In Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.

"“Offering ethnographically rich insights into labor migration between China and South Korea from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, June Hee Kwon tracks ethnic and kin affinities and tensions amid changing political and global economic conditions, providing nuanced descriptions and analysis of the distinct temporal-spatial experiences of the Korean Chinese migrants entangled in transnational flows of labor, money, and consumption. Borderland Dreams makes an important contribution to scholarship on translocal and transnational migration, political economy, ethnicity, and China and East Asia.”" - Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

"“Borderland Dreams tells a powerful, complex, and ethnographically driven story about capitalist modernity in China, ethnicity, borders and labor migration, remittance economies, and the temporalities of global capitalism. Drawing on highly original and important fieldwork, June Hee Kwon depicts the dreams, aspirations, and frustrations of her interlocutors through lively and engaging prose.”" - Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ