The Rising Korean Dream

This chapter shows how Korean Chinese living in Yanbian, China—an ethnic borderland—have been gradually integrated into national and transnational economies. It historicizes the “Korean Wind” (the wave of migration to South Korea starting in the 1990s) as an epochal occurrence happening at the intersection of post–Cold War and post-socialist transformations, a circumstance that enabled Korean Chinese to claim their long-forgotten kinship with the forbidden homeland of South Korea. By highlighting the contradictory desires Korean Chinese have developed in relation to Yanbian as an un/homely homeland—desiring both to leave Yanbian and to remain there—this chapter stages Yanbian as an ethnic borderland and Korean Chinese ethnicity as mobile.