Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

Leslie T. Chang

I am not sure what genre this book falls in. It is part autobiography/memoir, part expose, part cultural exploration. Chang is a reporter who, while living in China for several years, also explores her own family history. She does this by investigating/developing relationships with the migrant class in south China. This class is predominantly female (70%) and young (starting at 15, with 20 somethings finding themselves old and experienced). They have moved from the village, where they lived on a family farm, and entered the big manufacturing cities. These cities are factory driven, with 10 million or so people living with the purpose of producing goods and (initially at least) sending money back home. Chang befriends some of the women working in the factory and writes about their transition to city life over the course of several years. This portion of the book is fascinating, and it is a bit of an expose about life in the big factories that produce all of our products. However, Chang focuses on the actions/life of the workers, including their own dreams & struggles. This means we are not being taken into a moralistic, anti-consumerist, worker-quality-of-life outrage against the corporation. Instead, we are looking at people and individual decisions about what makes life good and what makes life hard. We are looking at the changing of a culture from holding a collective, community based value to one in which individualism is king. This brings us to a place where we can really think about cultural differences and our (U.S.) role in globalization.

Chang intersperses this fascinating story with an exploration of her own family history. It just so happens that her genealogy includes advisors to emperors and participants in the events leading up to the cultural revolution. For me, this section loses steam. But I suppose it was necessary to allow a real comparison between the village-centric life (her uncle gives her a 30 generation genealogy and explains that its main purpose was to ensure that marriages did not happen between relatives who were too close) and the individual focus existence that is being promoted by the factory. I loved the exploration of how generations shake of values of their elders or if it is even possible to do so. I loved thinking about other community cultures in Latin America or Africa where land ownership has differed dramatically from China, and wondered how a view of the land could so dramatically affect a view of family. I loved thinking about globalization and its relationship to consumerist and individualistic identities in the producer, wondering about how these changing identities will manifest in culture.

This is a fascinating book to read, although it was slow enough at times that I had to commit to picking it back up. In the end, the whole process holds together and Chang makes it worth your while.

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