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Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang
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Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

by Leslie T. Chang

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In the early aughts Leslie T. Chang was a foreign correspondent reporting for the “Wall Street Journal” on the transformative effects of socioeconomic change in China. Her exploration of the lives of the people she met led her, in 2004, to publish an article whose subject would eventually fill 432 pages of prose and become Chang’s first book, “Factory Girls” (Speigel & Grau, 2008), an impeccably-written survey of the lives female migrant workers—the young women who “go out” from China’s rural villages to find work in its urban factory cities. Over three years of reporting in Dongguan, one of a number of urban centers in China’s Pearl River Delta, Chang met women compelled by the promise of opportunity to leave home to find work, to jump from factory to factory in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions, to be with a friend, a sister, a boyfriend. She encountered women who were in the shadows, women who worked in karaoke bars, women who taught themselves English at night school, women buffeted by the pleasures and pitfalls of new friendship.

"When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work--this time, the fine one hundred yuan--to spend the day with you. You might stay at a factory you didn't like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to. Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish. They sent messages by mobile phone instead." -Pg. 3 to 5

Unconvinced that decade-old reports about inhuman working conditions examined factory life from all sides, Chang began her investigation with a question: What do migrant workers make of their own experience? Along the way she discovered previously unrevealed facets of the factory story, where individual ambition, hard work, lying, and personal pluck lead to advancement, where life is fast-paced but monotonous, anonymous, in which work and workers are depersonalized, except to each other, where women came in from the provinces and return to them, their connections severed, if they can find their way back.

"The girls talked constantly of leaving. Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker’s pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn’t know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out." –Pg. 4

Told in part through the close observation of two women, Wu Chunming and Lu Qingmin, she meets while reporting, in part through an account of Chang’s own family’s history, and in part through descriptions of the city of Dongguan, Leslie T. Chang presents a picture of a culture beset with change, whose rapidly evolving economic landscape offers pressures and perils in quick step with opportunity, where millions of ambitious, hard-working individuals live lives on the brink of explosive transformation. Chang challenges her readers to discard received notions of China and discover it anew—as a place full of energy, bursting with the promise of advancement, of individual success, where lives beset by setback, ravaged by history, always have the potential to be renewed.

~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press
1 vote OpenLoopPress | Oct 26, 2009 |
I am currently reading Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, about the young women who work in China's manufacturing industry. The author, an American of Chinese heritage, also explores her own family's history as she documents the girls' lives.
  booksofcolor | Aug 1, 2009 |
Not as dreary as the cover makes it seem. Parts are pretty funny, in fact. Very informative and timely. I most enjoyed the sections on the get-rich schemes, the dating scenes, the education system, and the workplaces. Some of the profiles are very striking. As other reviewers note, the author subjects the reader to some family history of hers that is only tenuously related to the thread of the book---but you can easily skip those sections if you like.
  leeinaustin | Apr 27, 2009 |
Great Book. Suprised at some of the editing mistakes. Wish there were pictures ( )
  jeanie1 | Feb 1, 2009 |
Leslie Chang, a Wall Street Journal correspondant, lived in China for a year, during which time she researched this book. Her primary objective was to gain an understanding of the lives of the girls and young women who leave their families in the countryside to go to work in the factories in Dongguan, and here she gives a fascinating account of modern Chinese life. Several chapters are also devoted to researching her own family's past.. If you liked Jan Wong's Beijing Confidential you'll enjoy Factory Girls. ( )
  skent | Jan 19, 2009 |
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385520174, Hardcover)

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.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400)

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