Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.
China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assem
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Tags: Changing, China, City, Factory, from, GIRLS, Village
3 responses to Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Brilliant,
Interesting subject, thorough research, well-written. Even the digressions (about the author’s family and their histories in and out of China) are fascinating, though they don’t quite mesh with the rest of the book. The experiences the factory girls have and their personal transformations will resonate with American readers – here is the self-improvement, hard work and confidence Horatio Alger stuff that used to inspire America transplanted into a culture that is receptive and eager to absorb it, and here, too, are lucid accounts of the sad gaps between ambition and ability, ideals and reality, success and failure that go with immigrant experiences. The author was able to get closer to her subjects than anyone else I have read and writes very well indeed. Her account of how the internal migrant experience has mutated in China over the last 10-15 years is particularly fascinating. I read this cover to cover with great interest and hope the author is a work on a new book. (I don’t know what is bothering the one star reviewer — this review is written in Henan where I am visiting my Chinese wife’s family, and I have read countless books on China and spent lots of time here and can vouch for the authenticity of this book).
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What Up in China,
In this book, Leslie Chang delves deeply into the world of migrant workers to find out who these people are and what their collective dislocation means for China. Chang skillfully sketches migrants as individuals with their own small victories and bitter tragedies, and she captures the surprising dynamics of this enormous but ill-understood subculture. In many ways, migrant workers embody the fundamental changes underway in China today.
Chang covered China for the Wall Street Journal, and she’s an insightful interpreter of a society in flux. People who leave village life, with its intense cocoon of family and community ties, find themselves untethered in a city, scrounging for work and a place to sleep. “They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information,” she writes. And yet many migrants also feel freed from a suffocating web of traditional habits and mores. Able to explore and grow in the lawless free-for-all of China’s boomtowns, many cross an invisible line into the modern world, and there is no going back.
Chang got to know dozens of young women who have ventured to Dongguan, a new metropolis just north of Hong Kong. She focuses on two particularly compelling ones, Min and Chunming, who gradually came to trust her enough to share their stories, as well as diary entries, late-night phone calls and heart-to-heart confessions. Each is ambitious, impulsive, endearing. Each left home as a teenager and experienced a big adventure. Through their lives, Chang shows us how unmoored China is, erratically yearning for something better, and surprisingly resilient.
One of the women describes her blurry, confusing arrival in a new city, getting lured into a whorehouse, escaping, begging on the street, stealing another woman’s ID card to get work at a toy factory, graduating to clerkdom, learning about business, striking it rich with direct sales only to see her company crumble overnight. Chang explores a “talent market,” where workers offer themselves to any prospective employer — a sneaker factory, a dating agency, an illicit nightspot. She reads magazines about migrant life that the women eagerly pass around, with articles titled “Be Your Own Master” and “Ambition Made Me Who I Am.” Interactions among migrant women seem a cross between high school networking and wartime bonding. Being far from home, the women depend on each other to survive, yet they unite and separate with remarkable ease. Everyone lies. Promises are made and broken. “Dongguan was a place without memory,” Chang writes.
Partway through “Factory Girls,” Chang abruptly changes gears to tell her own family history. It is fascinating. Her great-grandfather was a landowner in northern China and a Confucian patriarch with four wives. His son, Chang’s grandfather, studied mining in the United States and then returned to China. At the height of China’s civil war, working for the Nationalists, he was assassinated. Chang’s grandmother escaped to Taiwan with her children, leaving relatives and family wealth behind. Chang’s father later immigrated to America, where Chang was born and raised. He did not like to talk about family history. Only after Chang had worked in China for some years did she begin to explore and discover the truth, including the myriad resentments and injustices that festered among her relatives, as well as the government’s suppression of accounts of the past.
Chang writes about her family and its dislocations with special sensitivity and grace. That story is almost like a book within a book, and it gives a poignant perspective to her accounts of the dislocated migrant workers she gets to know. More than that, it completes her portrait of China.
If the lives of migrant workers seem to represent the new China, with all its unwieldy promise and economic possibilities, Chang’s family history reflects the old China, its stubborn intractability and severe injustice. For now, the two still go together.
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The History of a Family Begins When a Person Leaves Home,
From this book’s opening paragraph positing two factory girls meeting each other with an opening question of, “What year are you,” the China-knowledgeable reader knows with certainty that author Leslie Chang has her literary finger firmly on the pulse of mainland China. The good news is that Ms. Chang sustains her dead-on rendition of Chinese culture and factory life throughout the full length of this deeply engaging look at China’s massive migrant work force. FACTORY GIRLS is informative and insightful, offering a first-hand view of the (mostly) young women who make up what the Chinese aptly call the “liudong renkou,” the “floating population.”
Ms. Chang, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and spouse of China author Peter Hessler (RIVER TOWN and ORACLE BONES), directs her attentions to the industrial heart of southeastern China, in the city of Dongguan. There she meets and obtains the confidence of several young women from peasant families who have migrated from small villages in the country’s interior, agricultural provinces to take factory jobs. There’s Lu Qingmin, a migrant from Hubei Province who follows her older sister Guimin’s trek to the factory world in Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. There’s Wu Chunming, the inveterate diarist and self-motivator, a native of Hunan Province who left her village for factory life in 1993, long before the migration became a massive movement.
Amazingly, as Chang reveals, some of the young women had no idea what factory work was like before arriving there, imagining it as some sort of chatty, casual environment. What they discover is, of course, far different, but Chang uses her personal entrée to explore their motivations. First and foremost is money, both for their own use and equally to send back to their families. As time passes, however, some of the young women find themselves motivated by life style changes, new opportunities, chances to learn new skills (including the English language), and even to remake themselves into urbanites. Along the way, Ms. Chang picks up the stories of others whose orbits intersect with those of the factory girls. For example, there’s Mr. Wu, inventor of an absurd “assembly line English program,” and his devoted student, Liu Yuxia, and Ding Yuanzhi with his bizarrely successful perversion of a self-help book entitled “Square and Round.”
Without doubt, FACTORY GIRL’s most affecting segment concerns Lu Qingmin’s return trip to her parents’ home. Here Chang illustrates the widening gulf between generations and life styles as well as the spectacular role reversals that modernization has forced upon families. No longer can the elderly be revered for their experience and wisdom. Now they are obsolete, unable to earn even a modest income, unconnected in a wired world, ignorant of everything from fashion and job-hopping to flush toilets and dating.
Ms. Chang takes a somewhat risky approach to her story of a changing, industrializing China. Instead of focusing strictly on her factory girl subjects, she intersperses their stories with her own rediscovery of her family roots in and around Beijing. The literary purpose is clear: to delineate through generational differences the shift from the Mao-era, collectivist approach to and philosophy of life to the burgeoning sense of individualism and self-actualization in the present-day world of a developing, Westernizing China.
Unfortunately, Chang’s excursions into her own family history distract from the far more interesting stories of her young female subjects, the village migrant villagers struggling to survive, make money, and find their place in the changing world of Chinese life. Chang’s family was clearly a privileged one, filled with college educated professionals and migrants to Taiwan and the United States. They seem strangely out of place here, in much the same sense that tales of the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution ring hollow and anachronistic in the lives of the young factory girls’ lives. As a consequence, these personal biographical interludes feel more intrusive than illustrative. I read them impatiently, wanting only to get back to the stories of Lu Qingmin and Wu Chunming and their factory girl colleagues. If anything, Ms. Chang’s efforts to climb inside her subjects’ skins do not go far enough. We want to learn still more from the forward-looking stories of Qingmin and Chunming and less about the buried past represented by the pathetic, backward-looking obsessions of her father’s first cousin, Zhang Hong.
FACTORY GIRLS is nevertheless a revealing portrayal of a rapidly changing society seen through the least of its players, the young women who populate the factories that now produce so much of the world’s goods. Her stories exemplify beautifully her book’s catch phrase: “The history of a family begins when a person leaves home.” Ms. Chang’s strong eye for the telling detail…
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