Bob's Home Library
Summary:
An eye-opening and previously untold
story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives
of the migrant factory population in China.
Tags: [CNTY:USA, ZDC:RWSK, ZDC:YWSJ, ZDC:ZGGC, Lang:en]
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.