
Building my life as a diver
To get my license, I had to dive 50 days within a year, sell 1.2 million South Korean won, or $884, worth of catch, and get a unanimous vote from the divers in the collective. It took me two years.
Language was an issue; despite having spent years in the country, I still couldn't always understand what was happening. My biggest strength is that I'm physically fitter than some of the divers — they are mostly in their 70s and 80s. So, I help out, like when they need someone to carry their nets full of catches or wash the dishes.
A lot of the work is physically demanding. If you don't feel good, you can't just push through. I can't dive if I have a cold or my sinuses are blocked because I can't equalize underwater. It's important to keep my body physically strong and healthy through working out.
The women she dives with are mostly in their 70s and 80s.
Provided by Kylie Genter
Committing to an unconventional job
I enjoy my life. Every day is different, and I do a lot of things besides diving. I run a pet hotel with my husband; sometimes I still tutor and give lectures. I work more hours, but I also have a lot more flexibility to pursue other things. I don't need permission for a break or a day off.
On normal days, I wake up and take the dogs for a walk. Then, I go diving depending on the weather. If it's not great, I only dive for two or three hours. A normal day of diving may take four or five. After that, I take the dogs for another walk.
In our village, we typically dive five days a week. We'll take our catch and accumulate it after one cycle. After that, we'll sell it to the regional fishing co-operative. They'll pay our president, and she then distributes the money.
Being a diver isn't a full-time job. A lot of what we earn depends on the catch. I make around $2,000 a year. Teaching is much more financially stable. But I love learning from women who have been carrying on this work for generations.
When I'm diving, nothing else matters. I just have to focus on diving and catching seafood. Nobody can call me. I don't have to look at my phone and waste time doomscrolling.
When I'm deep underwater, it can be meditative, especially on days when the ocean is calm, and there's plenty to catch. I see myself wedded to this village for the rest of my life.
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Recently, Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, warned that Pyongyang could take strong retaliatory measures if Seoul continues activities it considers provocative. To casual observers, this may appear to be just another routine exchange of verbal threats between the two Koreas. However, a closer examination of the current situation suggests […]
The messages from the world’s biggest supertanker owner often begin with pleasantries: “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Within minutes, the WhatsApps are the talk of the oil-tanker industry, a multibillion-dollar corner of the energy market that’s been plunged into chaos by the Iran war this year, and where word of mouth is the main way information spreads.
Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority said it would take “legal action” against tankers belonging to Sinokor, the world’s biggest oil tanker owner that has carried millions of barrels out of the Strait of Hormuz in recent weeks.
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North Korea has the fourth-largest number of active armed forces in the world.
Alain Nogues/Corbis via Getty Images
China, India, and the US have the largest active armed forces in the world.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies compiled data about the world's militaries.
The world's top armies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense each year.
The US military may lead the world in budget size and in the ambitions of its warfare technology, but there is one measure by which it is outsized by other nations.
Using data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies' 2026 Military Balance report, Business Insider ranked the top 25 countries by the size of their active armed forces during 2025 and listed their defense budgets that same year.
Active-duty force size is a tally of a country's uniformed troops: airmen, soldiers, sailors, special operators, and Marines.
Armies, in particular, depend on size to gain and occupy ground during armed conflicts.
Militaries can also be a tool of domestic repression. North Korea, for example, is one of the world's most repressive states, led by a dictator who has repeatedly threatened neighboring South Korea — and it also has one of the world's largest militaries.
The number of active-duty military personnel is far from the only factor that matters when comparing military power between countries, but it reflects latent power.
"Numbers have value, but there's a lot more to military capability," Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC-based foreign policy and national security think tank, told Business Insider.
IISS, a London-headquartered think tank, counts active armed forces, reservists, and paramilitaries as separate categories in its analysis, showing a fuller picture of each nation's manpower.
Some countries have significantly more reservists than others — Vietnam has the largest number in the world, estimated at 5 million — but the quality and longevity of their expertise can vary between systems.
"When you look at some countries' reserve numbers, you're often looking at people who haven't trained in 10 or 20 years," Cancian said. "It gives you a big number, but their military value is questionable."
Even when accounting for all of a military's manpower, personnel is only one of the factors that can qualify a nation's military strength, which also includes equipment and readiness.
There's also the role of technologies in global warfare, the size and sophistication of air forces and naval fleets, amphibious capabilities for landing assault forces, command-and-control systems, and nuclear forces, all of which shape military power.
Still, comparing global manpower offers insight into how countries prioritize military power.
See how the world's largest militaries stack up in terms of active troop numbers.
China and Russia opened new bridges to North Korea a month apart, a sign that the two countries are competing for the favor of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Yalu River bridge to China sat unused for more than a decade after its completion in 2014, until Russia began rewarding North Korea for […]
South Korea is rebelling against U.S. dominance. It is witnessing a formidable opposition movement against the United States’ historic control over the Asian country’s military forces.
There is also growing pressure on the South Korean government to refuse demands by U.S. President Donald Trump for Korean troops to deploy in the Persian Gulf.
A major driver of this surging opposition movement is the widely held concern that Washington is maneuvering South Korea to fight a war with China.
Political analyst KJ Noh explains that the Korean people perceive the United States as positioning their country as a proxy to fight an eventual war with China, in a similar way to how Ukraine is being used as a front line to provoke Russia.
“The U.S. empire is making South Korea into the next Ukraine,” says KJ Noh. “It is weaponizing South Korea.”
This is analogous to how Ukraine was groomed and weaponized since 2014 to serve as a proxy for the U.S. and NATO to confront Russia.
He points out that China has always been the main target for American imperial planners seeking to extend U.S. hegemony. Pentagon Generals have openly spoken about going to war with China since 2025. Several strategic documents cite the imperative of confronting China for the U.S. to pursue its ambitions of global dominance.
Recently, the American commander in South Korea, General Xavier Brunson, referred to the country as “a dagger pointed at China” and “an unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier.” Such brazen comments have sparked even broader opposition.
KJ Noh contends that U.S. strategists assumed defeating Russia and Iran would be relatively easy, paving the way for the main target: China. However, the protracted war in Ukraine and Trump’s debacle in the Persian Gulf have delayed the war plan against China.
Nevertheless, Korean people understand that when the U.S. empire gets around to attacking China, their country will be deployed as Uncle Sam’s proxy.
Historically, for the past 76 years, Washington has exerted full control over the South Korean military. This was enabled by the U.S. using fascist collaborators from the Second World War to control South Korea – a legacy that persists among the deep state in South Korea.
KJ Noh surveys a history of genocidal violence perpetrated by the U.S. empire in South Korea to wipe out political opposition movements. The scale of mass murder and mass graves is shocking and hardly known in the West.
Despite the brutal oppression over many decades, there is still a defiant consciousness among Koreans who refuse to be vassals of the U.S.
Koreans do not want to do Uncle Sam’s dirty work any longer, and they do not want their country to be dragooned into a proxy war against their Asian neighbor, China, with which much of the Korean economy has beneficial relations.
This is why Koreans are demanding that the United States finally hand over Operational Control of the country’s military. President Lee Jae-myung reflects the popular will by calling on Washington to comply. It is also why the Korean people and government are refusing Trump’s peevish calls for deployment in the Persian Gulf. Given the history of loyal Korean service in U.S. wars, this latest defiance is a watershed in relations.
Koreans do not want to do Uncle Sam’s dirty work any longer, and they do not want their country to be dragooned into a proxy war against their Asian neighbor, China.
South Korea is rebelling against U.S. dominance. It is witnessing a formidable opposition movement against the United States’ historic control over the Asian country’s military forces.
There is also growing pressure on the South Korean government to refuse demands by U.S. President Donald Trump for Korean troops to deploy in the Persian Gulf.
A major driver of this surging opposition movement is the widely held concern that Washington is maneuvering South Korea to fight a war with China.
Political analyst KJ Noh explains that the Korean people perceive the United States as positioning their country as a proxy to fight an eventual war with China, in a similar way to how Ukraine is being used as a front line to provoke Russia.
“The U.S. empire is making South Korea into the next Ukraine,” says KJ Noh. “It is weaponizing South Korea.”
This is analogous to how Ukraine was groomed and weaponized since 2014 to serve as a proxy for the U.S. and NATO to confront Russia.
He points out that China has always been the main target for American imperial planners seeking to extend U.S. hegemony. Pentagon Generals have openly spoken about going to war with China since 2025. Several strategic documents cite the imperative of confronting China for the U.S. to pursue its ambitions of global dominance.
Recently, the American commander in South Korea, General Xavier Brunson, referred to the country as “a dagger pointed at China” and “an unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier.” Such brazen comments have sparked even broader opposition.
KJ Noh contends that U.S. strategists assumed defeating Russia and Iran would be relatively easy, paving the way for the main target: China. However, the protracted war in Ukraine and Trump’s debacle in the Persian Gulf have delayed the war plan against China.
Nevertheless, Korean people understand that when the U.S. empire gets around to attacking China, their country will be deployed as Uncle Sam’s proxy.
Historically, for the past 76 years, Washington has exerted full control over the South Korean military. This was enabled by the U.S. using fascist collaborators from the Second World War to control South Korea – a legacy that persists among the deep state in South Korea.
KJ Noh surveys a history of genocidal violence perpetrated by the U.S. empire in South Korea to wipe out political opposition movements. The scale of mass murder and mass graves is shocking and hardly known in the West.
Despite the brutal oppression over many decades, there is still a defiant consciousness among Koreans who refuse to be vassals of the U.S.
Koreans do not want to do Uncle Sam’s dirty work any longer, and they do not want their country to be dragooned into a proxy war against their Asian neighbor, China, with which much of the Korean economy has beneficial relations.
This is why Koreans are demanding that the United States finally hand over Operational Control of the country’s military. President Lee Jae-myung reflects the popular will by calling on Washington to comply. It is also why the Korean people and government are refusing Trump’s peevish calls for deployment in the Persian Gulf. Given the history of loyal Korean service in U.S. wars, this latest defiance is a watershed in relations.
Kim's visit to China is his latest move in an increasingly assertive foreign policy as he seeks to align Pyongyang with Beijing and Moscow in a united front against the United States under what he portrays as a "new Cold War." It's his first visit in a year.
A photograph provided by North Korean state media showing the leader, Kim Jong-un, and his daughter, Kim Ju-ae, overseeing the firing of an intermediate-range missile from the country’s east coast during a drill in October.
The topic of a possible Trump-Kim Jong Un summit is being actively hyped by political opponents and the media in order to create informational commotion. Considering the current geopolitical situation, real negotiations are practically impossible due to the lack of leverage, a common agenda, and mutual benefit. Who Is Pushing For the Summit and Why? […]
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