Review by New York Times Review
A look at the young women behind China's manufacturing boom. TOWARD the end of "Factory Girls," her engrossing account of the lives of young migrant workers in southern China, Leslie Chang describes receiving a gift. Min, a young woman who works at a handbag plant, presents Chang with an authentic Coach purse plucked fresh from the assembly line. It emerges that Min's dormitory-style bedroom is stuffed with high-end leatherwear. When the author proposes giving one of the handbags to the mother of Min's boyfriend, Min scoffs. "His mother lives on a farm," she says. "What's she going to do with a handbag?" The emergence of China's titanic manufacturing base has been chronicled in numerous books and articles in recent years, but Chang has elected to focus not on the broader market forces at play but on the individuals, most of them women, who leave their villages and seek their fortunes on the front lines of this economy. Since the 1970s, China has witnessed the largest migration in human history, Chang observes, "three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century." There are 130 million migrant workers in China today. A few decades ago, a rural peasant could expect to live and die on the same plot of land his family had farmed for generations. But the country's explosive economic growth has allowed the young and adventurous to trade the stifling predictability of village life for the excitement, opportunity and risk of the factory boomtown. A former China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Chang focuses on one boomtown in particular, Dongguan, a frenetic jumble of megafactories in Guangdong Province. The city produces garments of every description and 30 percent of the world's computer disk drives. One-third of all the shoes on the planet are produced in the province, and Chang spends time in a factory that manufactures Nike, Reebok and other brands. It has 70,000 employees, most of them women, and boasts its own movie theater, hospital and fire department. Dongguan is "a perverse expression of China at its most extreme," Chang suggests; it is polluted, chaotic and corrupt, but jostling also with a generation of strivers who are unashamed of their ambition and astonishingly indifferent to risk. New arrivals from the countryside can double or triple their income in a couple of weeks by taking a computer class or learning a little English. Switching jobs becomes a form of self-reinvention, and starting a new business is as easy as purchasing a new business card. To Chang, the factory girls seem to live in "a perpetual present." They have forsaken the Confucian bedrock of traditional Chinese culture for an improvised existence in which history and filial loyalty have been replaced by rapid upward mobility, dogged individualism and an obsessive pursuit of a more prosperous future. After revealing that her driver's license was purchased on the black market, one woman seems to voice the general ethos of the town when she says to Chang, of her abilities behind the wheel, "I know how to drive forward." With new job opportunities forever appearing and huge personnel turnover in any given factory, friendships are difficult to make and to maintain, and Chang details the loneliness and isolation of the migrant workers. Dongguan's laborers assemble cellphones, but they purchase them as well, and with their speed-dial archives of acquaintances, the phones become a sort of lifeline, the only way to keep track of the breakneck comings and goings of friends. If a worker's cellphone is stolen, as they often are, friends, boyfriends and mentors may be lost to her forever. "The easiest thing in the world," Chang remarks more than once, "was to lose touch with someone." People living their lives "on fast-forward" in this manner would seem to resist any kind of comprehensive portraiture by a reporter. But Chang perseveres, hanging around the factories, purchasing cellphones for some of the women she meets so that she can keep track of them, and eventually renting an apartment in Dongguan. While she relates the stories of numerous different women, she becomes closest with Min, who gave her the purse, and with Chunming, who left her home in Hunan Province in 1992 and has cycled through countless careers and relationships in the years since. (It is Chunming who can only drive forward.) Chang's extraordinary reportorial feat is the intimacy with which she presents the stories of these two women. Min and Chunming lack the reserve of some of their colleagues. They share their diary entries and their text messages, their romantic entanglements and their sometimes strained relationships with the families they left behind. The result is an exceptionally vivid and compassionate depiction of the day-to-day dramas, and the fears and aspirations, of the real people who are powering China's economic boom. BY delving so deeply into the lives of her subjects, Chang succeeds in exploring the degree to which China's factory girls are exploited - working grueling hours in sometimes poor conditions for meager wages with little job security - without allowing the book to degenerate into a diatribe. There is never any doubt that the factory owners in Hong Kong and Taiwan - and the consumers in American shopping malls - have the better end of the bargain. But for all the dislocation, isolation and vulnerability they experience, Chang makes clear that for the factory girls life in Dongguan is an adventure, and an affirmation of the sort of individualism that village life would never allow. "If it was an ugly world," Chang concludes, "at least it was their own." Patrick Radden Keefe is a fellow at the Century Foundation. His book "The Snakehead," about the Chinese human smuggler Sister Ping, will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
To American girls, the term going out means dating; to their Chinese counterparts, however, it means leaving their remote villages and migrating hundreds of miles to industrial cities to find work within the closed societies of assembly-line factories. Of Chinese ancestry herself, Wall Street Journal reporter Chang was allowed nearly unprecedented access to the sweatshops where the majority of the world's consumer goods are produced. Following several young women as they move from job to job, Chang reveals a world of naked ambition and abject loneliness, of grueling hours and spartan living conditions, of moral compromise and ethical ambiguity. In spite of such harsh conditions, however, these young women prefer the freedom factory life provides, and fail to return to their villages to fulfill their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Making it nearly impossible to blithely use a mobile phone or strap on a pair of running shoes ever again, Chang's portrait underscores the reality that the global economy rests on some very slender shoulders.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Former Wall Street Journal correspondent Chang penetrates the teeming world of young female migrant workers and finds, rather surprisingly, that it holds a lot more promise than being stuck on the farm. "There was nothing to do at home" was the recurring explanation the author received from workers who had moved to China's cities looking for work. Despite low wages, long hours, no health benefits and exploitive bosses, these girls, as young as 16 (they often lied about their ages), braved the danger of the unknown and sought new lives, sometimes with an older relative's help, sometimes by simply knocking on a factory door. Some 115 million migrant workers have been key to China's recent economic growth, providing the biggest source of wealth accumulation in rural China; the government no longer hounds these workers, but encourages them. Chang penetrates their world through the stories of two particular workers in the factory town of Dongguan. Min, born in a farming village in Hubei, went to Dongguan with her older sister and swiftly rose from a lowly assembly-line job to white-collar office work because of her nice handwriting. She sent money home and hoped to return there to find a husband. Chunming arrived in Dongguan from Hunan Province when she was 17; she narrowly escaped being pressed into a brothel and by sheer will and determination to better herself gained steady promotions into management and high-paying sales jobs, until in her early 30s she predicted that within three years she would achieve her goals of "financial independence and freedom." Enduring discrimination, loss of friends and dehumanizing dating rituals, these migrants still relished their independence and heightened status at home. Chang clutters their fascinating narratives with clumsy attempts to incorporate the migrant stories of her own family members, who fled the communist revolution. Somewhat bland and meandering, but in-depth reporting contributes significantly to our knowledge about China's development. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
