June Hee Kwon

My first book, Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers, is a borderland ethnography on the re/interpretation of the “Korean dream” that has dominated the ethnic borderland of Yanbian, the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture, since the early 1990s. The book is built on more than ten years of multi-sited field research conducted mainly in Seoul, South Korea, and Yanbian, China. It examines the remittance-driven material reality of the transnational labor migration shaped by the “Korean Wind”—the popular name for the urge among Korean Chinese for migration between China and South Korea. Using bodies, money, and time as key ethnographic lenses onto the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better,” this book analyzes the political economy of migration that has formed Korean Chinese workers into a transnational ethnic working class. I argue that the Korean dream represents not only a collective effort for a better life in the context of a rapidly privatizing China but also a reflection of the fluctuating political economy that emerged from the intersection between post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. This book captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese migrants caught between the waxing of the Chinese dream and the waning of the Korean dream—or, as I call them, borderland dreams.

As another borderlad studies, my next book project, Tangerine Island: The Social Life of Fruit Farming in Jeju Korea, examines the social history of tangerine trees imported from Japan(sent by diasporic Koreans in Japan) to Jeju Island from the 1960s to the 1980s. The tangerine trees have played a crucial role in rapidly increasing the farmers’ incomes and reshaping the ecology on Jeju, an exemplary tourist destination with a culture, history, and ecology distinct from the rest of Korea. By situating Jeju in the context of East Asian post-colonial / Cold War development on the basis of an archival and ethnographic study in Jeju, Korea, and Osaka, Japan, I look into the significance of tangerine trees 1) as gifts; 2) as commodities; and 3) as state projects. Drawing on transnational migration studies, political ecology, and post-colonial and Cold War histories, this project revisits the gift-commodity relationship and the governance of nature through the lens of tangerine trees, highlighting how Jeju has been controlled by and has controlled nature as a means of future-making.