“It was worse than an earthquake,” says 21-year-old Greek man who survived the fatal collision of the two high speed trains in Spain. “The impact caught us while we were standing; we were traveling at 170 kilometers per hour, and we all fell onto one another,” Marios recalled speaking to Mega TV Live News magazine. […]
In our Divorce Diaries series, we speak to people about their experience of marriage and divorce. This week, a man in his 50s with two children talks about separation from his perspective
Even though we live so close to each other, we have boundaries and our own separate lives.
In 2024, my husband and I began building our own house on the same property as my parents, siblings, and sister-in-law, creating a "family compound." In total, there are two separate houses, nine family members, and three adorable golden retrievers on the property.
Our family has always spent a lot of time together, but before moving into our new home in April, I don't think I truly understood what day-to-day life would be like.
Here are the biggest surprises I've encountered so far.
My family and I still have our own separate lives.
Taylor Bunting
Although my husband, daughter, and I live next door to the rest of my family, we still have our own houses, routines, and lives. Some days, when we all happen to be on different pages, we don't see each other at all.
I think this balance is a huge part of what makes our setup successful. No one feels as though they are on top of each other, and my husband and I can simply take our daughter to our house, close the door, and be our own little family.
Privacy and boundaries are still possible, even when living so close together.
Taylor Bunting
For us, one of the keys to making our living arrangement successful is respect for personal space and boundaries.
For example, my younger siblings don't come over to my house after about 8:00 p.m. because they know my daughter is asleep and my husband and I are likely settling in for the night. This isn't something we ever had to ask them to do, they just respect our privacy and nightly routine.
The same goes for my parents. They text my husband and me before popping over to visit and always avoid walking into our house unannounced.
A lot of people don't seem to understand multigenerational living.
Taylor Bunting
Since sharing our family compound on social media, I was taken aback by how many people assumed that our family was part of a religious group or separate "community," rather than our setup being an example of multigenerational living.
I knew that "family compounds" aren't incredibly common nowadays, at least in the United States, but I definitely didn't think they were so widely misunderstood.
People appear to confuse our setup with communal living, rather than our family simply living as neighbors next to each other.
Casual get-togethers and dinners happen spontaneously.
Taylor Bunting
I've been pleasantly surprised by how much easier casual get-togethers, dinners, and hangouts are.
I can just pop over to my parents' house and then "head home" whenever I want to. I don't need a reason to leave or an excuse to use if I'm just not feeling social.
We also don't typically find ourselves planning get-togethers; they just kind of happen. I can wake up on a Saturday morning with no plans, and within an hour, everyone is hanging out by the pool, playing yard games, and cooking food together.
Having my family around has really improved my mental health.
Taylor Bunting
As a stay-at-home mom, having my siblings and parents around throughout the week makes day-to-day life with a toddler so much more enjoyable.
Our setup gives me other adults to interact with, another set of hands when I need them, and simply remedies any of the aspects of motherhood that can otherwise feel lonely.
It's also a game changer for me to have my own mom as a resource. Rather than turning to Google, I can walk across the driveway and pick my mom's brain for parenting advice as a first-time mom.
My marriage has actually gotten even stronger since living here.
Taylor Bunting
One of the many perks that I did not anticipate was how much the support of a village would benefit my relationship with my husband.
With other people around to lend a hand with our daughter, direct access to girl time with my mom and sister, and my husband having the ability to go watch a football game with my dad or play basketball with my brothers, we have easier access to hobbies and self-care outlets as parents. This leaves more quality time for us as a couple.
Our setup felt 'normal' pretty quickly.
Taylor Bunting
It's taken me by surprise how after only living in our home for six months, this setup already feels so natural and "normal." I can't imagine going back to living even 15 minutes down the road from our family.
Sometimes it takes people asking questions or sharing their opinion on our living arrangements to remind me that our setup is a whole lot less common than I think.
When I think back to my expectations surrounding a 'family compound' prior to moving into our home, I had only really envisioned the more overarching concepts such as family dinners, lots of quality time and no longer having to drive to visit each other.
However, I didn't realize how many of the small details would make such a positive impact on our day-to-day lives.
Amid a growing trend of parent-child estrangement, experts say recognizing the early warning signs may help families address problems before they escalate into a no-contact situation.
Nearly four in 10 Americans are currently estranged from at least one close family member, according to a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 U.S. adults. That includes 24% who reported estrangement from a sibling, 16% from a parent and 10% from a child.
While estrangement can sometimes seem sudden, experts say subtle changes may signal that a family relationship is beginning to unravel.
Mary McLaughlin, a licensed couples and family therapist in Vienna, Virginia, said early signs may include an adult child becoming less willing to share details of their life directly with a parent.
"You might find out about the trip, the new relationship or a promotion at work at the same time everyone else does," she told Fox News Digital.
The parent may still be in contact with the adult child, McLaughlin said, but the child no longer chooses to share parts of their life directly.
Other potential warning signs may include skipping family holidays, birthdays or weddings; leaving texts and calls unanswered; and reducing communication to brief or sporadic exchanges, according to the expert.
The distance may become so noticeable that siblings, grandparents or other relatives comment that they have not seen or heard from the adult child in a long time.
A child who once readily joined family photos but begins stepping out of them may also be signaling that they are starting to see themselves as separate from the family, McLaughlin said.
Blythe Landry, a Pennsylvania-based therapist and founder of Blythe Landry Coaching, said other early signs may include a child becoming involved with a new social group that encourages estrangement over difficult conversations, or "beginning to rewrite history in a way that seems more damaging than what might have happened."
The adult child may also become less willing to let a parent spend time with their grandchildren.
The most telling sign may be a noticeable shift in the tone of the relationship, Landry said.
"You know your child, and you know when the energy has shifted in a direction that seems dramatically harsher than in previous interactions."
The shift to independence
Laura Wellington, a Connecticut mother who has been estranged from her adult daughter since 2024, said it can be challenging to distinguish early signs of estrangement from typical moves toward independence.
"It’s confusing to the parent because, a lot of times, they look like the general signs of a teenager moving into the young-adult zone — just pulling away and going off and establishing their lives," she told Fox News Digital.
"That’s what I think confuses many parents, because they want to give them the space to start pulling away and showing signs of their own individuality and carving their path."
"They don’t want to fight every battle, because if they fight every battle, then communication breaks down. So they try to pick and choose."
Loss of respect
One warning sign, according to Wellington, is if the child has an "I know everything, you know nothing" mindset.
"What's happening in our society today is … a lot of ‘I know everything, you know nothing’ toward the parent," she said. "There's no respect for what the parents experience. There's no tolerance for them speaking up and saying, ‘No, this is not what you should be doing.’"
In some cases, the child may begin treating the parent as a subordinate, according to Wellington.
Some parents begin to notice a shift when their adult children start treating them with disrespect, pushing back on their opinions and positioning themselves as the authority in the relationship, she said.
"They become the authority; they flip it. Anytime you say something, you’ll see them bark at the parent and push back on the parent. They really have no respect for the parent."
Different worldviews
Wellington also pointed to major differences in political, religious or lifestyle beliefs as a possible source of growing distance between parents and adult children.
She suggested that some young people who become estranged are "more liberal in thinking," while acknowledging that the dynamic can also work in the opposite direction when a parent holds especially strong ideological views.
"There is extremism sometimes where the parent is extremely something, and then the child … goes the other way," she said.
Richard Blake, Ph.D., a Texas-based psychology researcher who focuses on anxiety and family estrangement, said an adult child’s unwillingness to consider differing views may signal trouble.
He suggested that personality may play a role, with more argumentative adult children who are less willing to consider differing views potentially more prone to family estrangement.
Another possible warning sign, according to Blake, is if the adult child has begun cutting off other people. He said parents should take note if an adult child has repeatedly stopped speaking to relatives or openly boasts about ending relationships.
"Chances are, they're going to cut off someone else, and it may be the parent," he said. "If you haven’t been cut off yet, you may be in the firing line there."
Communication breakdown
Ongoing communication problems may be an early warning sign, Blake said, particularly when an adult child feels that a parent refuses to listen or acknowledge the child’s point of view.
"They may say, 'My parents just don’t listen. I cannot get through to them. It’s like talking to a brick wall.'"
Parents who consistently dismiss their children’s concerns should not be surprised when conflict develops, he said.
"If you don’t listen to your child, then don’t be surprised if you have conflict with them."
Blake recommends listening actively, avoiding interruptions, repeating back what the other person has said and asking a simple follow-up question: "First, you say, 'Is there more?'"
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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.
Marijuana is becoming the new alcohol — or worse. And children are paying the price.
Not only is cannabis use skyrocketing in this country, with close to 70 million users every year, but parents are increasingly subjecting their children to wafting, intoxicating smoke.
A new study from the University of California San Diego, a school based in a state with a big marijuana problem, shows that nationwide approximately 6 million children are living with a parent who uses cannabis most days.
As I pointed out on "The Ingraham Angle" recently (both host Laura Ingraham and I are highly concerned about the impact of chronic marijuana use), children are twice as likely to use cannabis themselves if they live in a household where a parent is a regular user, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
Cannabis use has more than doubled in the adult population over the past two decades (it’s now over 8%), according to data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Cannabis is highly addictive, and the THC content has increased greatly in all its forms, making it more and more dangerous. Edibles now typically contain up to 10 mg THC per serving, and concentrates and vape cartridges contain 50% to 95% THC (the psychoactive chemical in cannabis). The buds and flowers used for joints, vapes, edibles and concentrates are now 15 to 25% THC — a few decades ago, the amount was just 1 to 2%.
Children are the victims here, and the impact starts as early as the womb. Fetal exposure leads to nearly twice the risk of premature birth and a two-and-a-half-times-greater risk of being born underweight or needing immediate medical intervention in the Neonatal ICU. Yet national data shows that over 5% of pregnant women have used marijuana products over the past month, and the number is climbing.
Plus, if a child is exposed to marijuana in the womb, research shows that there is a 2.5 times greater risk of THC product use during the child’s early teen years.
A landmark study from Harvard found that a mother’s cannabis use during a child’s first 12 years of life is linked to the child beginning to use marijuana by the age of 16.
Regular marijuana use is not just addictive and contagious; it also directly impacts parenting. Parents who are regular users are more prone to emotional outbursts, car accidents, poor parenting, and mental health disorders.
Regular cannabis use can also cause emotional dysregulation, mood swings, impaired judgment and unexpected outbursts of anger or irritability. Research shows that anxiety in parents leads directly to anxiety in children.
Where do we go from here? Look to our long history with alcohol. Strategies developed and used over generations for dealing with another highly addictive substance, alcohol, can help parents develop the tools they need to help themselves and their children.
In my new book, "The Angels Among Us," I share the story of how Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson is inspired by God’s presence, which comes to him in a "blinding glare of white light." After previously living with debilitating alcoholism, Wilson discovers that sobriety becomes its own reward as he helps other alcoholics find a path to recovery. He finds that his method works best when he is sharing mutual experiences rather than preaching to other addicts.
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