Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

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.

Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant October 11, 2008
27 out of 29 found this review helpful

Interesting subject, thorough research, well-written. Even the digressions (about the author's family and their histories in and out of China) are fascinating, though they don't quite mesh with the rest of the book. The experiences the factory girls have and their personal transformations will resonate with American readers - here is the self-improvement, hard work and confidence Horatio Alger stuff that used to inspire America transplanted into a culture that is receptive and eager to absorb it, and here, too, are lucid accounts of the sad gaps between ambition and ability, ideals and reality, success and failure that go with immigrant experiences. The author was able to get closer to her subjects than anyone else I have read and writes very well indeed. Her account of how the internal migrant experience has mutated in China over the last 10-15 years is particularly fascinating. I read this cover to cover with great interest and hope the author is a work on a new book. (I don't know what is bothering the one star reviewer -- this review is written in Henan where I am visiting my Chinese wife's family, and I have read countless books on China and spent lots of time here and can vouch for the authenticity of this book).

1 out of 5 stars

difficult to read, content questionable October 9, 2008
13 out of 50 found this review helpful

In summary, Factory Girls is very difficult and slow to read, and the content is highly suspect. There are too many simple sentences that make the reading choppy, making the author's thoughts disjointed and lacking in cohesion. Complex sentences are often used at awkward places in the paragraph, contributing to the difficult reading. The writing comes across as if the author 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 true for a small 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. Other items (content) are also suspect. For example, on page 101, the author talked about "Love triangles and extramarital affairs are common...." and proceeded to give one example of a "young woman" who committed suicide "over a failed love affair." Does one example make it common? In my experience and as I understand 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 author interviewed or spoke with; but it seems to me that she is making alot of generalizations based on a few encounters. Anyways, I don't need to make this review an essay.

4 out of 5 stars

The History of a Family Begins When a Person Leaves Home October 26, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

From this book's opening paragraph positing two factory girls meeting each other with an opening question of, "What year are you," the China-knowledgeable reader knows with certainty that author Leslie Chang has her literary finger firmly on the pulse of mainland China. The good news is that Ms. Chang sustains her dead-on rendition of Chinese culture and factory life throughout the full length of this deeply engaging look at China's massive migrant work force. FACTORY GIRLS is informative and insightful, offering a first-hand view of the (mostly) young women who make up what the Chinese aptly call the "liudong renkou," the "floating population."

Ms. Chang, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and spouse of China author Peter Hessler (RIVER TOWN and ORACLE BONES), directs her attentions to the industrial heart of southeastern China, in the city of Dongguan. There she meets and obtains the confidence of several young women from peasant families who have migrated from small villages in the country's interior, agricultural provinces to take factory jobs. There's Lu Qingmin, a migrant from Hubei Province who follows her older sister Guimin's trek to the factory world in Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. There's Wu Chunming, the inveterate diarist and self-motivator, a native of Hunan Province who left her village for factory life in 1993, long before the migration became a massive movement.

Amazingly, as Chang reveals, some of the young women had no idea what factory work was like before arriving there, imagining it as some sort of chatty, casual environment. What they discover is, of course, far different, but Chang uses her personal entree to explore their motivations. First and foremost is money, both for their own use and equally to send back to their families. As time passes, however, some of the young women find themselves motivated by life style changes, new opportunities, chances to learn new skills (including the English language), and even to remake themselves into urbanites. Along the way, Ms. Chang picks up the stories of others whose orbits intersect with those of the factory girls. For example, there's Mr. Wu, inventor of an absurd "assembly line English program," and his devoted student, Liu Yuxia, and Ding Yuanzhi with his bizarrely successful perversion of a self-help book entitled "Square and Round."

Without doubt, FACTORY GIRL's most affecting segment concerns Lu Qingmin's return trip to her parents' home. Here Chang illustrates the widening gulf between generations and life styles as well as the spectacular role reversals that modernization has forced upon families. No longer can the elderly be revered for their experience and wisdom. Now they are obsolete, unable to earn even a modest income, unconnected in a wired world, ignorant of everything from fashion and job-hopping to flush toilets and dating.

Ms. Chang takes a somewhat risky approach to her story of a changing, industrializing China. Instead of focusing strictly on her factory girl subjects, she intersperses their stories with her own rediscovery of her family roots in and around Beijing. The literary purpose is clear: to delineate through generational differences the shift from the Mao-era, collectivist approach to and philosophy of life to the burgeoning sense of individualism and self-actualization in the present-day world of a developing, Westernizing China.

Unfortunately, Chang's excursions into her own family history distract from the far more interesting stories of her young female subjects, the village migrant villagers struggling to survive, make money, and find their place in the changing world of Chinese life. Chang's family was clearly a privileged one, filled with college educated professionals and migrants to Taiwan and the United States. They seem strangely out of place here, in much the same sense that tales of the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution ring hollow and anachronistic in the lives of the young factory girls' lives. As a consequence, these personal biographical interludes feel more intrusive than illustrative. I read them impatiently, wanting only to get back to the stories of Lu Qingmin and Wu Chunming and their factory girl colleagues. If anything, Ms. Chang's efforts to climb inside her subjects' skins do not go far enough. We want to learn still more from the forward-looking stories of Qingmin and Chunming and less about the buried past represented by the pathetic, backward-looking obsessions of her father's first cousin, Zhang Hong.

FACTORY GIRLS is nevertheless a revealing portrayal of a rapidly changing society seen through the least of its players, the young women who populate the factories that now produce so much of the world's goods. Her stories exemplify beautifully her book's catch phrase: "The history of a family begins when a person leaves home." Ms. Chang's strong eye for the telling detail brings fascinating tidbits of Chinese life and culture to the reader, and she does so in a style that is both entertaining and highly readable. We can only hope to see more from her in the coming years.

5 out of 5 stars

What Up in China October 31, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

In this book, Leslie Chang delves deeply into the world of migrant workers to find out who these people are and what their collective dislocation means for China. Chang skillfully sketches migrants as individuals with their own small victories and bitter tragedies, and she captures the surprising dynamics of this enormous but ill-understood subculture. In many ways, migrant workers embody the fundamental changes underway in China today.

Chang covered China for the Wall Street Journal, and she's an insightful interpreter of a society in flux. People who leave village life, with its intense cocoon of family and community ties, find themselves untethered in a city, scrounging for work and a place to sleep. "They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information," she writes. And yet many migrants also feel freed from a suffocating web of traditional habits and mores. Able to explore and grow in the lawless free-for-all of China's boomtowns, many cross an invisible line into the modern world, and there is no going back.

Chang got to know dozens of young women who have ventured to Dongguan, a new metropolis just north of Hong Kong. She focuses on two particularly compelling ones, Min and Chunming, who gradually came to trust her enough to share their stories, as well as diary entries, late-night phone calls and heart-to-heart confessions. Each is ambitious, impulsive, endearing. Each left home as a teenager and experienced a big adventure. Through their lives, Chang shows us how unmoored China is, erratically yearning for something better, and surprisingly resilient.

One of the women describes her blurry, confusing arrival in a new city, getting lured into a whorehouse, escaping, begging on the street, stealing another woman's ID card to get work at a toy factory, graduating to clerkdom, learning about business, striking it rich with direct sales only to see her company crumble overnight. Chang explores a "talent market," where workers offer themselves to any prospective employer -- a sneaker factory, a dating agency, an illicit nightspot. She reads magazines about migrant life that the women eagerly pass around, with articles titled "Be Your Own Master" and "Ambition Made Me Who I Am." Interactions among migrant women seem a cross between high school networking and wartime bonding. Being far from home, the women depend on each other to survive, yet they unite and separate with remarkable ease. Everyone lies. Promises are made and broken. "Dongguan was a place without memory," Chang writes.

Partway through "Factory Girls," Chang abruptly changes gears to tell her own family history. It is fascinating. Her great-grandfather was a landowner in northern China and a Confucian patriarch with four wives. His son, Chang's grandfather, studied mining in the United States and then returned to China. At the height of China's civil war, working for the Nationalists, he was assassinated. Chang's grandmother escaped to Taiwan with her children, leaving relatives and family wealth behind. Chang's father later immigrated to America, where Chang was born and raised. He did not like to talk about family history. Only after Chang had worked in China for some years did she begin to explore and discover the truth, including the myriad resentments and injustices that festered among her relatives, as well as the government's suppression of accounts of the past.

Chang writes about her family and its dislocations with special sensitivity and grace. That story is almost like a book within a book, and it gives a poignant perspective to her accounts of the dislocated migrant workers she gets to know. More than that, it completes her portrait of China.

If the lives of migrant workers seem to represent the new China, with all its unwieldy promise and economic possibilities, Chang's family history reflects the old China, its stubborn intractability and severe injustice. For now, the two still go together.

5 out of 5 stars

Very Informative! October 26, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

China has 130 million migrant workers, 70% female; Chang tells their story primarily through the lies of two young women over a three year period as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines. Most leave home for these jobs for the money, to see the world, to have something to do, and learn new skills. Parents, however, are usually unhappy with this decision as it frequently leads to marrying someone outside the village and very few visits home.

Ten are interviewed for every one hired, many have college diplomas. Typically girls sleep 12 to an unheated room at a factory site. Fines for sharing a bunk with a down and out friend (ten yuan, about $1.25), missing work (100 yuan) and various other infraction are deducted from their pay. Workers are usually required to stay 6 months, and the factory holds the first two months of pay as leverage to enforce this. Work days in some factories last 13 hours and go on every day for weeks, with some Saturday afternoons off. All this for 400 yuan/month (plus room and board), and almost as much again in overtime.

Min (one of the girls followed by Chang) managed to leave the factory for a clerk position because of her neat handwriting. Her pay doubled, only 8/room, and ten hours/day. She planned to stay 7 years, sending money home to repay her parents for raising her; after that Min intended to return home and marry. (Min eventually obtained a position as a purchasing agent for 1,200 yuan/month, plus about 8,000 yuan/month in kickbacks. This not only enormously raised her standard of living, but her status at home as well.)

Dongguan (estimated 10 million people) is divided into 32 towns, each specializing in a specific manufacture. American and European bosses rate best, then Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwanese. Chinese bosses are rated the worst - always going bankrupt.

Seventy-thousand work at the Taiwanese-owned Yue Huen shoe factory in Dungguan. It is the largest source for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, and others. Turnover is 5%/month, theft is rampant. (Dishonesty is common in all dimensions - purchasing kickbacks, official corruption, lying about marital status, product quality, corporations failing to pay employees.)

Chunming (the other girl) became a direct salesperson for a foreign health products firm, making $1,000/month; 2.5 years later, however, she was working for a Chinese company and only earning $150/month - a considerable downfall (not explained), though still much better than if she had stayed in her home village or original factory job.

Job-hopping and lying about one's past appear to be the best way to get ahead. Counterfeit vocational college degrees are available for $7.50.

Karaoke companions earn about $25/night; prostitutes about $2,500/month.

Chang also describes how the locals strive to learn English - enormously hampered by their instructors' lack of expertise - almost all Chinese, and many Ugandans.

It was also interesting to read about Chang's visit to her family's former village and talk to those who knew her relatives, as well as learn of the Cultural Revolution's impact on them. Trains and buses are difficult to board near the lunar new year - so crowded that on long trips toilets become stopped up and passengers squat in the aisles.

Bottom Line: "Factory Girls" excellently conveys the incredible drive and sense of self-responsibility possessed by China's massive number of young migrant workers.

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