Road Trip at the Borderland - Aube Rey Lescure

A road trip along the North Korean border, with a Chinese father and his estranged daughter, plastic bags of food, and an 81-year-old grandmother who refuses to wear a seat belt.

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.

Read more: Longreads