Rolin's Reviews > Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

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.