Chang spends three years in China, following the lives of several young women who have moved from rural China to find jobs and money and success and love in urban China. This is not the story I’d been expecting; city life turns out to be a big plus for most of the women in this book. Those for whom city life is not so well suited quickly return home, usually to try again on another day. For the most part, the women have a place to stay and are earning money. There are sad stories, too; companies close down and fail to pay their workers and women find they are working incredibly long hours for minimal pay. But the women generally begin to adjust to the six day work week and the long hours per day. Soon the women want to find ways to improve themselves and move up in the company hierarchy. This, too, is possible in the big city. The only jarring note for me was Chang’s side story about her own family; why was this included in this book? No one in Chang’s family was a factory girl. Had I been Chang’s editor I’d have saved this story for another book. ( )

A fascinating look at the life of China's migrant workers. Chang's account focuses on the Dongguan area in southern China, part of China's manufacturing boom area. Her she meets the young girls who have left rural China to move to the coast in hopes of building something better for themselves and their families. (Dongguan is about 70% female. Chang speculates that one reason for this may be that families are more reluctant to let their sons "go out" and move so far away from home.)

Chang follows these girls as they jump factories and move up and down the ladder of economic and personal success. She visits their home villages, hangs out with their friends. While there is a wealth of information about trends and modern China, it is through the lens of these girls, these women, and the reader connects with them on a personal level.

Entwined with the personal stories of these girls is the story of Chang's own family, and how they also migrated (but due to political rather than economic reasons) across China and then to Taiwan and the States. Through these duel narratives, she explores the similarities and differences, but also the Chinese mindset about the past, about individual and shared history and responsibility.

I most appreciated Chang's portrayal of factory life. Her descriptions of work schedules and conditions are colored only by the perceptions of those who work there. The focus is not "look at these horrible conditions" nor "such great opportunity!" but more, "this is what it is" and these are the people who work here, who live here.

Extremely readable and fascinating. I also think that this book would be a good read for teens--not only to see what the world is like and a little about where their stuff comes from, but also to see how 16 year olds live on the other side of the world and what they are doing and what their lives are like.

see all my reviews at www.jenrothschild.com ( )

Makes me realise that sometimes my life is easy. There are some tough choices and long hours made by the people in this book. ( )

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

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.