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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 assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.
As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
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 assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.
As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
420 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Leslie T. Chang
3 books147 followersLeslie T. Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, specializing in stories that explored how socioeconomic change is transforming institutions and individuals. She has also written for National Geographic. Factory Girls is her first book.
A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in American History and Literature, Chang has also worked as a journalist in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She was raised outside New York City by immigrant parents who forced her to attend Saturday-morning Chinese school, for which she is now grateful.
She is married to Peter Hessler, who also writes about China. She lives in Colorado.
A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in American History and Literature, Chang has also worked as a journalist in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She was raised outside New York City by immigrant parents who forced her to attend Saturday-morning Chinese school, for which she is now grateful.
She is married to Peter Hessler, who also writes about China. She lives in Colorado.
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January 10, 2012
In the early 2000s, my brother briefly worked as an executive for a Taiwanese-owned manufacturing company in China. It was a company of truly epic proportions, employing hundreds of thousands in China and abroad, and manufacturing for virtually all the big names in consumer electronics sold all over the world. If you use an IPad or any other Apple product, it would have passed through one of its gargantuan production facilities. Its ‘campus’ in Longhua, an industrial suburb of Shenzhen, was practically a city unto itself with massive dormitories, shops, a sports center and a hospital. Security was tight, discipline militaristic, living condition Spartan and working hours extremely long. Assembly-line pay was miniscule by first world standards, but slightly above average for China. Worker suicides were not unknown*. Once in a blue moon, the big boss, a Taiwanese self-made billionaire who scoffed at business school grads, would drop by to preach the virtues of “hard work” and four hours of sleep a day to stadium-full of employees. On certain auspicious days, everyone had to line up to pay their respect to the Tu Di Gong, the Chinese earth god of wealth, eliciting muffled objections from the Taiwanese Christians and mainlanders brought up as atheists by the Communist state. The Taiwanese executives and managers spoke Taiwanese Hokkien among themselves, a language not understood by most of the mainlanders, and looked down on their workers, migrants from the rural interior who formed the backbone of the company’s operations.
After a while, my brother’s functional Mandarin became good enough to talk directly to the workers. He was impressed by their capacity for hard work and innate intelligence. Considering that these people were probably the first generation ever to leave the farm and were spottily educated in rural schools, it was a revelation to see how quickly they learned how the factory worked and to make hi-tech products according to complex instructions. After working hours, he wandered around the town, an industrial Wild West full of shops selling cheap and/or bootleg goods. You could walk into a hole-in-the-wall electronics shop and buy, say, a ‘Sony’ DVD player for a fraction of the official price. Or, if you liked the design of the Sony but preferred the specs of the Phillips --- mei wenti! No problem. They could assemble one for you. The more reputable shops got their wares from the factories that made these brands, so in a sense they were ‘genuine’ knock-offs. Everyone was ambitious, inured to working conditions that were unthinkable in developed countries, and had no respect whatsoever for intellectual property. The officials expected kickbacks, and practically anything was permissible for the right price. Currency manipulation aside, these attitudes seem to be the real cause behind China’s spectacular economic rise.
This book is a fascinating, occasionally voyeuristic, study of the lives of the assembly-line workers who fueled this rise, specifically a couple of factory girls in Dongguan, another industrial town not far from Shenzhen. Chang, a second-generation Chinese American, followed each of her subjects for years, chronicling their working and private lives, collecting information about their family history and even gaining access to their diaries. Daughters, who are less valued under the Confucian system, became the primary breadwinners of the family under the new values of industrialization (sons are often required to stay in the village to care for their ancestral farms and many factories prefer young women as they are considered more diligent and easier to manage). For the first time in history, unmarried, working-class women call the shots and they are ambitious enough to make the most of this opportunity. A sweatshop job is a stepping-stone to a white-collar job in the same factory. A receptionist with a talent for public speaking can become a successful recruiter for a MLM company. Farm girls who never graduated middle school could own export-oriented SMEs. There is a darker side to all of this, and Chang is never sentimental about her girls; she doesn’t shy away from writing about the sometimes-Machiavellian ethos they employed to get ahead, or about the bogus and criminal enterprises that proliferated to take advantage of ignorant migrant workers.
Between stories of the factory girls, Chang inserted her own family’s history of migration. It is decades and continents apart, for the Changs were an educated, upper middle class family that migrated to America after the Communist victory, but it serves as an interesting contrast to the experiences of today’s rural migrants.
Writing about the rising China is practically a cottage industry of its own, but this book is remarkable for putting a human face on the tide of workers who powers the economic juggernaut. It seems to me that this book and both Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler, who is married to Chang, present the most honest and insightful picture of contemporary China.
*Long after my brother left the company, these tragic incidents became a PR disaster for the company (and Apple). In response to this problem, the management planned to replace troublesome human workers with automatons.
After a while, my brother’s functional Mandarin became good enough to talk directly to the workers. He was impressed by their capacity for hard work and innate intelligence. Considering that these people were probably the first generation ever to leave the farm and were spottily educated in rural schools, it was a revelation to see how quickly they learned how the factory worked and to make hi-tech products according to complex instructions. After working hours, he wandered around the town, an industrial Wild West full of shops selling cheap and/or bootleg goods. You could walk into a hole-in-the-wall electronics shop and buy, say, a ‘Sony’ DVD player for a fraction of the official price. Or, if you liked the design of the Sony but preferred the specs of the Phillips --- mei wenti! No problem. They could assemble one for you. The more reputable shops got their wares from the factories that made these brands, so in a sense they were ‘genuine’ knock-offs. Everyone was ambitious, inured to working conditions that were unthinkable in developed countries, and had no respect whatsoever for intellectual property. The officials expected kickbacks, and practically anything was permissible for the right price. Currency manipulation aside, these attitudes seem to be the real cause behind China’s spectacular economic rise.
This book is a fascinating, occasionally voyeuristic, study of the lives of the assembly-line workers who fueled this rise, specifically a couple of factory girls in Dongguan, another industrial town not far from Shenzhen. Chang, a second-generation Chinese American, followed each of her subjects for years, chronicling their working and private lives, collecting information about their family history and even gaining access to their diaries. Daughters, who are less valued under the Confucian system, became the primary breadwinners of the family under the new values of industrialization (sons are often required to stay in the village to care for their ancestral farms and many factories prefer young women as they are considered more diligent and easier to manage). For the first time in history, unmarried, working-class women call the shots and they are ambitious enough to make the most of this opportunity. A sweatshop job is a stepping-stone to a white-collar job in the same factory. A receptionist with a talent for public speaking can become a successful recruiter for a MLM company. Farm girls who never graduated middle school could own export-oriented SMEs. There is a darker side to all of this, and Chang is never sentimental about her girls; she doesn’t shy away from writing about the sometimes-Machiavellian ethos they employed to get ahead, or about the bogus and criminal enterprises that proliferated to take advantage of ignorant migrant workers.
Between stories of the factory girls, Chang inserted her own family’s history of migration. It is decades and continents apart, for the Changs were an educated, upper middle class family that migrated to America after the Communist victory, but it serves as an interesting contrast to the experiences of today’s rural migrants.
Writing about the rising China is practically a cottage industry of its own, but this book is remarkable for putting a human face on the tide of workers who powers the economic juggernaut. It seems to me that this book and both Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler, who is married to Chang, present the most honest and insightful picture of contemporary China.
*Long after my brother left the company, these tragic incidents became a PR disaster for the company (and Apple). In response to this problem, the management planned to replace troublesome human workers with automatons.
December 3, 2019
If you have ever wondered about the people who make most of the objects we use on a daily basis – like running shoes, home appliances, kitchen utensils... read this book. We are given an insightful view of their lives and surroundings.
Most of them are young women who come from rural areas. They essentially abandon the rural lifestyle to embark on an urban factory journey. Most will change jobs several times. They will meet a myriad of friends who just come and go. Their lives are forever altered.
The author does not wage a campaign denigrating the factories young people work in. We are presented rather with their daily living conditions. They work long hours and they are exploited – if they leave the job they may not receive the back pay owed to them (like two months wages). One of the first things that hit me when starting to read, were the job ads specifically asking for “female workers”. In my country (Canada) it would be against the labour code to specify a gender when posting an ad (not that jobs in Canada do not discriminate by gender – construction jobs are male dominated, CEOs are predominantly male).
Importantly the author visits a village, that some of the workers come from, during the New Year vacation period. We feel the contrast between what the young girls’ life in the village would be like with constricting and defined roles around the family, the extended family and the entire rural community. In the factory they have more empowerment – they can ask the boss for a change of position, a raise, or even quit. They can spend their earnings as they wish. They also sense their empowerment when they return to their small community – which aside from the electronic gadgets seems almost medieval; there is no sense of privacy.
Neither does Ms Chang paint the urban factory as a paradise. There is a constant pressure of production – of doing more with less, and also dishonesty between all levels of the workers and employers . We are told for instance that theft is common in the worker bunk houses. Also I got a pervading sense of loneliness,but loneliness is common in the urban environment. So many people, but so few real friends.
I titled this review “Debrouillez-vous” which is a French expression meaning – get on with it, make due, you are on your own. This, I believe, describes the plight of these young girls when they arrive in Dongguan – a huge land of factories – where they must organize themselves, get a job, change jobs – all on their own – and become self-reliant. They are no longer in a communal village.
This is a revealing book and focuses on people – not statistics – so we get a personal view of some of the factory workers – mostly female but young men as well. One statistic does stand out – 130 million migrant workers – the population of my country (Canada) is somewhat over 30 million. That is a staggering number! Perhaps I would have liked more on sexual harassment – after all most of the workers are young women and their bosses male. We are also provided with a chapter on the ubiquitous running shoe. This is a very worthwhile read – up close, engaged and personal.
Some quotes:
Page 11 (my edition): “There was nothing to do at home, so I went out”
Page 57: If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in no-man’s land.
Page 97: In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north.
Page383: now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real
Most of them are young women who come from rural areas. They essentially abandon the rural lifestyle to embark on an urban factory journey. Most will change jobs several times. They will meet a myriad of friends who just come and go. Their lives are forever altered.
The author does not wage a campaign denigrating the factories young people work in. We are presented rather with their daily living conditions. They work long hours and they are exploited – if they leave the job they may not receive the back pay owed to them (like two months wages). One of the first things that hit me when starting to read, were the job ads specifically asking for “female workers”. In my country (Canada) it would be against the labour code to specify a gender when posting an ad (not that jobs in Canada do not discriminate by gender – construction jobs are male dominated, CEOs are predominantly male).
Importantly the author visits a village, that some of the workers come from, during the New Year vacation period. We feel the contrast between what the young girls’ life in the village would be like with constricting and defined roles around the family, the extended family and the entire rural community. In the factory they have more empowerment – they can ask the boss for a change of position, a raise, or even quit. They can spend their earnings as they wish. They also sense their empowerment when they return to their small community – which aside from the electronic gadgets seems almost medieval; there is no sense of privacy.
Neither does Ms Chang paint the urban factory as a paradise. There is a constant pressure of production – of doing more with less, and also dishonesty between all levels of the workers and employers . We are told for instance that theft is common in the worker bunk houses. Also I got a pervading sense of loneliness,but loneliness is common in the urban environment. So many people, but so few real friends.
I titled this review “Debrouillez-vous” which is a French expression meaning – get on with it, make due, you are on your own. This, I believe, describes the plight of these young girls when they arrive in Dongguan – a huge land of factories – where they must organize themselves, get a job, change jobs – all on their own – and become self-reliant. They are no longer in a communal village.
This is a revealing book and focuses on people – not statistics – so we get a personal view of some of the factory workers – mostly female but young men as well. One statistic does stand out – 130 million migrant workers – the population of my country (Canada) is somewhat over 30 million. That is a staggering number! Perhaps I would have liked more on sexual harassment – after all most of the workers are young women and their bosses male. We are also provided with a chapter on the ubiquitous running shoe. This is a very worthwhile read – up close, engaged and personal.
Some quotes:
Page 11 (my edition): “There was nothing to do at home, so I went out”
Page 57: If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in no-man’s land.
Page 97: In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north.
Page383: now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real
September 2, 2011
While being able to relate to Chang certainly is not a prereq for enjoying this book, I think I've had a different experience reading this book than non-Chinese-Americans may have. My mom grew up working in sweatshops and factories in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, so this book has been really interesting as a look into the generation of girls that came after her. She had limited schooling, and worked with her hands her entire life. The mentality of moving up and switching jobs and taking computer classes to improve your chances at a better job (and husband) seems to be what sets this generation of girls and women apart. My mother didn't go to work because she wanted to improve her life, she wanted to earn money to improve the lives of her siblings and let them continue schooling. She is of the previous generation, just like Chang's father's generation.
It was really interesting how having wealth changed the migrants' roles in their family affairs. Chang mentions that for the older generation, it was not the same (i.e. getting beaten for changing your major without consulting with parents). My mother also earned a lot for her parents, not more than her father, but it only made a difference when she argued for allowing her younger sisters to continue their education.It is interesting to see how much has changed and how things are continually changing, not necessarily in a good or bad way, but just changing.
Some quotes that I liked:
p. 49 "We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar" - Wu Chunming
p. 58 "The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate."
"You can only rely on your self"
p. 234 "Seventy percent of Chinese people are bad." - Lao Gong, businessman
Some of the reviews talk about how Chang uses a lot of metaphors, or jumps from topic to topic, or delves too deeply into her own family history for the purposes of the story. I think to try to understand present modern China, you really do need to understand at least some of the history, and the cultural things that have led up to present day. I admit that at some points her narrative is a little weak, but the richness of history makes up for that and the intrigue of the modern girls' story holds up well against it.
As for the metaphors, that is part of Chinese culture (i.e. the not talking openly about yourself or feelings or opinions), so if you really don't get the picture or effect she is going for, then you could try just thinking about it for a few minutes. That break in space between paragraphs is meant to tell you to take a moment and think before you barrel further into the story. This is not like your fictional novel where you just want to see what happens at the end. Part of the process is really trying to understand the people and what they are going through in these stories.
On a somewhat related note, this is an interesting project (scroll down to "Apart Together"):
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/e...
It was really interesting how having wealth changed the migrants' roles in their family affairs. Chang mentions that for the older generation, it was not the same (i.e. getting beaten for changing your major without consulting with parents). My mother also earned a lot for her parents, not more than her father, but it only made a difference when she argued for allowing her younger sisters to continue their education.It is interesting to see how much has changed and how things are continually changing, not necessarily in a good or bad way, but just changing.
Some quotes that I liked:
p. 49 "We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar" - Wu Chunming
p. 58 "The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate."
"You can only rely on your self"
p. 234 "Seventy percent of Chinese people are bad." - Lao Gong, businessman
Some of the reviews talk about how Chang uses a lot of metaphors, or jumps from topic to topic, or delves too deeply into her own family history for the purposes of the story. I think to try to understand present modern China, you really do need to understand at least some of the history, and the cultural things that have led up to present day. I admit that at some points her narrative is a little weak, but the richness of history makes up for that and the intrigue of the modern girls' story holds up well against it.
As for the metaphors, that is part of Chinese culture (i.e. the not talking openly about yourself or feelings or opinions), so if you really don't get the picture or effect she is going for, then you could try just thinking about it for a few minutes. That break in space between paragraphs is meant to tell you to take a moment and think before you barrel further into the story. This is not like your fictional novel where you just want to see what happens at the end. Part of the process is really trying to understand the people and what they are going through in these stories.
On a somewhat related note, this is an interesting project (scroll down to "Apart Together"):
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/e...
August 11, 2017
Ottimo saggio-reportage che fa capire più della Cina di oggi di tante analisi socio-economiche blasonate, 'Operaie' mi ha ricordato assurdamente 'Dove corri, Sammy', di Budd Schulberg. La stessa frenesia disperata di arrivare, di lasciarsi alle spalle condizioni di vita durissime, e di farlo nel più breve tempo possibile. Negli anni '20 era il sogno americano, ora il turno è della Cina, in scala 1:1000. La cosa strana è che a Est la riscossa ha cambiato di segno. 'Non è un problema ma un'opportunità', una delle frasi più irritanti che mi sia mai capitato di sentire, in questo caso almeno è vera: le figlie femmine, nella Cina rurale, sono considerate 'acqua sporca dopo aver sciacquato i piatti' totalmente inutili alla famiglia, perché si sposeranno e andranno a stare da un'altra parte, senza contribuire al mantenimento degli anziani genitori. Nessun diritto per loro, nessuna considerazione, nessuna protezione. Solo i maschi contano. Ebbene, questa totale mancanza di aspettative, di affetti e di doveri nei loro riguardi le rende paradossalmente più libere di costruirsi una vita migliore nell'unico modo per loro possibile oggi: facendo un po' di soldi. Così migliaia e migliaia di formichine senza né arte né parte, povere, ignorantissime, sole, sorrette solo da una feroce determinazione a 'far carriera', vengono inghiottite ogni anno dalla fabbrica del mondo, il distretto industriale del Guandong che da solo produce in pratica tutte le merci che consumiamo. La giornalista sino-americana Leslie Chang ha seguito per anni le vite di queste operaie migranti che popolano fabbriche da settantamila unità, a loro volta spina dorsale di città da trenta milioni di abitanti che nessuno ha mai sentito nominare su una guida. Solo chi ha visto un po'di Cina può immaginare lo squallore disumano di questi non-luoghi, la durezza delle condizioni di lavoro, la solitudine spaventosa delle esistenze che qui si consumano. Non si sa se provare più pena o più ammirazione per queste ragazzine sradicate, che imparano a sedici anni sulla loro pelle quello che molte di noi non introiettano nemmeno a cinquanta 'Posso contare solo su me stessa'. Indipendenza, spirito d'iniziativa, ambizione: quelle sveglie imparano in fretta come gira. Obiettivo: diventare segretarie, impiegate, venditrici, rappresentanti, addirittura manager; per tutte le altre non ci sarà via d'uscita dall'orribile catena di montaggio, dallo sfruttamento senza limiti. Nel paese del collettivismo, in cui l'iniziativa individuale è stata sistematicamente eradicata per secoli, mentre i maschi restano indietro, coccolati/stritolati dalle aspettative e dalle tradizioni familiari pesanti almeno quanto quelle nostrane, tutta una generazione di ragazzette senza tetto né legge corre talmente avanti da ritrovarsi poi sola al traguardo. Perché anche quelle poche che ce l'hanno fatta, che balbettano un po' d'inglese, che hanno letto i manuali di self-help e fatto corsi assurdi di automiglioramento; quelle che hanno soldi da mandare a casa, il cellulare, l'automobile, il bagno, scoprono troppo tardi di essere ormai anni luce lontane dal natìo borgo selvaggio e comunque troppo consapevoli, troppo adulte, troppo dure, troppo avanti per un uomo cinese medio del loro ceto. E dunque l'eterna maledizione dell'emancipazione femminile, la solitudine, qui non mitigata da alcun sostegno culturale o spirituale, si ripropone intatta nella sua drammatica durezza. 'Puoi contare solo su te stessa', appunto. Una lunga digressione sulla famiglia dell'autrice, emigrata a Taiwan e poi negli States, se da un lato chiarisce meglio certi aspetti della natura e della società cinese, finisce per spezzare la tensione narrativa, togliendo un po' di slancio e di coerenza a tutta l'opera. Forse sarebbe stato meglio farne oggetto di un altro libro
March 6, 2021
What’s to See Here?
Personally, I didn’t see the point of this book. Was it to warn us about communism or just tell us what it was like for some women in China? Either way, it didn’t seem like their lives were so bad,not that I would want to work in a factory in any country. The women were given room and board with pay and had the freedom to quit work and go back home or get a job elsewhere. They worked 6 days a week for long hours, and basically they made no friends. Personally, I would prefer farm life to the kind of drudgery that any factory would offer. Even being a nanny or a maid would be better and many of those jobs are room and board with some pay, but at least you are not doing the same repetitive work every day.
Personally, I didn’t see the point of this book. Was it to warn us about communism or just tell us what it was like for some women in China? Either way, it didn’t seem like their lives were so bad,not that I would want to work in a factory in any country. The women were given room and board with pay and had the freedom to quit work and go back home or get a job elsewhere. They worked 6 days a week for long hours, and basically they made no friends. Personally, I would prefer farm life to the kind of drudgery that any factory would offer. Even being a nanny or a maid would be better and many of those jobs are room and board with some pay, but at least you are not doing the same repetitive work every day.
September 3, 2009
There are two great reasons to read this book! One, the direct relevance it has to almost everyone alive today who consumes products of any sort (shoes, bags, cell phone parts, computer parts) made by the intrepid young working ladies of Dongguan in Southern China that the author describes in this book. Second, Ms. Chang's narrative voice was truly a pleasure to read.
The material itself is fascinating and up-to-the minute-timely; the book details how a huge migration is taking place in China, transforming family life, economic life, and the individual fates of millions of young women and men who leave the countryside to work in cities full of factories, cities which are changing and growing at an insane speed. Knowing next to nothing about China, this book opened the door a crack for me to understanding something about the country. It was a great introduction, providing a context or anchor for further reading, and sparking my interest in learning more. Ms. Chang was the perfect narrator; she wrote in a way that provided an immediately familiar and recognizable narrative voice to an American reader but with her Chinese language skills, family background, open mind, and warm heart she was also able to become close enough with the Chinese women to give us an intimate view of their lives, ambitions, and view of the world.
It took me almost a month to read the book. Upon finishing, I realized I was going to miss Ms. Chang's company, telling me the story of these girls and their surroundings through the filter of her own wonderfully insightful mind; sometimes with gentle humour, sometimes subtly scathing, sometimes admiring of the girls, sometimes seeing right through their words and acitons. While picking up on unusual and fascinating details with a reporter's careful eye, Ms. Chang also showed just as good a feel for understanding the bigger picture and going to the heart of the matter in her analyses. It would have been difficult to read about some of the chinese style self-help-gurus, the cult style English teachers and the like without touches of Ms. Chang's scepticism and wit. It was useful, after reading about the flimsiness of business standards in Dongguan and shallow ethics of the Dongguan workplace, to have Ms. Chang anchor the story in the context of a larger picture of Chinese values and history. I appreciated the honesty, open-mindedness, humour, courage, and wisdom with which Ms. Chang researched the book, lived her life in a very intense environment without losing her own perspective, and narrated this fascinating story.
The material itself is fascinating and up-to-the minute-timely; the book details how a huge migration is taking place in China, transforming family life, economic life, and the individual fates of millions of young women and men who leave the countryside to work in cities full of factories, cities which are changing and growing at an insane speed. Knowing next to nothing about China, this book opened the door a crack for me to understanding something about the country. It was a great introduction, providing a context or anchor for further reading, and sparking my interest in learning more. Ms. Chang was the perfect narrator; she wrote in a way that provided an immediately familiar and recognizable narrative voice to an American reader but with her Chinese language skills, family background, open mind, and warm heart she was also able to become close enough with the Chinese women to give us an intimate view of their lives, ambitions, and view of the world.
It took me almost a month to read the book. Upon finishing, I realized I was going to miss Ms. Chang's company, telling me the story of these girls and their surroundings through the filter of her own wonderfully insightful mind; sometimes with gentle humour, sometimes subtly scathing, sometimes admiring of the girls, sometimes seeing right through their words and acitons. While picking up on unusual and fascinating details with a reporter's careful eye, Ms. Chang also showed just as good a feel for understanding the bigger picture and going to the heart of the matter in her analyses. It would have been difficult to read about some of the chinese style self-help-gurus, the cult style English teachers and the like without touches of Ms. Chang's scepticism and wit. It was useful, after reading about the flimsiness of business standards in Dongguan and shallow ethics of the Dongguan workplace, to have Ms. Chang anchor the story in the context of a larger picture of Chinese values and history. I appreciated the honesty, open-mindedness, humour, courage, and wisdom with which Ms. Chang researched the book, lived her life in a very intense environment without losing her own perspective, and narrated this fascinating story.
November 22, 2013
I am truly at a loss for how to rate this book. It was entirely new information, I vacillated between fascination, horror, and awe…. And then complete boredom. This book could have easily been 150 pages shorter, there were times that it was excruciatingly repetitive, and at one point I actually thought tom myself, “Hasn’t she already told this story?”
The pacing for this book was entirely wrong. The setup and presentation of information was wrong. It seemed so helter skelter. The stories felt like they were vignettes, which I feel would have been a better choice for presentation, because they never felt like they flowed together. And then, then the book just ended. I couldn’t believe that it just ended. No summation. No wrap up. It felt like the end of just another vignette. At no point did I feel that the author had a thesis, or a guiding point, other than to tell these stories, and it left me, as the reader, feeling like I was just wandering through her book.
These complaints aside, I think it’s (or maybe an abridged version) is an important read. China is huge, a vastly expanding commercial market, and producers of real to the most elaborate fake products ever. It’s a complete enigma to most Westerners, but its arguable a world power with an expanding military power. We need to understand where China has come from, where she and her citizens want to go in the future. It’s definitely an eye opening work that will make you think twice about American standards of construction, work ethic, production, and consumption, and as we enter the holiday season- these are not bad things to think about and be grateful for.
The pacing for this book was entirely wrong. The setup and presentation of information was wrong. It seemed so helter skelter. The stories felt like they were vignettes, which I feel would have been a better choice for presentation, because they never felt like they flowed together. And then, then the book just ended. I couldn’t believe that it just ended. No summation. No wrap up. It felt like the end of just another vignette. At no point did I feel that the author had a thesis, or a guiding point, other than to tell these stories, and it left me, as the reader, feeling like I was just wandering through her book.
These complaints aside, I think it’s (or maybe an abridged version) is an important read. China is huge, a vastly expanding commercial market, and producers of real to the most elaborate fake products ever. It’s a complete enigma to most Westerners, but its arguable a world power with an expanding military power. We need to understand where China has come from, where she and her citizens want to go in the future. It’s definitely an eye opening work that will make you think twice about American standards of construction, work ethic, production, and consumption, and as we enter the holiday season- these are not bad things to think about and be grateful for.
August 30, 2015
You might expect a book about the lives of migrant workers in China to be incredibly depressing, full of tales of abuse. This book isn't like that at all; it's informative, and doesn't gloss over ugly things, but nor does it beat you down.
Factory Girls focuses on the lives of young women living in Dongguan, a huge city in southern China filled with factories and inhabited mainly by migrant workers. The author spent several years getting to know workers there, and most of the book tells their stories. But there's a lot of the author in the book as well; not just recounting her interactions with the migrant women (the migrant population in Dongguan is estimated at 70% female), but also tracing the history of her family in China, before they left for Taiwan and eventually the U.S.
This book is certainly worth reading if you are curious about life in modern China; it's full of stories from the lives of the people Chang meets, as well as some broader factual information to give them context. Chang gets to know a couple of the women very well, meeting their friends and traveling home with them to visit their families. In a way, their stories are surprisingly positive; they seem very in control of their lives and able to pursue what they want from life, which is quite different from the typical industrial revolution story of oppressed workers. They change jobs frequently in search of better opportunities, they date, and they send home enough money to gain a voice in family affairs. But in other ways, the picture is hardly rosy: relationships don't last, everyone is obsessed with money, bosses often cheat their workers and corruption abounds.
From a writing standpoint, the book is good: it's a smooth, easy read without feeling dumbed down, and the organization is clear. However, Chang made a couple of tricky choices that may impair some readers' enjoyment of the book.
First, there's the decision to include so much of herself in the book, and stick scrupulously to events she witnessed and stories she was told rather than trying to draw broader generalizations. Sometimes I felt that the book could have used more breadth or depth, but ultimately Chang seems very careful to limit it to what she can discuss with authority. So, for instance, we get detailed accounts of events and conversations for which the author was present, which aren't necessarily earth-shaking, but which allow the reader to see where her information is coming from. Toward the end, she even admits that the two women she focuses on most may not be representative of most migrant workers, without suggesting how they might be different (for Dongguan, at least, both seem atypical in that they quickly moved up from assembly line work).
Second, there's Chang's decision to write so much about her own family history and her quest to discover it, including her visits with long-lost relatives. She justifies this by pointing out that, like the workers' stories, it deals with migration; perhaps a better justification would be that it provides a historical context, and a contrast between people like her distant cousin who are stuck in the past and the young, ambitious women of Dongguan who are focused on the present and future. While I found the family history reasonably interesting, these sections ultimately seem a little too removed from the subject matter of the book, and cause it to be longer than necessary.
Overall, an interesting, readable and worthwhile book. If you like this and are interested in a fictional take on the lives on young female migrant workers in China, I recommend Miss Chopsticks.
Factory Girls focuses on the lives of young women living in Dongguan, a huge city in southern China filled with factories and inhabited mainly by migrant workers. The author spent several years getting to know workers there, and most of the book tells their stories. But there's a lot of the author in the book as well; not just recounting her interactions with the migrant women (the migrant population in Dongguan is estimated at 70% female), but also tracing the history of her family in China, before they left for Taiwan and eventually the U.S.
This book is certainly worth reading if you are curious about life in modern China; it's full of stories from the lives of the people Chang meets, as well as some broader factual information to give them context. Chang gets to know a couple of the women very well, meeting their friends and traveling home with them to visit their families. In a way, their stories are surprisingly positive; they seem very in control of their lives and able to pursue what they want from life, which is quite different from the typical industrial revolution story of oppressed workers. They change jobs frequently in search of better opportunities, they date, and they send home enough money to gain a voice in family affairs. But in other ways, the picture is hardly rosy: relationships don't last, everyone is obsessed with money, bosses often cheat their workers and corruption abounds.
From a writing standpoint, the book is good: it's a smooth, easy read without feeling dumbed down, and the organization is clear. However, Chang made a couple of tricky choices that may impair some readers' enjoyment of the book.
First, there's the decision to include so much of herself in the book, and stick scrupulously to events she witnessed and stories she was told rather than trying to draw broader generalizations. Sometimes I felt that the book could have used more breadth or depth, but ultimately Chang seems very careful to limit it to what she can discuss with authority. So, for instance, we get detailed accounts of events and conversations for which the author was present, which aren't necessarily earth-shaking, but which allow the reader to see where her information is coming from. Toward the end, she even admits that the two women she focuses on most may not be representative of most migrant workers, without suggesting how they might be different (for Dongguan, at least, both seem atypical in that they quickly moved up from assembly line work).
Second, there's Chang's decision to write so much about her own family history and her quest to discover it, including her visits with long-lost relatives. She justifies this by pointing out that, like the workers' stories, it deals with migration; perhaps a better justification would be that it provides a historical context, and a contrast between people like her distant cousin who are stuck in the past and the young, ambitious women of Dongguan who are focused on the present and future. While I found the family history reasonably interesting, these sections ultimately seem a little too removed from the subject matter of the book, and cause it to be longer than necessary.
Overall, an interesting, readable and worthwhile book. If you like this and are interested in a fictional take on the lives on young female migrant workers in China, I recommend Miss Chopsticks.
July 20, 2020
This book was published in 2009 and the highest compliment I can give is that I wish I'd known about it (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and read it then.
While Chang weaves in her own life story, which is fascinating, she focuses on several Chinese teen-aged girls and young women who've "gone out" from their villages, where there's no work, and found jobs in cities like Dongguan. Even though I usually reject the premise that the anecdotes speak for the whole, in this case, the depth of reporting on each young woman gives readers a true sense of the motives and national circumstances driving these ambitious young women and so many millions like them.
Highly, highly recommended. Put this at the top of your list if you haven't already read it. (And thanks to KSD for recommending it to me.)
While Chang weaves in her own life story, which is fascinating, she focuses on several Chinese teen-aged girls and young women who've "gone out" from their villages, where there's no work, and found jobs in cities like Dongguan. Even though I usually reject the premise that the anecdotes speak for the whole, in this case, the depth of reporting on each young woman gives readers a true sense of the motives and national circumstances driving these ambitious young women and so many millions like them.
Highly, highly recommended. Put this at the top of your list if you haven't already read it. (And thanks to KSD for recommending it to me.)
May 26, 2015
For me this book felt like a gentle drenching in the culture of Dongguan - a city that grew up from small sweatshop factories and burgeoned into a town of massive enterprises, sucking in migrant workers from rural villages hundreds of miles away.
Seventy thousand people now work at the Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. "Inside the compound's brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees' children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department...."
When Yue Yuen set up its first factory its employees often had to work until midnight, and they only got one day off a month. Then big American brands like Nike and Adidas were chivvied in the West about the bad working conditions in the factories belonging to their producers. In response Yue Yuen changed to an eleven hour workday, and gave its workers every Sunday off... but other things changed for the worse. In 2001 Adidas initiated a programme called "Lean Manufacturing" to increase efficiency and decrease waste. Not only did this put more pressure on the workers - with tasks precisely designated and little downtime, but workers were no longer allowed to share dormitories with friends....instead they had to share with assembly line colleagues.
Life in most of the big factories appears vast, impersonal and pressured - but in fact the people working there sound far from cowed by their situations. Throughout the book we hear about people moving onto new jobs at the drop of a hat, happily falsifying information about past work experience and skills in order to get better jobs. Many of the people interviewed seemed fantastically ambitious and enthusiastic. Ambitious to earn more, to learn better social or business skills, and to learn English. (English sometimes taught in extraordinary ways!) It seems a lonely life though - with people moving all too easily in and out of one another's lives. Several times the author talks about friendship links being tenuous - with contact information only kept on mobile phones. Lose your phone, lose your friends.
There is another huge aspect to this life though, and that is the rural culture that most of these people come from.
"The continuing link to a family farm has stabilized China in an age of mass migration. Its cities have not spawned the shantytown slums of so much of the developing world, because the migrant who fails in the city can always return home and find someone there. A teenager may go out for work, leaving his parents on the farm. A husband who migrates may have a wife at home tilling the fields, or sometimes the other way around. A married couple might go out together, leaving young children in the care of their aged parents. In the city, a migrant may look desperate, but almost every migrant has a farm to fall back on."
All the young people interviewed in this book were sending money home to their parents in the countryside.
In one instance the author accompanies one of the girls back to her country home. Hours of cramped and uncomfortable travel by train, and at the end of it - some incredibly basic conditions. A family of people sharing beds, sharing washing water, and unwanted waste just dropped on the floor. I was amazed that such an ambitious work ethic could have blossomed in such circumstances, but the desire to better oneself seemed a burning issue for most of the workers.
Back at the factories there is much duplicity and corruption - pyramid schemes, often involving gullible factory workers,or pay-offs to buyers at factories and suchlike. All of this is perhaps exacerbated by the incredibly low wages that the workers get.
Another thing that stuck me was the incredible urge for business that everyone seems to have, with every opportunity for investment or diversification leapt upon.
All in all I felt the book could have been considerably shorter than it was - especially the first half. I also did not enjoy the author's discussions about her investigations into her own family, and family history. This just felt like a rather lumpy aside. On the other hand I did feel I got a very good impression of what life is like for migrant factory workers in China - and I am very pleased I read it.
Seventy thousand people now work at the Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. "Inside the compound's brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees' children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department...."
When Yue Yuen set up its first factory its employees often had to work until midnight, and they only got one day off a month. Then big American brands like Nike and Adidas were chivvied in the West about the bad working conditions in the factories belonging to their producers. In response Yue Yuen changed to an eleven hour workday, and gave its workers every Sunday off... but other things changed for the worse. In 2001 Adidas initiated a programme called "Lean Manufacturing" to increase efficiency and decrease waste. Not only did this put more pressure on the workers - with tasks precisely designated and little downtime, but workers were no longer allowed to share dormitories with friends....instead they had to share with assembly line colleagues.
Life in most of the big factories appears vast, impersonal and pressured - but in fact the people working there sound far from cowed by their situations. Throughout the book we hear about people moving onto new jobs at the drop of a hat, happily falsifying information about past work experience and skills in order to get better jobs. Many of the people interviewed seemed fantastically ambitious and enthusiastic. Ambitious to earn more, to learn better social or business skills, and to learn English. (English sometimes taught in extraordinary ways!) It seems a lonely life though - with people moving all too easily in and out of one another's lives. Several times the author talks about friendship links being tenuous - with contact information only kept on mobile phones. Lose your phone, lose your friends.
There is another huge aspect to this life though, and that is the rural culture that most of these people come from.
"The continuing link to a family farm has stabilized China in an age of mass migration. Its cities have not spawned the shantytown slums of so much of the developing world, because the migrant who fails in the city can always return home and find someone there. A teenager may go out for work, leaving his parents on the farm. A husband who migrates may have a wife at home tilling the fields, or sometimes the other way around. A married couple might go out together, leaving young children in the care of their aged parents. In the city, a migrant may look desperate, but almost every migrant has a farm to fall back on."
All the young people interviewed in this book were sending money home to their parents in the countryside.
In one instance the author accompanies one of the girls back to her country home. Hours of cramped and uncomfortable travel by train, and at the end of it - some incredibly basic conditions. A family of people sharing beds, sharing washing water, and unwanted waste just dropped on the floor. I was amazed that such an ambitious work ethic could have blossomed in such circumstances, but the desire to better oneself seemed a burning issue for most of the workers.
Back at the factories there is much duplicity and corruption - pyramid schemes, often involving gullible factory workers,or pay-offs to buyers at factories and suchlike. All of this is perhaps exacerbated by the incredibly low wages that the workers get.
Another thing that stuck me was the incredible urge for business that everyone seems to have, with every opportunity for investment or diversification leapt upon.
All in all I felt the book could have been considerably shorter than it was - especially the first half. I also did not enjoy the author's discussions about her investigations into her own family, and family history. This just felt like a rather lumpy aside. On the other hand I did feel I got a very good impression of what life is like for migrant factory workers in China - and I am very pleased I read it.
May 16, 2019
Uno dei libri più interessanti dell'anno e di sempre è questo saggio/reportage. L'autrice segue le vite di due ragazze emigrate dalle zone rurali della Cina verso una delle metropoli industriali del sud e contemporaneamente racconta la Cina contemporanea -che ti distrai un secondo ed è già cambiata.
La città è Dongguan, 10 milioni di abitanti, parte della "provincia" di Guangdong, un'immensa megalopoli industriale di 100 milioni di abitanti più 30 milioni stimati di migranti non censiti. Di cui il 70% sono donne.
Come cambia la vita di una ragazza che abbandona il villaggio per cercare lavoro in una megalopoli industriale? Si passa dall'inerzia del villaggio alla frenesia metropolitana, dal non avere un lavoro a cambiarlo ogni 6 mesi, dall'essere parte di una comunità all'essere un individuo, dal non avere un soldo ad averne tanti, dal non poter scegliere al dover scegliere continuamente, dall'avere amici e parenti a poter contare solo su di sé e abituarsi a perdere periodicamente ogni riferimento.
Si scappa dal villaggio, si pensa sempre al villaggio, si torna al villaggio e si scopre che il villaggio non ti appartiene più -la migrazione è un viaggio a senso unico, il cambiamento che la metropoli impone rende impossibile il ritorno.
La cosa curiosa è che non si parla di democrazia e del passato violento. O meglio: l'autrice ne scrive, ma realizza che la cosa non sembra interessare ai cinesi, che assomigliano a una massa di individui concentrati sul presente e il futuro.
La città è Dongguan, 10 milioni di abitanti, parte della "provincia" di Guangdong, un'immensa megalopoli industriale di 100 milioni di abitanti più 30 milioni stimati di migranti non censiti. Di cui il 70% sono donne.
Come cambia la vita di una ragazza che abbandona il villaggio per cercare lavoro in una megalopoli industriale? Si passa dall'inerzia del villaggio alla frenesia metropolitana, dal non avere un lavoro a cambiarlo ogni 6 mesi, dall'essere parte di una comunità all'essere un individuo, dal non avere un soldo ad averne tanti, dal non poter scegliere al dover scegliere continuamente, dall'avere amici e parenti a poter contare solo su di sé e abituarsi a perdere periodicamente ogni riferimento.
Si scappa dal villaggio, si pensa sempre al villaggio, si torna al villaggio e si scopre che il villaggio non ti appartiene più -la migrazione è un viaggio a senso unico, il cambiamento che la metropoli impone rende impossibile il ritorno.
La cosa curiosa è che non si parla di democrazia e del passato violento. O meglio: l'autrice ne scrive, ma realizza che la cosa non sembra interessare ai cinesi, che assomigliano a una massa di individui concentrati sul presente e il futuro.
January 7, 2009
I was very disappointed in this book. It was very disorganized.
The way it jumped from one thing to another with no transition beyond some extra space on the page was quite disorienting. (E.g., one section ended with a statement about an old relative laying in bed waiting to die and the next paragraph started with a description of a table loaded with food.)
The descriptions and conclusions also seemed very superficial. I chose the book because I was very interested in learning about life in China today. I stayed with it to the very end hoping I'd learn more, but nothing more ever came. When I finally finished I felt I'd wasted my time and wished I quit sooner.
The way it jumped from one thing to another with no transition beyond some extra space on the page was quite disorienting. (E.g., one section ended with a statement about an old relative laying in bed waiting to die and the next paragraph started with a description of a table loaded with food.)
The descriptions and conclusions also seemed very superficial. I chose the book because I was very interested in learning about life in China today. I stayed with it to the very end hoping I'd learn more, but nothing more ever came. When I finally finished I felt I'd wasted my time and wished I quit sooner.
December 15, 2015
I acquired this little book last year from a local library that has piles of English books particularly and neatly stacked up in a room, quite cozy and convenient for readers who like to be more bilingual （like me）.
The protagnists are those migrant female workers, the young girls who fleed their imporverished rural villages in quest of a better city life.
The book primarily covered a period from late 90s and early 00s. At a time particularly in 90s, if they strive for something new they need to challenge and break the bonds of the old world and traditions where their options are extremely limited. Most girls would end up being married at young age and their fates are mostly set . There is no other alternative if not choosing to go outside.
Village life was never a pastoral scenery swarmed with arresting tranquility and poignant nostalgia. If you rusticate for a while yearning for a flavor of country life, think it again and get yourself prepared for a disillusionment.（thing changed a bit in recent years）
What impressed me most was author mentioned that when rural teenagers were trying to do something new and desperately in need of life guidance their parents will invariably and inevitably offer the worst advice. They were never privileged to attain favorable guidance as their urban peers did.
Dreams are great but the reality won't always offer them romantic answers. Almost poorly educated, Village girls ,if not most of them, would end up as workers in those obnoxious sweatshops.
I swear you were not rare to see those reports on incessant cases of jumping-off-the-roof stuff in some or other of those factories a few years ago even you didn't pay much attention to China.
Things transformed a bit these years but the “constructive conflict” still taneciously persists in modern China with the fact that rural people , migrant workers included, never can access to an identity belonging in cities however hard they try, however affluent they may be.
The book succeeded in exposing the real life of individuals instead of focusing on the big picture of social transformation.I love the way the author drawing us a bittersweet picture through the eyes and experiences of insignificant individuals like most Chinese people ,like me..
But the defects are also noticeable. The book seems not have arranged its chapers chronologically , which made me kindof bewildered and excruciating.
I will give the book three and a half stars.
The protagnists are those migrant female workers, the young girls who fleed their imporverished rural villages in quest of a better city life.
The book primarily covered a period from late 90s and early 00s. At a time particularly in 90s, if they strive for something new they need to challenge and break the bonds of the old world and traditions where their options are extremely limited. Most girls would end up being married at young age and their fates are mostly set . There is no other alternative if not choosing to go outside.
Village life was never a pastoral scenery swarmed with arresting tranquility and poignant nostalgia. If you rusticate for a while yearning for a flavor of country life, think it again and get yourself prepared for a disillusionment.（thing changed a bit in recent years）
What impressed me most was author mentioned that when rural teenagers were trying to do something new and desperately in need of life guidance their parents will invariably and inevitably offer the worst advice. They were never privileged to attain favorable guidance as their urban peers did.
Dreams are great but the reality won't always offer them romantic answers. Almost poorly educated, Village girls ,if not most of them, would end up as workers in those obnoxious sweatshops.
I swear you were not rare to see those reports on incessant cases of jumping-off-the-roof stuff in some or other of those factories a few years ago even you didn't pay much attention to China.
Things transformed a bit these years but the “constructive conflict” still taneciously persists in modern China with the fact that rural people , migrant workers included, never can access to an identity belonging in cities however hard they try, however affluent they may be.
The book succeeded in exposing the real life of individuals instead of focusing on the big picture of social transformation.I love the way the author drawing us a bittersweet picture through the eyes and experiences of insignificant individuals like most Chinese people ,like me..
But the defects are also noticeable. The book seems not have arranged its chapers chronologically , which made me kindof bewildered and excruciating.
I will give the book three and a half stars.
August 11, 2009
Some people, when they travel, are most amazed by the differences they find ... the donkeys, the tuk-tuks, the rat-on-a-platter, the strange drinks and weird foods. Others are most taken aback by the unexpected similarities: the corn farmer with a cell phone, the slum dweller playing Grand Theft Auto 4, the kids who rock out to punk and metal. The best travel writers and foreign reporters, though, simply see.
This is a splendid, splendid book. It's not only better than I expected, it might even be better than it has any right to be, because it so easily could have been awful. It so easily could have been another why-China-will-rule-the-world book, or another how-the-West-is-ruining-the-East book, or even--since the author weaves the story of her own family's immigrations into the larger story of the current mass migration from farm to factory--another ersatz Joy Luck Club wannabe about how tough it is to be Chinese. Instead, it's a perceptive, funny, sympathetic, and often deeply moving story of forgotten people and forgotten histories. Chang, in profiling the women who come from rural China to the bustling factories of the southern provinces, provides a compelling narrative of the way that the people of China are trapped between the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and those of unfettered hyper-capitalism, and she does so in a way that is critical and clear-eyed, yet refrains from easy potshots and sweeping judgments.
If Factory Girls is a little short on analysis, it is full of insight. It is also surprisingly well written ("The houses of Liutai sat amid rolling hills, each one set apart from the next and facing a different direction, like a fistful of dice flung across the valley"); its final paragraph reminded me of nothing so much as the lovely, elegiac ending of A Bend in the River, also a fine book about being far from home. I expect more good things from Ms. Chang. She is a writer who sees.
This is a splendid, splendid book. It's not only better than I expected, it might even be better than it has any right to be, because it so easily could have been awful. It so easily could have been another why-China-will-rule-the-world book, or another how-the-West-is-ruining-the-East book, or even--since the author weaves the story of her own family's immigrations into the larger story of the current mass migration from farm to factory--another ersatz Joy Luck Club wannabe about how tough it is to be Chinese. Instead, it's a perceptive, funny, sympathetic, and often deeply moving story of forgotten people and forgotten histories. Chang, in profiling the women who come from rural China to the bustling factories of the southern provinces, provides a compelling narrative of the way that the people of China are trapped between the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and those of unfettered hyper-capitalism, and she does so in a way that is critical and clear-eyed, yet refrains from easy potshots and sweeping judgments.
If Factory Girls is a little short on analysis, it is full of insight. It is also surprisingly well written ("The houses of Liutai sat amid rolling hills, each one set apart from the next and facing a different direction, like a fistful of dice flung across the valley"); its final paragraph reminded me of nothing so much as the lovely, elegiac ending of A Bend in the River, also a fine book about being far from home. I expect more good things from Ms. Chang. She is a writer who sees.
Read
February 5, 2020Amazing (but really not shocking) how much cultural overlap there is between the families depicted in this book and Afghan families. Young women leaving their rural homes to work in urban factories tilted the social hierarchy. Their agency came from their economic empowerment.
Plenty of people have asked me when I think the status of girls/women in Afghanistan will fundamentally change or when the bacha posh practice will cease to exist. I've always believed that the more society sees women as contributors to household and community economies, the more people's thinking will bend toward equality. That's what makes education and employment opportunity critical.
Plenty of people have asked me when I think the status of girls/women in Afghanistan will fundamentally change or when the bacha posh practice will cease to exist. I've always believed that the more society sees women as contributors to household and community economies, the more people's thinking will bend toward equality. That's what makes education and employment opportunity critical.
February 11, 2020
This book is more than a little dated by now, but it still gives the reader a useful look into the Chinese psyche. While the realities of the cities mentioned in it, like Shenzhen & Dongguan, have undoubtedly changed a lot, there are still large swathes of the country yet to experience the same wave of transformation. As China now develops inwards away from key coastal areas, these other areas will likely go through the same metamorphosis.
One statement quoted several times in the book stuck with me.
"In the end, you can only rely on yourself".
Said often in the face of personal setbacks and disappointments, it is a powerful snapshot of the tenacity and resilience of the largest population on earth.
One statement quoted several times in the book stuck with me.
"In the end, you can only rely on yourself".
Said often in the face of personal setbacks and disappointments, it is a powerful snapshot of the tenacity and resilience of the largest population on earth.
February 14, 2021
I read this book 1st about 10 years ago and just now have listen to it and audible while following along with the Kindle version. As a result I have taken a lot of paragraphs out of the book and they are included along with this review.
The author is a Chinese American Who speaks Chinese and spent a considerable amount of time interacting with people at a very human level to be able to write this book. But as she acknowledges in the book she primarily relies on her relationship with only two young women in China for her knowledge of factory girls. It would be hard to say that to people could be representative of literally millions of young women who moved from the country to the city at a very young age to find work.
The book tries to bring two separate stories together: the story of the factory girls and the family history of the author whose family was divided by the communist takeover in 1949. The book makes a real effort to understand the mentality of the people in the country who have lived through incredibly traumatic times and experienced major changes. I found listening to the books that struggle with understanding the development and thought process of the people in China in the last half of the 20th century To be a fascinating experience.
——-___________
Factory Girls is the story of change and that change is examined through young girls who migrated from their rural homes to the factory city of Dongguan in the south of China as well as Chang’s exploration of her family history in China before her father migrated to Taiwan at the age of twelve when the Communist Party defeated Chiang Kai-shek and assumed power in 1949. Eventually he immigrates to the U.S. where Chang was born. She watched the Cultural Revolution in China from her family’s home in suburban New York. And eventually she returned to her homeland as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal to write a series of articles about young women as migrants. That work lead to this book.
I found the stories to be very readable and engrossing. The author writes in the first person, is a participant in the story (or is at least embedded, as goes the current phrase) and is often asking the girls just the question we want answered. But she does far more than ask questions; she blends into the events and reflects those events from her own point of view. The personalization of the factory girls is accomplished by following the lives of two of the girls who left home in their teens and made a new life for themselves. Their adopted home has a population of seven million with over five million of those being migrants. Chang, fluent in Chinese and with a Chinese background, lived in China for a decade including three years living in very close association with the young women about whom she writes. She went back to the house that her family had fled in 1948. She travelled and spent the Chinese New Year with the rural family of one of the girls. She shadowed the life of a factory girl.
The girls opened their lives to her to an amazing degree sharing their hopes and loves and struggles, not to mention adventures and boyfriend dating lives.
Chang writes very comfortably with novel descriptions of people she meets:
If you are interested in learning about life in China as young people move from rural to urban, this would be a great book. It would be fair to say that I like this book as much as I like the Peter Hessler books about his experiences living and traveling in China. Maybe that is not such a coincidence that Peter and Leslie merged their interesting China lives into marriage. They currently live with their two daughters in Cairo.
In conclusion, Ms. Chang said:
It is easy to give Factory Girls four stars. It is well written and interesting. I am attracted to books about life in China since I have an adopted daughter from Aksu, China.
The author is a Chinese American Who speaks Chinese and spent a considerable amount of time interacting with people at a very human level to be able to write this book. But as she acknowledges in the book she primarily relies on her relationship with only two young women in China for her knowledge of factory girls. It would be hard to say that to people could be representative of literally millions of young women who moved from the country to the city at a very young age to find work.
The book tries to bring two separate stories together: the story of the factory girls and the family history of the author whose family was divided by the communist takeover in 1949. The book makes a real effort to understand the mentality of the people in the country who have lived through incredibly traumatic times and experienced major changes. I found listening to the books that struggle with understanding the development and thought process of the people in China in the last half of the 20th century To be a fascinating experience.
——-___________
Factory Girls is the story of change and that change is examined through young girls who migrated from their rural homes to the factory city of Dongguan in the south of China as well as Chang’s exploration of her family history in China before her father migrated to Taiwan at the age of twelve when the Communist Party defeated Chiang Kai-shek and assumed power in 1949. Eventually he immigrates to the U.S. where Chang was born. She watched the Cultural Revolution in China from her family’s home in suburban New York. And eventually she returned to her homeland as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal to write a series of articles about young women as migrants. That work lead to this book.
I found the stories to be very readable and engrossing. The author writes in the first person, is a participant in the story (or is at least embedded, as goes the current phrase) and is often asking the girls just the question we want answered. But she does far more than ask questions; she blends into the events and reflects those events from her own point of view. The personalization of the factory girls is accomplished by following the lives of two of the girls who left home in their teens and made a new life for themselves. Their adopted home has a population of seven million with over five million of those being migrants. Chang, fluent in Chinese and with a Chinese background, lived in China for a decade including three years living in very close association with the young women about whom she writes. She went back to the house that her family had fled in 1948. She travelled and spent the Chinese New Year with the rural family of one of the girls. She shadowed the life of a factory girl.
Staying in Min’s village made me think about my own family. Long ago when my parents were children in China, they had grown up in a similar way.
The girls opened their lives to her to an amazing degree sharing their hopes and loves and struggles, not to mention adventures and boyfriend dating lives.
In the factory towns of the south, I was meeting young women and watching them learn how to be individuals. They found jobs; they confronted bosses; they tried to learn new skills. Mostly they came to believe that they mattered, despite their humble origins. Do not feel inferior because we are ordinary migrant workers, Chunming wrote in her diary. We have no reason to feel inferior. In Zhang Hong’s world, it was still 1957 [the Great Leap Forward]. He loved himself; he hated himself. He hated Mao; he quoted Mao constantly. He despised the Party; he belonged to the party.
…
My thanks go first to those I knew in Dongguan, who taught me so much about this city in which we were all outsiders. Lu Quigmin and Wu Chunming generously opened up their eyes to me, granting me their trust, patience, time, and lasting friendship. Zhang Qianqian and Jia Jimei showed me life on the assembly line, while Jiang Haiyan and Chen Ying shared their struggles to rise above it. Liu Yixia opened my eyes to the way English is learned in a factory town.
Chang writes very comfortably with novel descriptions of people she meets:
He had dark kind eyes in a trim face the color of a walnut; he spoke deliberately, with the precise gestures of a Peking opera performer, and he never raised his voice.
She had dyed and permed her hair so it was long and crinkly, like caramel taffy.
He was three years older than Min and as skinny as a hastily drawn cartoon character, with long limbs and a narrow handsome face and a bashful smile.
The boyfriend answered the door. His face was narrow and tough and darkish red, like a cord of beef jerky; he looked to be in his forties.
He had a narrow face that came to a point at his chin and a tiny square mustache that hung on his upper lip, like a stray postage stamp.
He had a thin face, with the skin stretched tight over the cheekbones and hair so short it gave him a permanently startled expression.
The boy, Zhang Bin, had a narrow face, round dark eyes, and pale cheeks that were flushed with nervousness.
If you are interested in learning about life in China as young people move from rural to urban, this would be a great book. It would be fair to say that I like this book as much as I like the Peter Hessler books about his experiences living and traveling in China. Maybe that is not such a coincidence that Peter and Leslie merged their interesting China lives into marriage. They currently live with their two daughters in Cairo.
In conclusion, Ms. Chang said:
Learning my family story also changed the way I saw the factory towns of the south. There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave you village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real. The journey my grandfather attempted was one that millions of young people now make every day – they left home; they entered an unfamiliar land; they worked hard. But nowadays their purpose was not to change China’s fate. They were concerned with their own destinies, and they made their own decisions. If it was an ugly world, at least it was their own.
It is easy to give Factory Girls four stars. It is well written and interesting. I am attracted to books about life in China since I have an adopted daughter from Aksu, China.
January 25, 2014
I suppose for a reader not yet familiar with China, much of this book content would be quite shocking and enlightening. I did not particularly feel that way, yet still there are many insights worth reading.
The main focus of the book, these factory girls, or we should rather call them migrants (since at first I mistook the word "factory girls" for workers on assembly lines only), are fascinating. Instead of knowing them through the usual presentation of statistics, numbers and graphs, plus some sensational stories, Leslie Chang simply looks into several ordinary girls that she seems to stumble upon by complete chance. After getting to know these migrants, we find them not so ordinary anymore, we find them, in fact, extra-ordinary, in both good and bad lights. These stories are the ones that draw me most, their emotional struggle, their pragmatic dealing with the world they live in. Unfortunately, I find the structure of the book quite frustrating. To the book's credit, I realize life is not so easily categorized and ordered into separate aspects, such as work, study, marriage, family. And none of these girls' stories are complete, so it is after all an endless struggle, with repeated occurrences of many issues. Nevertheless, I think the book could be trimmed down and ordered more effectively.
I am not that interested in looking at Chang's comments on national characteristics, the "Chineseness" of many things she found in the country. I am deeply skeptical about thinking there is a unique "essence" that marks the difference of one group of people to all others. As if some of their experiences are true to them only, as if some resulted reactions could happen to them only. It shares some shortcomings with How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, I think. No, my personal belief, that if you have a lens large enough to look at a wide span of history, you would find humankind is pretty much universal. We find ourselves in many other people throughout history. The circumstances are not exactly the same, but there are ones very similar. Yet, we tend to exaggerate what we find as special.
I am not that interested in Chang's personal family history and her quest to reconcile with a home she had not known for many years. The connection between her story and those of factory girls seem a little bit stretched and very much personal. They are not really meaningful connection to me, but surely to the author since she could better make sense of her world.
On the other hand, I appreciate Chang's effort to understand how people try to deal with their pasts, how memories and history are treated, how history might be a burden, a very heavy baggage. But I come to a slightly different conclusion. There are perhaps two ways of dealing with history, one is ignoring it, pretending it differently; another is facing, confronting it. Both works, you know. We do both ways at the same time, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
The main focus of the book, these factory girls, or we should rather call them migrants (since at first I mistook the word "factory girls" for workers on assembly lines only), are fascinating. Instead of knowing them through the usual presentation of statistics, numbers and graphs, plus some sensational stories, Leslie Chang simply looks into several ordinary girls that she seems to stumble upon by complete chance. After getting to know these migrants, we find them not so ordinary anymore, we find them, in fact, extra-ordinary, in both good and bad lights. These stories are the ones that draw me most, their emotional struggle, their pragmatic dealing with the world they live in. Unfortunately, I find the structure of the book quite frustrating. To the book's credit, I realize life is not so easily categorized and ordered into separate aspects, such as work, study, marriage, family. And none of these girls' stories are complete, so it is after all an endless struggle, with repeated occurrences of many issues. Nevertheless, I think the book could be trimmed down and ordered more effectively.
I am not that interested in looking at Chang's comments on national characteristics, the "Chineseness" of many things she found in the country. I am deeply skeptical about thinking there is a unique "essence" that marks the difference of one group of people to all others. As if some of their experiences are true to them only, as if some resulted reactions could happen to them only. It shares some shortcomings with How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, I think. No, my personal belief, that if you have a lens large enough to look at a wide span of history, you would find humankind is pretty much universal. We find ourselves in many other people throughout history. The circumstances are not exactly the same, but there are ones very similar. Yet, we tend to exaggerate what we find as special.
I am not that interested in Chang's personal family history and her quest to reconcile with a home she had not known for many years. The connection between her story and those of factory girls seem a little bit stretched and very much personal. They are not really meaningful connection to me, but surely to the author since she could better make sense of her world.
On the other hand, I appreciate Chang's effort to understand how people try to deal with their pasts, how memories and history are treated, how history might be a burden, a very heavy baggage. But I come to a slightly different conclusion. There are perhaps two ways of dealing with history, one is ignoring it, pretending it differently; another is facing, confronting it. Both works, you know. We do both ways at the same time, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
November 19, 2021
As a part of a genre of works of the requisite "my time in China book" by Western journalists, this is one of the best, despite some flaws.
Chang writes about these girls not as just labor automatons or powerless victims but as whole people. They work, they date, they have ambition, they make mistakes. Chang does not judge them but with careful and empathetic precision, she chronicles their lives. This encompassing view is refreshing and is a rather liberating perspective for a population that seems so faceless and dreary in popular imagination.
Chang also does a good job dispelling some myths and offering a new perspective of how labor and commerce functioned in a factory town in the mid aughts. Our images of a prison-like Chinese factory is not entirely accurate as laborers constantly cycle in and out, freely moving and negotiating for higher and higher wages in different workplaces. The proliferation of direct sales MLM pyramid schemes is both alarming but strangely touching as it takes a lot of self-confidence (and self-delusion) to pursue something like that and it showcases an individualistic mindset that is often denied to the Chinese masses in Western imagination.
This book really should have been two as she interweaves her own family's extraordinary history in the 20th century throughout her reporting. While compelling, it seemed like neither narrative could fully breathe on its own. It felt a tad navel-gazey with her making some equivalencies between her grandfather's migration to America for education and these factory girls migration from the countryside to the city.
Another problem of the book is its unclear language on "Chinese-ness." Chang assumes a level of static generalization of Chinese culture to emphasize the break that these factory girls are making from the past. This static generalizations, however pervasive, deserve a bit more scrutiny which Chang does not pursue.
Chang writes about these girls not as just labor automatons or powerless victims but as whole people. They work, they date, they have ambition, they make mistakes. Chang does not judge them but with careful and empathetic precision, she chronicles their lives. This encompassing view is refreshing and is a rather liberating perspective for a population that seems so faceless and dreary in popular imagination.
Chang also does a good job dispelling some myths and offering a new perspective of how labor and commerce functioned in a factory town in the mid aughts. Our images of a prison-like Chinese factory is not entirely accurate as laborers constantly cycle in and out, freely moving and negotiating for higher and higher wages in different workplaces. The proliferation of direct sales MLM pyramid schemes is both alarming but strangely touching as it takes a lot of self-confidence (and self-delusion) to pursue something like that and it showcases an individualistic mindset that is often denied to the Chinese masses in Western imagination.
This book really should have been two as she interweaves her own family's extraordinary history in the 20th century throughout her reporting. While compelling, it seemed like neither narrative could fully breathe on its own. It felt a tad navel-gazey with her making some equivalencies between her grandfather's migration to America for education and these factory girls migration from the countryside to the city.
Another problem of the book is its unclear language on "Chinese-ness." Chang assumes a level of static generalization of Chinese culture to emphasize the break that these factory girls are making from the past. This static generalizations, however pervasive, deserve a bit more scrutiny which Chang does not pursue.
May 3, 2011
3 stars but at times 2 1/2. Parts were very interesting while other parts seemed repetitive. The author focuses on a couple of young women who leave the country areas of China, travel to the main cities and seek work in the factories there. Their stories are sad mostly, as they are at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. However they also live an unreal lifestyle - easily moving from one factory to the next (often just on the say so of a stranger) in the hope that conditions would be better elsewhere. They are vulnerable to all sorts of unfair practices and exploitation, even prostitution if they are not careful (altho none of the women in this book fall into that trap). Of course one character appealed to me more than the other, but that adds to the interest. A Chinese work colleague confirmed for me that what I am reading is absolutely correct. Recommended if you have an interest in China, it's current culture and the lifestyle choices its people will make in the hope of leaving one world behind them and embracing the new. Sadly the new isn't all it's made out to be.
March 23, 2017
Factory Girls deals with a fascinating subject, but unfortunately it was a very slow read. Leslie T. Chang is a Wall Street Journal reporter; her writing style is probably fine for relatively brief newspaper articles, but not so effective for a longer work.
Chang also decided to include long stretches of her own family history, and has said she did this to make the writing experience more interesting for herself. I'm sorry to say this did not translate into a more interesting reading experience, at least not for this reader. Those sections might have worked if Chang had a more engaging writing style, or if they were somehow integrated better into the main narrative, but as it is, they felt endless and weren't tied in very well with the actual topic of the book.
I did learn a lot from Factory Girls, but I wish I'd been able to enjoy the experience more.
Chang also decided to include long stretches of her own family history, and has said she did this to make the writing experience more interesting for herself. I'm sorry to say this did not translate into a more interesting reading experience, at least not for this reader. Those sections might have worked if Chang had a more engaging writing style, or if they were somehow integrated better into the main narrative, but as it is, they felt endless and weren't tied in very well with the actual topic of the book.
I did learn a lot from Factory Girls, but I wish I'd been able to enjoy the experience more.
September 16, 2023
C’est un livre qui plairait bcp a madame Salmon. On y suit le parcours de jeunes migrantes en Chine dans les années 2000.
Je le prête à qui veut !
Le titre en français ne correspond pas vraiment à ce qu’il y a dans le livre selon moi. C’est une des choses que je trouve dommage. En fait le livre est bien plus intéressant que juste le parcours de deux femmes. c’est vraiment une réflexion sur la Chine.
Le début du livre m’a un peu ennuyé. J’ai trouvé que l’auteure avait un point de vue un peu cliché et même parfois un peu faux sur l’Histoire. Mais finalement, le livre est un voyage initiatique (biographique) de l’auteure. Elle va apprendre ��normément sur elle même et sa famille. Elle a aussi un point de vue psychologique intéressant et j’ai beaucoup apprécié le fait qu’elle ne juge jamais les autres.
Cependant les récits se mélangent un peu et parfois je ne me rappelais plus qui était qui.
Je le prête à qui veut !
Le titre en français ne correspond pas vraiment à ce qu’il y a dans le livre selon moi. C’est une des choses que je trouve dommage. En fait le livre est bien plus intéressant que juste le parcours de deux femmes. c’est vraiment une réflexion sur la Chine.
Le début du livre m’a un peu ennuyé. J’ai trouvé que l’auteure avait un point de vue un peu cliché et même parfois un peu faux sur l’Histoire. Mais finalement, le livre est un voyage initiatique (biographique) de l’auteure. Elle va apprendre ��normément sur elle même et sa famille. Elle a aussi un point de vue psychologique intéressant et j’ai beaucoup apprécié le fait qu’elle ne juge jamais les autres.
Cependant les récits se mélangent un peu et parfois je ne me rappelais plus qui était qui.
June 7, 2016
This book explores two related topics: the conditions and situation of female migrant workers in China, and the author's family history in China (she is American but her family immigrated in the mid-20th century). The former is much, much more compelling than the latter, which to me seemed meaningful for the author but ultimately not compelling enough, or connected enough to the broader story, to warrant being included in the book. Some of the interesting things I learned from this book:
--employers withhold the first two months of a worker's pay, and one who leaves without approval (which is difficult to obtain) means forfeiting this money. Nonetheless this often happens, if better positions are available, as climbing the ladder from floor worker to supervisor or especially positions like secretary is well worth it.
--China has 130 million migrant workers, three times as many as immigrated from Europe to America over the course of a century
--money sent home is the largest source of wealth accumulation for rural families. In contrast with prior generations of migrant workers, women (or, really, girls, as they are quite young) who leave home now rarely return to farming permanently, as they never knew this life previously. Older generations care for younger children and harvest the fields. However, the rural lifestyle does provide a safety net for workers, and the author postulates that China does not feature the shanty towns prevalent in other developing (or for that matter developed) countries because of this safety net.
--Also in contrast with previous generations of migrant workers, today's do not face the same sort of intimidation from police, or discrimination, because in many towns they are now the overwhelming majority of factory workers.
--Based on working conditions, European- or American-owned factories are most preferred, followed by Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally domestic companies.
--Power supply shortages are prominent and often limit working hours
--70,000 people work at the Yue Yuen shoe factory, which makes athletic shoes for several major manufacturers. When Nike and Adidas came under pressure to improve working conditions, they went to an 11-hour workday at the factory, and gave workers Sundays off--but this prompted many workers to quit because they could no longer get enough overtime. I thought this was an interesting microcosm of the problem of imposing developed-world values onto the developing world.
As noted, though, I thought the author's discussion of her family history really dragged, and that ultimately the book would have been better without it. In addition, these parts are more prone to unnecessarily over-the-top language and lame similes like:
"An incident from half a century ago would be recalled differently, with each person's version fixed and distinct--pieces of China they carried with them that had hardened over time, like precious pebbles worn smooth."
"Zhao sat perfectly straight on the couch--as stiff-backed as a young cadet, and arrogant in this knowledge. Silently he pointed to himself, his thumb aiming at his chest like a dagger that has found its target."
"The Cultural Revolution took everything the Chinese people had long held sacred and smashed it to pieces, like an antique vase hurled against the wall."
Nonetheless, the discussion of this class of Chinese women, and the Chinese migrant-worker economy, is interesting and makes this book worth reading.
--employers withhold the first two months of a worker's pay, and one who leaves without approval (which is difficult to obtain) means forfeiting this money. Nonetheless this often happens, if better positions are available, as climbing the ladder from floor worker to supervisor or especially positions like secretary is well worth it.
--China has 130 million migrant workers, three times as many as immigrated from Europe to America over the course of a century
--money sent home is the largest source of wealth accumulation for rural families. In contrast with prior generations of migrant workers, women (or, really, girls, as they are quite young) who leave home now rarely return to farming permanently, as they never knew this life previously. Older generations care for younger children and harvest the fields. However, the rural lifestyle does provide a safety net for workers, and the author postulates that China does not feature the shanty towns prevalent in other developing (or for that matter developed) countries because of this safety net.
--Also in contrast with previous generations of migrant workers, today's do not face the same sort of intimidation from police, or discrimination, because in many towns they are now the overwhelming majority of factory workers.
--Based on working conditions, European- or American-owned factories are most preferred, followed by Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally domestic companies.
--Power supply shortages are prominent and often limit working hours
--70,000 people work at the Yue Yuen shoe factory, which makes athletic shoes for several major manufacturers. When Nike and Adidas came under pressure to improve working conditions, they went to an 11-hour workday at the factory, and gave workers Sundays off--but this prompted many workers to quit because they could no longer get enough overtime. I thought this was an interesting microcosm of the problem of imposing developed-world values onto the developing world.
As noted, though, I thought the author's discussion of her family history really dragged, and that ultimately the book would have been better without it. In addition, these parts are more prone to unnecessarily over-the-top language and lame similes like:
"An incident from half a century ago would be recalled differently, with each person's version fixed and distinct--pieces of China they carried with them that had hardened over time, like precious pebbles worn smooth."
"Zhao sat perfectly straight on the couch--as stiff-backed as a young cadet, and arrogant in this knowledge. Silently he pointed to himself, his thumb aiming at his chest like a dagger that has found its target."
"The Cultural Revolution took everything the Chinese people had long held sacred and smashed it to pieces, like an antique vase hurled against the wall."
Nonetheless, the discussion of this class of Chinese women, and the Chinese migrant-worker economy, is interesting and makes this book worth reading.
December 17, 2017
Author Leslie Chang is Peter Hessler's wife. The couple is renowned for their non-fiction books on contemporary China. Chang uses plain yet informative language to write the stories of factory girls. This book is said to be the first in its kind dealing with this group. Factory girls are those who leave hometown for cities on the East Coast. Major manufacturing hubs are in these big cities. They can't earn enough money in villages. Therefore, many people abandon their schools and start working in factories when they turn 16.
Among these people, about one third are women. As you can imagine, you go outside, far away from homes, at such a young age. Everything must be hectic but exciting as well. These young girls are forced to 'grow' fast in desperate situations. They may encounter abuse, betrayal, intimidation, anxiety, and many other negative things. They might be naive at first, but all of them would gradually be 'adults'. The transformation would take only one or two years, and they would be like a whole new person.
Chang follows several girls like these and chronicles their changes. There are two major protagonists who are more willing to share stories with Chang. The others might appear in only one chapter. Then they would disappear. It's a norm in this world. People come and leave constantly. Some may go back to hometown, get married, have children, and follow Chinese traditions. Some may choose to go to another city searching for better opportunities.
Chang spent two years in a major manufacturing hub, Dongguan, doing research. She not only followed the girls but also observed the city itself. Dongguan is known as the sex capital of China. She went to the nightclubs and saw many spectacles. You can use Youtube to get a glimpse of this unbelievable industry. Some girls found working as prostitutes more profitable (like 12 times higher) than assembly workers. So they chose the 'shortcut' to earn more money. It's really sad to see this phenomenon.
"Factory Girls" is a book about ordinary figures. There in no complaint or suggestion for a greater China. These are simply stories of normal people who are working hard for their dreams. You could watch Chang's Ted speech on youtube. After reading the book, I am impressed by their diligence and resilience. Modern capitalism works because of their hard works (and sacrifice?) We should always be grateful for these people and contribute more back to the society.
Among these people, about one third are women. As you can imagine, you go outside, far away from homes, at such a young age. Everything must be hectic but exciting as well. These young girls are forced to 'grow' fast in desperate situations. They may encounter abuse, betrayal, intimidation, anxiety, and many other negative things. They might be naive at first, but all of them would gradually be 'adults'. The transformation would take only one or two years, and they would be like a whole new person.
Chang follows several girls like these and chronicles their changes. There are two major protagonists who are more willing to share stories with Chang. The others might appear in only one chapter. Then they would disappear. It's a norm in this world. People come and leave constantly. Some may go back to hometown, get married, have children, and follow Chinese traditions. Some may choose to go to another city searching for better opportunities.
Chang spent two years in a major manufacturing hub, Dongguan, doing research. She not only followed the girls but also observed the city itself. Dongguan is known as the sex capital of China. She went to the nightclubs and saw many spectacles. You can use Youtube to get a glimpse of this unbelievable industry. Some girls found working as prostitutes more profitable (like 12 times higher) than assembly workers. So they chose the 'shortcut' to earn more money. It's really sad to see this phenomenon.
"Factory Girls" is a book about ordinary figures. There in no complaint or suggestion for a greater China. These are simply stories of normal people who are working hard for their dreams. You could watch Chang's Ted speech on youtube. After reading the book, I am impressed by their diligence and resilience. Modern capitalism works because of their hard works (and sacrifice?) We should always be grateful for these people and contribute more back to the society.
July 10, 2012
When my sister asked what I was reading recently, I told her it was a book about Chinese factory workers.
“God, you’re worthy,” she replied scathingly.
But the thing is – despite its worthy subject matter and uncomfortably small print – Factory Girls is actually a highly enjoyable read. Providing a flipside to all those “terrible working conditions, suicides, general calamity” articles about manufacturing in China, Leslie T Chang seeks to find out more about the average Chinese factory worker on a very human level.
What she finds is, yes, long hours and exploitation for many. But she also finds a number of spirited, ambitious young women whose lives are surprisingly easy to relate to. Through these highly-personal stories, Chang draws out some very interesting analysis of Chinese culture and society in the 21st century.
The book’s only misstep, in my opinion, is Chang’s decision to include lengthy digressions into her own family history. It felt a little like Chang was trying to research her family tree on her publisher’s dime.
That aside, Factory Girls is illuminating and eminently readable. Recommended.
“God, you’re worthy,” she replied scathingly.
But the thing is – despite its worthy subject matter and uncomfortably small print – Factory Girls is actually a highly enjoyable read. Providing a flipside to all those “terrible working conditions, suicides, general calamity” articles about manufacturing in China, Leslie T Chang seeks to find out more about the average Chinese factory worker on a very human level.
What she finds is, yes, long hours and exploitation for many. But she also finds a number of spirited, ambitious young women whose lives are surprisingly easy to relate to. Through these highly-personal stories, Chang draws out some very interesting analysis of Chinese culture and society in the 21st century.
The book’s only misstep, in my opinion, is Chang’s decision to include lengthy digressions into her own family history. It felt a little like Chang was trying to research her family tree on her publisher’s dime.
That aside, Factory Girls is illuminating and eminently readable. Recommended.
March 24, 2009
This book is a bit hard to review because it is somewhat more complex than one would first expect.
The story turns out to be a bit different than the preconceived notion also.
For the positive, the writer had a background at the wall st journal,
probably the least biased newspaper in America and this gave her the mindset and habit to write an interesting and unbiased account of this unusual mass migration from rice patty to factory.
She also integrated her life with her subjects to an unusual degree which gave her more information and allowed her the chance for personal growth and self understanding.
One gets the impression that previous to writing the book she ignored the Chinese aspect of her personal history, but in spending so much time with ambitious Chinese girls, she came to see a side of herself she had previously ignored.
The author comes across as a bright, spunky, likeable person so this helped to make the book an interesting read.
She lists quite a few interesting observations about Chinese behavior that are good too.
The 70 pages of personal family history was unexpected and while it probably made her parents happy, the book would have been better without that.
She went with one of the girls to the home farm twice and tells of life there, a high def. TV that the kids watch all day long,
but no indoor plumbing or heating, so they have to stand up and jump around to stay warm while watching it.
3-8 people sleeping in a bed...
And much more.
One funny account of bathing in the country.
"the women of the family would heat a basin of water.
One after another they washed their private parts and feet, without changing the water in between.
Then the men would refill the basin and do the same.
Every so often, the family members took a sponge bath, but that was usually different from the once in many days they washed their hair.
Eventually every part of the body would be clean, although rarely at the same time."
But, the factory girls themselves:
Most accounts tell of the low pay and long hours, they make it seem like the poor girls live a life of misery.
But throughout the book one feels that the girls don't feel that way, instead they look to the future with optimism that with each year their life is getting better and that they have more choices.
There is a sense of excitement.
Few things make people as happy as being optimistic about the future,
and except for one adult man who is fighting the government about a grievance from long ago, there are no sad sacks or whiner's in this book.
Just a hoard of ambitious people relentlessly pushing ahead with high expectations.
The major disappointment is that except for one photo on the back cover there are NO photos.
The dorms & lunchrooms they live in, the factory floor, the train stations, the farm back home, a hundred interesting images that one can only imagine.
The China of today is so different from China of 20 years ago,
and 20 years from now it will again be so different.
A photo record of this transformation is needed.
The story turns out to be a bit different than the preconceived notion also.
For the positive, the writer had a background at the wall st journal,
probably the least biased newspaper in America and this gave her the mindset and habit to write an interesting and unbiased account of this unusual mass migration from rice patty to factory.
She also integrated her life with her subjects to an unusual degree which gave her more information and allowed her the chance for personal growth and self understanding.
One gets the impression that previous to writing the book she ignored the Chinese aspect of her personal history, but in spending so much time with ambitious Chinese girls, she came to see a side of herself she had previously ignored.
The author comes across as a bright, spunky, likeable person so this helped to make the book an interesting read.
She lists quite a few interesting observations about Chinese behavior that are good too.
The 70 pages of personal family history was unexpected and while it probably made her parents happy, the book would have been better without that.
She went with one of the girls to the home farm twice and tells of life there, a high def. TV that the kids watch all day long,
but no indoor plumbing or heating, so they have to stand up and jump around to stay warm while watching it.
3-8 people sleeping in a bed...
And much more.
One funny account of bathing in the country.
"the women of the family would heat a basin of water.
One after another they washed their private parts and feet, without changing the water in between.
Then the men would refill the basin and do the same.
Every so often, the family members took a sponge bath, but that was usually different from the once in many days they washed their hair.
Eventually every part of the body would be clean, although rarely at the same time."
But, the factory girls themselves:
Most accounts tell of the low pay and long hours, they make it seem like the poor girls live a life of misery.
But throughout the book one feels that the girls don't feel that way, instead they look to the future with optimism that with each year their life is getting better and that they have more choices.
There is a sense of excitement.
Few things make people as happy as being optimistic about the future,
and except for one adult man who is fighting the government about a grievance from long ago, there are no sad sacks or whiner's in this book.
Just a hoard of ambitious people relentlessly pushing ahead with high expectations.
The major disappointment is that except for one photo on the back cover there are NO photos.
The dorms & lunchrooms they live in, the factory floor, the train stations, the farm back home, a hundred interesting images that one can only imagine.
The China of today is so different from China of 20 years ago,
and 20 years from now it will again be so different.
A photo record of this transformation is needed.
April 30, 2016
An account of girls moving from rural areas to the big cities for better opportunities, a universal story that could be told in different countries and by many women, including my mother. The first bit of this includes the fairly brutal factory conditions, the chaotic hiring practices and poor living conditions, mill girls from the 19th century gave similar accounts, the Chinese version has been in the news lately.
Next the author gives an account of her grandfather's quest for education that includes college in America and a beating given by his father for changing majors and his murder by persons unknown. His devotion to his country is shown thru diary entries and is contrasted later with the modern migrants who are more self-centered. The story of part of the family fleeing the Communists and some staying behind is also retold.
Following this is a bit that covers the self-help industry, pyramid scams, inferior almost cult-like schools mixed in with some dating practices. This section explores the fakery and fraud that is so much a part of the factory subculture in China. Forged IDs and credentials are common, lying about your age, phony dating pictures, nothing seems real. I've been told that there's a saying, everything but your mother is fake , this conveys the levels of deception encountered.
Next the author goes to the villages of some of her friends and shows what these girls are fleeing from; poverty, poor schools and patriarchy. It then gets you thinking, are those factory life styles really that bad compared to the alternative? Among my many Chinese friends and coworkers I have never talked to anyone not from an educated middle class or better background except for brief phone conversations along the lines of You want massage?, so this bit was fascinating. This is contrasted with her trip to her own village where no members of her family reside and only few locals remember them.
The book ends with a bit of a hodgepodge of stories that tie all the bits together including the impact of the Communist regime on China. Like most history there is good and bad, but the status of women has certainly improved tremendously, now there are women infantry officers, mayors and other high level jobs. You can read fictional but fairly accurate accounts about Chinese women at the start of the 20th century in works by Pearl S. Buck and Lin Yutang if you want somewhat depressing reads.
Next the author gives an account of her grandfather's quest for education that includes college in America and a beating given by his father for changing majors and his murder by persons unknown. His devotion to his country is shown thru diary entries and is contrasted later with the modern migrants who are more self-centered. The story of part of the family fleeing the Communists and some staying behind is also retold.
Following this is a bit that covers the self-help industry, pyramid scams, inferior almost cult-like schools mixed in with some dating practices. This section explores the fakery and fraud that is so much a part of the factory subculture in China. Forged IDs and credentials are common, lying about your age, phony dating pictures, nothing seems real. I've been told that there's a saying, everything but your mother is fake , this conveys the levels of deception encountered.
Next the author goes to the villages of some of her friends and shows what these girls are fleeing from; poverty, poor schools and patriarchy. It then gets you thinking, are those factory life styles really that bad compared to the alternative? Among my many Chinese friends and coworkers I have never talked to anyone not from an educated middle class or better background except for brief phone conversations along the lines of You want massage?, so this bit was fascinating. This is contrasted with her trip to her own village where no members of her family reside and only few locals remember them.
The book ends with a bit of a hodgepodge of stories that tie all the bits together including the impact of the Communist regime on China. Like most history there is good and bad, but the status of women has certainly improved tremendously, now there are women infantry officers, mayors and other high level jobs. You can read fictional but fairly accurate accounts about Chinese women at the start of the 20th century in works by Pearl S. Buck and Lin Yutang if you want somewhat depressing reads.
October 25, 2017
Đó là một buổi trưa trời nắng đẹp và tôi đi bộ từ ngoài cổng trường vào nhà A. Để vào toà nhà, tôi hay đi con đường dốc thoải thoải, mà cho tới giờ, khi có mặt ở Úc rồi, tôi mới nghĩ là "có thể đó là đường mà kiến trúc sư xịn của trường mình thiết kế ra để cho người tàn tật đi". Hôm đó ở đỉnh dốc, (gọi là dốc thôi chứ người ta hay ngồi bạ ngồi bừa ở bất kỳ chỗ nào trong sự thoai thoải đó), H ngồi, đang đọc một cuốn sách mà cậu đã giới thiệu cho tôi vài ba ngày trước đó. H đọc đầy đam mê, như cách tôi có thể cảm nhận được qua những lời khen đậm đặc mùi xuýt xoa của cậu. Tôi tính ngó qua chào một câu, và lên lớp, nhưng khi ngồi cùng H rồi, cậu nói tôi ngồi lại bên cậu một chút.
Và đó là tất cả những gì tôi nhớ lại về "Gái công xưởng" trước khi tôi quyết định sẽ đọc cuốn sách ở bên này, bản tiếng Anh, giữa những chộn rộn về nữ quyền, năng lực lãnh đạo, giữa tình yêu mới và những điều mới mẻ khác.
Những ngày đầu đọc sách cũng là những ngày đầu tôi bắt đầu đi làm ở một nhà máy, với vai trò công nhân. Tôi, lúc đó, cũng là một gái công xưởng. Nhưng ở một quốc gia khác. Ở một chế độ khác. Một hệ thống khác. Phong cách khác. Vậy nên đọc Gái công xưởng, phần nhiều tôi nhảy sang một bên của diễn biến nhân vật, để nghĩ về mình (cũng là gái nhà máy của vài ba năm về trước), rồi lại là mình của một vài năm sắp tới.
Gái công xưởng quả tình tới giờ không xuất sắc như ngày đó tôi mường tượng (qua những cái xuýt xoa của H, chuyện này xin đổ lỗi cho H), nhưng mang lại cho người đọc một cái nhìn nhiều vị mặn về một góc không hề nhỏ của thế giới, khi mà chuyện biết viết (và viết đep), cũng là một giá trị cao cấp.
Mặn tới mức đọc xong tôi chỉ muốn trở thành một cái cây.
Và đó là tất cả những gì tôi nhớ lại về "Gái công xưởng" trước khi tôi quyết định sẽ đọc cuốn sách ở bên này, bản tiếng Anh, giữa những chộn rộn về nữ quyền, năng lực lãnh đạo, giữa tình yêu mới và những điều mới mẻ khác.
Những ngày đầu đọc sách cũng là những ngày đầu tôi bắt đầu đi làm ở một nhà máy, với vai trò công nhân. Tôi, lúc đó, cũng là một gái công xưởng. Nhưng ở một quốc gia khác. Ở một chế độ khác. Một hệ thống khác. Phong cách khác. Vậy nên đọc Gái công xưởng, phần nhiều tôi nhảy sang một bên của diễn biến nhân vật, để nghĩ về mình (cũng là gái nhà máy của vài ba năm về trước), rồi lại là mình của một vài năm sắp tới.
Gái công xưởng quả tình tới giờ không xuất sắc như ngày đó tôi mường tượng (qua những cái xuýt xoa của H, chuyện này xin đổ lỗi cho H), nhưng mang lại cho người đọc một cái nhìn nhiều vị mặn về một góc không hề nhỏ của thế giới, khi mà chuyện biết viết (và viết đep), cũng là một giá trị cao cấp.
Mặn tới mức đọc xong tôi chỉ muốn trở thành một cái cây.
September 23, 2014
I had really high hopes for this book. Being Chinese-American, I was searching for a well-researched nonfiction book that would provide cultural insight into my heritage. I thought that learning about a segment of the population in today's China was a good place to start.
Chang brings 6 years of research with this book, mainly by following 2 women ("factory girls") through their journey from the village to Dougguan, a manufacturing hub in China. However, she also adds in stories from her own journey of ancestral discovery, excerpts from lives of other factory girls, and a random chapter about prostitution. The book was very difficult to follow, and I failed to connect with any of the characters because the flow was so disorganized. The content was extremely superficial. Chang recites conversations verbatim but is unable to diagnose the day-to-day with any overarching theme and/or connection to the superpower that China has become. Although I appreciated her own self-discovery journey, it just seemed very out-of-place. Oftentimes I felt like I was reading 4 different books, pasted together in one.
I appreciate the amount of research that goes into any piece so I'm grateful to have had this intimate insight into the lives of those she interviewed. The factories always get bad publicity for horrible working conditions and long hours. It was refreshing to read about it from the other side, learning that the women are just as opportunistic and resourceful, and in no way feel tied to a bad job.
Chang brings 6 years of research with this book, mainly by following 2 women ("factory girls") through their journey from the village to Dougguan, a manufacturing hub in China. However, she also adds in stories from her own journey of ancestral discovery, excerpts from lives of other factory girls, and a random chapter about prostitution. The book was very difficult to follow, and I failed to connect with any of the characters because the flow was so disorganized. The content was extremely superficial. Chang recites conversations verbatim but is unable to diagnose the day-to-day with any overarching theme and/or connection to the superpower that China has become. Although I appreciated her own self-discovery journey, it just seemed very out-of-place. Oftentimes I felt like I was reading 4 different books, pasted together in one.
I appreciate the amount of research that goes into any piece so I'm grateful to have had this intimate insight into the lives of those she interviewed. The factories always get bad publicity for horrible working conditions and long hours. It was refreshing to read about it from the other side, learning that the women are just as opportunistic and resourceful, and in no way feel tied to a bad job.
August 30, 2012
In 'Factory Girls', Leslie unfolded the desperate life of female migrants in China's industrial cities. The book had a great beginning with many real-life accounts of young girls working in sweatshops in China. Those were the young and ambitious women who worked stressfully in assembly lines, who found themselves tangled in danger of being exploited and assaulted, and who had to depend on no other than themself to break away. Sadly, there were just few of them who managed to create their own new future while the rest of them were still struggling behind the walls of factories. All stories were vivid.
However, it would have been an excellent book if Leslie had not spent too much time explaining the rationale behind her hatred of the communism. She lamented the miserable history of her family. She lectured unnecessarily on Chinese history. She regarded bitterly that the communist party ruined her family. She blamed the communist government for causing the deprivation of the migrants. In short, the personal issues prevented her from accepting the fact that though migrant issues could vary by country, they were fundamentally the same despite whatever ruling party.
After all, 'Factory Girls' was highly worth reading because of valuable insights into the migrant labour system in China. That was the best part of the book.
However, it would have been an excellent book if Leslie had not spent too much time explaining the rationale behind her hatred of the communism. She lamented the miserable history of her family. She lectured unnecessarily on Chinese history. She regarded bitterly that the communist party ruined her family. She blamed the communist government for causing the deprivation of the migrants. In short, the personal issues prevented her from accepting the fact that though migrant issues could vary by country, they were fundamentally the same despite whatever ruling party.
After all, 'Factory Girls' was highly worth reading because of valuable insights into the migrant labour system in China. That was the best part of the book.
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