Our March Author: Leslie T. Chang

This month we read Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
by Leslie T. Chang.  Here are a few links to supplement discussion:

One Loop Press explores the author's dual role as journalist and friend to her subjects, a tricky area for such an intimate piece of reporting and, among other topics, Chang explains how she tried to tell a different story about the factory girls,

I felt like people had taken a very American perspective, by which I mean they went in thinking, “Where are the abuses? How can we write articles to try to improve the system?” Even, “How can we as consumers do things to make things better for these workers?” What I wanted to do was look at it from the inside China point-of-view. To ask, “What is it like for these young people?” They’re not sitting here thinking, “I need an eight hour workday, and minimum wage, and this much, this much,” all these things that Western people would think about right away. They’re just thinking, “I want to get to the city, I want to make some money, and I want to improve myself.” So from their perspective life looks very different than it does to us. That’s what I wanted to capture in trying to get as much as possible inside their lives and inside their heads, to see how they saw their experience rather than how we would judge it and in many ways criticize it and find problems with it.

The China Beat has an interview that gets at the links between the two distinct narratives of the book, following the factory girls and Chang's exploration of her family's history,

I think the story of leaving home, going to a strange place and making a new life is universal. And I did think while writing it that while I know China is very distant for most Americans, I hope Americans reading this will feel like this is the story of their ancestors as well. And obviously without downplaying all of the differences in China’s history and China’ situation, this is kind of a universal story. That was also one of the motivating factors for my reporting on migrants in the first place. When we talk about the American migration story, whether from Europe or from somewhere else, it isn’t a story of pure privation and desperation and horrible conditions although all those things existed in some form. It’s really a story about opportunity and adventure and a new life. And I felt like the story of the migrants leaving their villages for the city might have some similarities with that story.

In an audio interview from Connecticut Public Radio, Chang explains the anthropological approach she used in writing this book, changing relationships between migrant children and parents, her subjects' reaction to her writing, industrial pollution, and more.

Here is a talk Chang gave for Authors@Google (the first part is mostly a reading, questions start at about the 20 minutes in):



In a Why I Write interview,  Chang answers questions about her favorite authors (a couple Rights Readers favorites get a mention-- Ha Jin and Tracy Kidder).

As a bonus on the subject of exploring family history, check out the recent PBS series Faces of America  for the portions exploring Yo-Yo Ma's genealogy.

And don't forget to check out our previous post regarding films related to the migrant experience in China!

Factory Girls Film Festival

In preparation for this month's discussion of Leslie Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, here are a few suggestions for films you may also enjoy as a supplement to the book:

First, Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary on the work of  photographer Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky traces the path of rampant consumerism from manufacture to landfill starting on the floor of a Chinese factory.  For more on Burtynsky visit his website and browse the stills.  The film is essential for understanding the monumental scale of the Chinese manufacturing (and disassembling) enterprise.




The documentary Up the Yangtze follows a young girl as she leaves her family to find work aboard a cruise ship in the Three Gorges Dam area.  Although this is not factory work, the challenges and transformation for this child and her family are similar to those described by Chang.




Finally, the films of Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke feature a recurring theme of dislocation in the midst of societal transformation on a massive scale.  The pacing can at times be tedious, but I found Still Life, also set in the Three Gorges area, to be one of his most accessible and is worth seeing for the cinematography alone.

For March: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

We have selected Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang for March,

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.