Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: handbag factory, talent market, hot water dispenser, Liu Yixia, Yue Yuen, The Stele (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, explores the urban realities and rural roots of a community, until now, as unacknowledged as it is massive—China's 130 million workers whose exodus from villages to factory and city life is the largest migration in history. Chang spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan, one of the new factory cities that have sprung up all over China. The author's incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls—with their incredible ambition and youth—to emerge powerfully upon the page. Dongguan city is itself a character, with talent markets where migrants talk their way into their next big break, a lively if not always romantic online dating community and a computerized English language school where students shave their heads like monks to show commitment to their studies. A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family's immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance. (Oct. 7)
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From The New Yorker

China is in the midst of history�s largest human migration, a hundred and thirty million of its citizens having left their home villages in search of urban employment. Chang, an American of Chinese descent, explores the migrant experience and �the burden of being Chinese� through the lives of several young women in the industrial city of Dongguan. Their Sisyphean attempts at self-reinvention are both entertaining and poignant; the most ambitious of them achieves modest success selling dubious health products, before falling under the spell of an American raw-food guru. In her diary, she reminds herself, �We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar.� Chang�s fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape, �a universe of relentless motion.�
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385520174
• ISBN-13: 978-0385520171
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #194,006 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, October 11, 2008

By	D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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).

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Up in China, October 31, 2008

By	Seth Faison (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars So glad someone finally wrote this book, November 5, 2008

By	Lu Y. Yang "nakedsushi" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Factory Girls is a non-fiction book written by an Chinese-American journalist. It focuses on the stories of girls who immigrate from rural Chinese villages to factories in more urban areas of China. The girls work in shoe factories, purse factories, factories that make one specific plastic piece for a larger item, and a lot of other factories, but their stories are all the same -- they left the village for better opportunities.

I'm glad that someone finally wrote a book like this. People in America like to focus on poor working conditions of factories in China, but what they don't realize is that a lot of the people working in those factories would rather work 14 hour days sitting in an assembly line and earning 10x the amount they make doing back-breaking work on a farm. The author does a great job showing the lives of these girls who leave their village without imparting any judgement on them or their bosses.

I enjoyed reading the stories of the handful of girls who worked at one factory, jumped to the next, jumped to another job, and so on, but I thought the author's own story of her family felt a bit tacked on. It made the book feel like it was trying to be two separate books. The author's story could have gone in a separate book about families affected by the Communist Revolution.

The book is easy to read. Even though the factory girls' stories started sounding similar toward the middle of the book (that was the point), it never felt like a chore to read. I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in the side of the story that doesn't usually get covered in western newspapers.