Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China | 
 enlarge | Author: Leslie T. Chang
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $16.10
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 1782
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0385520174
Dewey Decimal Number: 331.40951
EAN: 9780385520171
ASIN: 0385520174
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: R20081125231055H
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 if you only read one book about China, it should be this one. November 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As someone who lives in Beijing and has been part of the East Asian Studies scholastic community for years, I can honestly say that this book sums up everything my mountains of pretentious textbooks and Dashan-esque snooty white dudes have ever said about life in China. The book is long, as it should be, because there is so much to observe. The author's analysis is thoughtful, and never condescending or presumptuous. Her personal family history is so fascinating. Many reviews say it interrupts the rest of the book, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It provides a concrete historical background so that you see a snapshot of modern culture, then a digression to find out more about China's past. Her comments about various ironies of Chinese modern culture are spot-on but always kind. I would teach an entire course on this book, and it should certainly be required reading for any class on modern China, women in China, Chinese economics, etc. I haven't been this excited about a single book in a long time. Thank you Leslie T. Chang for writing this book!!!
Outstanding November 9, 2008
I enjoyed very much reading this book. I read the author's WSJ article long time ago, so I was eagerly waiting for this book to come out. The stories are very interesting yet poignant at the same time. These girls' ambitions, hard work, & constant desire for self-improvement put those Americans who take everything they have for granted to shame.
I admire the author's courageous effort in her research, following the girls to their factories, villages, and business meetings. Joining millions of migrants in the crazy Chinese New Year travel BY TRAIN & then BY BUS - is not for the ones with fainted hearts... TO live in the rural village with no heat in February (below freezing point weather)for TWO WEEKS - is not an easy task for someone who's American born, or even native Chinese from the northern part of China (where there is heat in winter). Mao in the old days arbitrarily decided that "north of the Yangze River is allowed to have heat in winter, south of it no need". What a tyrant!!
I gave the book 4-star instead of a 5-star only because:
1. I found the stories a bit choppy. I had a hard time tracking all the names & places & found myself flipping back to see who's whom. A clearer timeline might have been helpful.
2. I would like to see some pictures of Dongguan, factories, dorms, places where the author & girls have been to, and a detailed map perhaps, tracking each girl's job hopping steps. A picture is worth a thousand words. Author might want to set up a website with some additional information.
3. The author's own family history, while very touching to read, is somewhat distracting from the girls' stories, despite the author's effort of drawing the analogy of "her grandfather was just like these migrant girls by leaving their own village decades ago". I think that the author should've saved that material & write another book about it.
Overall, this is a great book, and kudos to Leslie for her hard work & incredible effort to make these girls' stories known. Bravo!
 So glad someone finally wrote this book November 5, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Have You Ever Wondered About the Life of Those That Make Your Electronics? November 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you are anything like me, you have wondered about the lives and work conditions of the workers in China that manufacture the good we buy and use on a daily basis. In addition, I wonder if they know what they are making and have any desire to own these things. If these questions, and more, make you curious, then this is the perfect book for you to read.
The author looks at the lives of the (mainly) women who leave the country side to come to the factories to make money for themselves and for their families. Focusing on the city of Dongguan, which is known as a manufacturing city, the author looked for and found 2 subjects that were interested in telling their stories. She actually found more, but do to the turnover rates at the factories, she lost touch with them fairly rapidly.
Imagine, if you can, a factory that makes most of the athletic shoes for many of the main brand names in the industry, along with a few lesser brands. What would that factory look like and how are the workers treated? Would you be surprised if I told you the factory compound employs 70,000 employees (no, that isn't a misprint) and that the workers work forced overtime, make less than $200 a month (on average) and live and eat within the factory compound? I know I was amazed and tried to picture what a factory of that size looked like.
Interspersed with the information about the factories, the city, and life in the city, the author presents a history of her family. While it may seem out of place, the information is very useful in demonstrating how China has changed financially, as well as socially, over the past 100 years. The information paints a stark change in the way society functions and demonstrates that China is a different country now from what it was even a mere 10 years ago.
This was an excellent read that had me looking at electronic items I used every day in a totally different light. And, I am sure it will cause me to think twice when I next purchase something made in China. I will wonder if the people who made it are treated as slaves or if this factory is one of the better ones. And I will wonder if they aspire to own whatever it is I want (and probably don't really need). This is an excellent book that puts a face on the globalization of industry and I cannot recommend it highly enough!
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.
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