In April 2008, I celebrated my birthday in the village of Diyalivtsi, 1 where I had been living since October 2007, while carrying out research on informal economic practices in the Ukrainian–Romanian borderlands. My host, Rodika, and I had spent some time preparing food and drink for visitors and the first to arrive were our good friends and neighbours Luchika and her daughter Zhenia. Luchika and her son-inlaw Dima were both cross-border small traders of cigarettes to Romania, and until the birth of her son, Zhenia had also been involved in the trade. While we waited for others to arrive, Luchika entertained us all with stories about the Romanian border guards and customs officials from the nearby road crossing. One of the guards had been given the nickname King Kong, due to his size, and Luchika had us all laughing with her impressions of him asking how many cartons of cigarettes she had and sending her back to ‘try again’. This was not the first time I had heard such stories since I had moved to Diyalivtsi. In fact, the trading of cigarettes and other products to Romania was often present in village life; in conversations over the fence with neighbours, in performances for St Andrew’s feast day at the village school and during drinks and birthday celebrations in the village sauna. The significance of cross-border small trade in the village was not limited to its role in sustaining and reproducing local households, 2 but lay also in the way in which Diyalivtsyany3 infused discourses surrounding the trade with meaning and its influence on their changing perspectives of the past.

Nonetheless, whilst we laughed along with Luchika, different emotions often emerged when discussing border crossings in private. In fact, on another occasion Zhenia came to visit Rodika in tears after an argument with her husband, Dima.‘Dima has gone back to his mother again. We had an argument. She said that we are a poor family and if he had married someone else he wouldn’t have to cross the border. She says we are below them… their family don’t do this.’The implication of the trade as being beneath Dima’s family, who had returned to the village after successful periods of migrant labour in Spain, reflected broader feelings of cross-border small trading as bringing shame upon a household. The specific dimensions of how