Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke University Press, 2023), examines how Korean Chinese workers' collective aspiration for the "Korean Dream" emerged at the intersection of post-socialist China and post-Cold War South Korea. This book argues that this aspiration was not merely an individual desire for upward mobility, but a historically situated project that reconfigured class, ethnicity, and gender across shifting national and ideological terrain. Using bodies, money, and time as analytical lenses, Borderland Dreams reveals how Korean diasporic lives are enacted, negotiated, and contested across competing national imaginaries - the fading promise of the Korean Dream and the emergent pull of the China Dream - within uneven horizon of mobilities.
June Hee Kwon is Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of Borderland Dream: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke University Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Francis H. K. Hsu Book Award from the Society for East Asian Anthropology. She is currently developing a new book project, Frontier Fruits: The Social Power of Citrus Trees in Jeju, Korea, which examines how the transnational mobilities of citrus trees—particularly between Jeju and Japan—have reorganized ecologies, economies, and farmers' aspirations within Cold War political economy and geopolitics.
This is part of the "Koreans in the World" project hosted by UCLA's Center for Korean Studies. This event is supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS Award Number: AKS-2023-SRI-2200001) as part of its Strategic Research Institute Program for Korean Studies.