Military, Gender, and Trade: The Story of Auntie Duan of the Northern Thai Borderlands

This paper explores Auntie Duan’s life story, a story that mirrors remarkable female Yunnanese Chinese migrants’ economic agency in the face of numerous vicissitudes caused by contextual and personal tragedies. Auntie Duan (born in 1938) and her family fled from Yunnan to Burma in 1950 after the Chinese Communists took over China. Being a woman, a refugee, and a widow moving repeatedly among borderlands, she led a life characterized by a multiplicity of peripheral positionings. In order to survive and raise her children, she participated in different economic activities, most saliently as a borderland trader. By focusing on her life story based on her oral narratives, the author attempts to illustrate her steps of economic initiation in combating a range of adversities. Furthermore, with a comparison to Anna Tsing’s Meratus gendered politics, the author looks into embedded meanings in gender asymmetry among migrant Yunnanese communities.