"A poetic and potent gentle critique of globalization discourse that rescue human agency and subjectivity from the etatization of the borderlands between Vietnam and China. Chan provides a thick description of daily life with ethnographic data from entrepreneurs, tourists, sex workers, and spouse-seekers infused with jokes, conservations, and the keen insights of a cultural anthropologist. Chan’s bottom-up analysis of life at the Vietnam-China borderland reveals how subjects on either side maneuver the vexing history—visceral and real—between Vietnam and China." - Dr. Jonathan H. X. Lee, San Francisco State University"In this concise, powerful and richly documented study, highlighted with relevant literature references, Chan constantly challenges the general approach of Sino-Vietnamese relationships as conflicting and unbalanced."Caroline Grillot, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany)Asian Journal of Social Science 43 (2015) 844-846