Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
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Product Description
An eye-opening and previously untold tale, 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 ex- correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the tale 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 manufacturing 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 place home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the tale of her own family tree’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing past 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.
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In synopsis, Factory Girls is very hard and slow to read, and the content is highly suspect. There are too many simple sentences that make the reading choppy, building the leader’s thoughts disjointed and missing in cohesion. Complex sentences are regularly used at awkward places in the paragraph, contributing to the hard reading. The writing comes across as if the leader was a factory girl, which was confusing to me. I have worked and lived in China for many years and have traveled for both work and leisure to over 30 cities in China. I can tell you this: Most (as in 90%) of the girls who work in factories do so because of one primary reason – money. Secondary reasons would be for personal development or what have you, but it would be intellectually dishonest to say that money is not the only primary reason. Maybe that is right for a tiny number of the girls (as in 10%), who go to work in factories for personal development and “see the world,” but I can assure you, from first-hand experience and having been in the trenches, most are motivated by money as THE primary reason to migrate to the cities and work in factories. Additional items (content) are also suspect. For example, on page 101, the leader talked about “Like triangles and extramarital affairs are common….” and proceeded to give one example of a “young woman” who committed suicide “over a failed like affair.” Does one example make it common? In my experience and as I know it, Chinese people make some of the most faithful spouses, relative to the rest of the world. I’m not sure how many millions of factory girls there are in China, and I’m not sure how many factory girls the leader interviewed or spoke with; but it seems to me that she is building alot of generalizations based on a few encounters. Anyways, I don’t need to make this review an essay.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Hello? Paperback for $10.88 and Kindle edition for $12.57?
Have we had too much party cheer, Amazon?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
There is not a soul who will disagree that Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls is valid now more than ever. To date, Microsoft and Apple continue to conveniently overlook the deplorable conditions of their factories in South China. Meanwhile, China has yet to really enforce the laws it passed years ago regulating OT and improving effective conditions. Only when the western media gets involved do the rich white CEOs of America suddenly become concerned and “vow to take immediate action” against the corrupt Chinese overlords they left in charge of their factories. The paradox of this drama is that as long as Middle America continues its blind consumerism of the latest gadgets and “stuff”, neither China nor the American CEOs who outsource to the PRC have any incentive to change. FDI and GDP are obviously more vital than the well-being of some teenage migrant worker from Anhui. Just know, people, that a name in China suffered to get you your precious iPhone! Leslie Chang did a excellent thing by publishing this book. But I do have to question why only a Chinese-American who happens to be married to an over-hyped American leader and have career relations to the world’s most powerful media conglomerate can get a book like this published. What about the workers themselves? Are they so undeserving of being heard unless it’s through the voice of a Harvard graduate? Were their diaries not worthy of being directly published? Such hypocrisy was not lost on me as I progressed through this book. Factory Girls was heavily reviewed by Chang’s pals in the mainstream press, which is probably the only reason why many of you have read it. But for anyone who really cares about this issue, I also suggest reading Ngai Pun Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace and Chun Yu Wang Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin: Diary of a Chinese Garment Factory Girl on Saipan, who offer more sincere, first-hand perspectives about life in China’s factories but whose books lacked the USD $45,000 marketing battle that Chang’s novel did.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Needed the book for a chinese history class and arrived just in time for the start of class. The books dull though, but appealing.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This is really two books in one. The first is about the factory girls in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Although the tales are appealing, I reflect Ms. Chang is too gullible, especially concerning Chinese prostitutes, who are not all the pleased campers that Ms. Chang seems to judge, and the Chinese gangsters she seems to have a schoolgirl crush on. At any rate, with the current worldwide economic dip, these tales are now already out of date.
The second book is about Ms. Chang’s family tree history, which to me was of small interest at all.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5