The introduction contextualizes the rise of Korean Chinese borderland dreams in Yanbian, China, through “winds” of migration—the Market Wind, the North Korean Wind, the Soviet Wind, and the (South) Korean Wind—unique local periodizations of recent history, following the economic reforms and opening up of its economy that China initiated in the 1980s. In particular, the introduction maps how the wave of Korean Chinese migration to South Korea starting in the 1990s was driven by the new political economy: neoliberal, democratic South Korea and privatized, self-sufficiency-requiring China. Three theoretical lenses—bodies, money, and time—are used to develop an ethnographic analysis of the transnational lives of Korean Chinese workers who move across multiple borderlands and have become a transnational ethnic working class.