For well-educated, salaried women in Sambas, the principal significance of the territorial border is as a marker of disadvantage and peripherality; it does not induce them to cross the border, unlike the farming and workingclass women described in the previous chapter. The term ‘borderscope of marginality’ employed in this and the next chapter encapsulates the feelings that educated, salaried Sambas Malay women attach to living and working in Sambas and, importantly, inform their decision-making with regard to their work. The sentiment of marginality is only partly due to the socioeconomic hardship that is familiar to many in Sambas. It is also informed by their education- and work-related mobility beyond Sambas. Their exposure to other parts of Indonesia consolidates an impression of Sambas as ‘lacking’ in precisely the fields in which they are most embedded. Consequently, these women's desire to transcend the borders of marginality for themselves and other Sambas Malays orients them towards pathways such as university, vocational and professional training, and salaried forms of employment. A further feature of educated women's borderscope of marginality is their ambivalence towards the international border with Sarawak. On the one hand, they have internalised the popular images of borderlands as poor and lawless sites of smuggling and trafficking (see also, Singh, 2017, p. 121). On the other, they sometimes view the border with Sarawak as an economic opportunity, especially as a point of access to Malaysian consumers and tourists.

This ambivalence is at play in the comments of the public sector-employed women discussed in this chapter. While the opportunity to revitalise local handicrafts and tourism by selling goods and tourist destinations to Sarawak is viewed positively, the border is also seen as threatening Sambas’ socioeconomic future by depriving Sambas of workers. There are explicitly temporal dimensions to these oscillating border imaginaries as memories and past associations of the territorial border and its crossing collide with current hopes and fears (see also, Hurd, Donnan, and Leutloff-Grandits, 2017). When associated with the cross-border labour migration of working-class Sambas Malays, the territorial border is ascribed a negative evaluation, partially due to the women's present-day reading of the site. In contrast, however, the territorial border as a means to access the markets of Sarawak is evaluated positively, in line with imagined future prosperity.