Wen-Chin Chang's Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma provides a rich personal history of Yunnanese Chinese migrants in South-East and East Asia. The study ranges from the era of socialism to present-day Burma. Based on a personal narrative approach, Wen-Chin Chang reveals unwritten personal histories through transborder experiences of migrants. This book offers an alternative to the official history of the nation state by emphasizing the migrants' life-world. She describes that “an essential task of this ethnography is to enliven informants' narrative power and unpack the invested meanings (rather than factual accuracy) embedded in their narratives” (p. 11). This detailed study reminds us to keep questioning the rigid boundaries we assume between the centre and periphery, legality and illegality, and autochthons and allochthons. The book is primarily based on the life stories of eighteen informants. The first part of the book shows the history of the migration of the Yunnanese people, while the second part argues for the existence of transnational trade by the migrants.

Part One spans four chapters, and under the broad theme of migration history, introduces life stories of eight informants and the process of their migration in depth. In Chapters 1 and 2, the author focuses on one informant each, which helps us to understand the situation from the 1960s to the 2000s in detail. In Chapter 3, she focuses on stories of intergenerational dynamics of a father and a son to explore shared social values that enhance social connections. In Chapter 4, she analyses the Islamic transnationalism of Yunnanese Muslims, as in the case of religious specialists from Burma who completed their studies in the Middle East and were recruited to work in Taiwan.

Part Two, on transnational trade, consists of three chapters. Chapter 5 deals with the individual stories of four traders in the era of the Burmese Socialists Programme Party. These stories provide us a significant understanding of people who experienced the politics of the borderlands. Regardless of the isolation of the Burmese socialist regime from the international arena, Yunnanese traders found their own way to reach out to the outside world. From a geographical standpoint, a significant majority of the Yunnanese migrants were located on the peripheral frontier of Burma and Thailand. Yet, as Chang argues, in terms of economics, the migrants transformed the region into a centre for transnational trade from where smuggled goods were further distributed to widespread locations (p. 174). It is only by these means of oral histories, records of migrants' lives, that the so-called national history has been relativized. Chapter 6, “Transcending Gender Geographies: Yunnanese Women Traders”, is the unique chapter in this book. This is because women's lives are generally overlooked and thus are less visible. Nevertheless, Chang shows that women have played an essential role in the maintenance of their families by participating in different types of economic activity, including long-distance trade. Further, the anecdotes invalidate the conventional restraint on the movement of women. Chapter 7 focuses on two jade traders. Thus, the book focuses on specific personal experiences of Yunnanese migrants, through narratives that examine dynamism and sociocultural implications of migrants along the borderlands.

However, Chang's ethnography fails to look beyond the framework of specific case studies. Ethnographies with thick description possess holism, which encompass both the macro and micro, and the local and global context of the field. A thick ethnography goes beyond the detail of case studies, and offers the possibility of composing a theory. The book does not construct any original theory to understand the phenomenon of Yunnanese migrants across borders and periods of time. It is regrettable that each narrative is explained within the framework of previous studies, such as those by Michiel Baud, Willem van Schendel, Homi Bhabha, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tising. For example, one of the conclusions of the book is that “borderlands are not passive geographical margins but active sites intertwined with different forces, constantly subject to tensions, struggles, and ongoing negotiation” (p. 150). This commonplace conclusion does not do justice to the descriptive stories that could have been used to challenge existing theories. Thus the remarkable case studies are let down by a commonplace conclusion, and life histories fail to provide a critical view on previous studies.

Throughout the book, one gets the impression of reading the author's field notes rather than an ethnography. The diary entry-style writing aids us in imagining the scene and the atmosphere of the field. Her vivid description divulges the emotions of informants as well as of the author. However, it can be said that it illustrates the perspective of the author and not of the migrants. In this self-reflective style of experimental ethnography, the author expressively articulates her interactions with informants, trying to indicate the process and situation in which she obtained the narrative of informants. She adds herself into the story as one of the cast, honestly conveying her feelings into the sentences of her ethnography. In a sense, it can be said that this book is written in collaboration with the informants. Her sincere attitude towards all people in the field is uniformly visible. Even the personal feelings of the author, which are generally omitted in the process of writing an academic book, appear frequently in this work. It is difficult to ascertain her sincerity towards the field, since it seems that the author has written everything she saw, heard, felt, and knew. For instance, one can ask if it is necessary to record the process of making an appointment. One can further ask how the author's feeling contributes to her understanding of the experiences of Yunnanese Chinese migrants. Finally, one can ask if the title of the book, Beyond Borders, also stands for a breach of boundary between the anthropologist and the informants.

The study is a retrospective one based on the narration of various informants. Though Chang recognizes that all stories are unfinished and incomplete, the process and experiences reveal the migrants' condition, what James Clifford calls the roots and routes. On the other hand, this approach overlooks choice and ignores the crossroads that migrants have passed. For this reason, it is necessary to locate each story in its macro-historical context. The book does not include substantial discussion on how these life stories challenge the standardized regional history. While anthropologists might think that vivid personal narratives are exciting to read, they often imply a lack of rigour for historians. For instance, the author quotes information from Wikipedia. She indiscriminately tries to contextualize an individual informant's story into larger historical backgrounds without considering the representativeness of the case study. One cannot judge why each case is important for the point at hand. Therefore, the author should have relativized not only “nation” and “border”, but also those of the case studies themselves.

The significance of the book is in having recorded the voices of the voiceless. It successfully avoids analysing case studies through the lens of ethnicity theories. During the civil war period in Burma, most ethnic groups were divided politically as well as into sociocultural domains. In this historically significant time, people made flexible partnerships, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. One would assume that this is common along the border area and it is a difficult task to write extensively about things that are taken for granted. All in all, this individual-centred ethnography, backed by its narrative power, provides a rich comprehension of people's lives across borders.