This article presents an ethnographic historiography of the beginning of postsocialist reforms between the 1980s and the 1990s in the Yanbian Korean-Chinese autonomous prefecture (hereafter Yanbian) in China. It focuses on how they interpreted the process through which they, once socialist danwei workers, were divided into two social classes: the owners of getihu (small private businesses) and their sales employees (the fuwuyuan). Depending on when and how they came to terms with the end of danwei employment and began to earn money in the market economy, they had experienced and conceptualized Yanbian differently in terms of the concepts of time and space. This article, therefore, analyzes the cultural meanings of this heterogeneity with respect to their temporal and spatial experiences in postsocialist Yanbian. More importantly, this article illustrates how the early adopters of the economic reforms and the faithful socialist workers in danwei held different cultural values and morals with respect to their devotion to either the new market system or the existing state-run planned economy, respectively. The analysis provided here concerning this division of the Korean-Chinese workers in the early postsocialist period will shed light on how they defined who the good Chinese citize...