Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma

Book Review Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma. By Wen-Chin Chang. Ithaca and London: Wen-Chin Chang, 2014. xv, 278 pages. $26.95 paperback. HIU LING CHAN Leiden University Institute for Area Studies Borderland diaspora is a popular topic in the social sciences, although borders are sometimes perceived as problematic, complicated phenomena related to the organization of society. This book offers a different take on borders. Using a lifestory and self-reflective approach, WenChin Chang engages readers with the diverse experiences of Yunnanese Chinese migrants in Burma, Thailand, Taiwan, and other places. The Yunnanese Chinese, from the province of Yunnan in southwestern China, have strong historic roots of migrating to and settling in Burma, from which they also often move to other places, such as Thailand. The Yunnanese population is composed of both Han Chinese and Muslims. Different forms of Yunnanese diasporas, including military, commerce, labor, and refugee flows, have been established in neighboring countries since as early as the fourteenth century, when the Yunnan province began to see an influx of Han Chinese. Situating contemporary Yunnanese Chinese migrants in a transborder context, this book addresses how migrants orient themselves in different host societies and how their biographies interplay with regional geopolitics. Building on 36 months of multisited fieldwork between 1994 and 2010, Chang looks beyond governmental institutions to shed light on the agency of diasporic Yunnanese. Her book is one of the very few ethnographies to investigate the migration history of and transborder trading among Yunnanese migrants. It has two sections and a total of seven chapters, plus fieldwork notes, an introduction, and an epilogue. Section 1 discusses the migration history of Yunnanese migrants to Burma, with section 2 addressing their transnational trading experiences. This book provides significant insights into the diversity of Yunnanese Chinese migrants through first-person narratives of soldiers, refugees, students, and caravan muleteers, as well as cross-border smugglers and traders. Their stories reveal how these migrants understand their life trajectories and how they situate these trajectories within different contexts. The Yunnanese migration histories told here do not belong to the elites or the privileged of the past. Instead, Chang argues, these histories are made by “many different kinds of people” (17) at different stages of their lives and from different generations. The narratives of these migrants are also infused with a wide range of emotions and tensions that bring their personal stories to life and contribute to our understanding of migrants’ inner selves and multifaceted experiences. The trading experience in a transborder context is a highlight of this book, as the mobility and trading practices pursued by Yunnanese migrants transcend the political borders of China, Burma, and Thailand. The author argues that their economic activities are not defined by borders but, instead, by their transnational connectivity. Migrant traders constantly expand their networks and interact with various political powers as a way to endure the marginality they otherwise experience. In contrast to conventional images of migrants who primarily or exclusively develop bonds with co-ethnics, the Yunnanese migrants establish both in- and out-group connections. To secure economic gains, these migrants must be flexible and rely on institutional organizations that develop guanxi (connections) with outsiders. In spite of their ethnic and religious differences, traders as a group observe their own rules, providing further © 2016 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/imre.12297 e60 IMR Volume 50 Number 4 (Winter 2016):e60–e61 BOOK R EVIEW evidence that migrants will ignore borders and ethnicity when it suits them. That said, the author’s arguments could have benefited from greater conceptual attention to the situations in which traders compete or, alternatively collaborate, with other groups. Such a question offers a glimpse into what future studies could address. To this reviewer, the author’s discussion of gendered economies is a notable feature of this book. Women are sometimes portrayed as a helpless, passive, and vulnerable group in migration studies. Chang challenges this stereotype by showing how migrant Yunnanese women make a living in the face of external constraints. However, it is interesting that the economic pursuit of these migrant women is largely for the sake of families, not for themselves. For Yunnanese women, Chang notes, the idea of sacrificial motherhood — devotion to natal families before marriage and new families after marriage — circulates widely, and the family’s well-being remains the top concern. Thus, a shift in the economic structure, and women’s central economic role in these e61 trading networks, does not result in a reconfiguration of gender relations. With improvements in education, such as the case of graduate student Ae Maew discussed in chapter 2, future research should attend to the gendered dynamics of migrant entrepreneurship across borders and across generations. Undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from this text. Chang shows how ethnographers build rapport with informants, let them speak for themselves, and preserve the “thicknesses” of their stories using first-person narratives. Her book is highly reflexive in the sense that she always questions the role of the researcher and her neutrality in ethnography. The book’s limitation, however, is its failure to reflect on the uniqueness of Yunnanese migrants in a cross-border context. It is also unclear how the author chose the narrators she highlights and why their stories are significant in relation to or representative of their wider cultural groups. Despite these issues, this book is an eyeopening addition to the literature on borderland diasporas in Southeast Asia.