Reviewed by John Cairns
Consumers everywhere reach for new toys, timepieces, trinkets and other products without much thought. But journalist-author Leslie T. Chang has devoted high-voltage brainpower and several years to the Chinese factory workers toiling long shifts for little pay in Guangdong Province, adjacent to Hong Kong.
Chang's non-fiction account, Factory Girls, From Village to City in a Changing China (2009, Spiegel and Grau, New York, 431 pages), builds understanding, even enlightenment. Much of the book qualifies as "outstanding", but some sections badly digress.
The author befriended and followed the lives of several teenage girls, especially Lu Qingmin and Wu Chunming. They both migrated south and worked at one factory after another in Dongguan, an industrial metropolis.
“Long journeys end at the Guangzhou railway station, where the passengers pour off the trains after rides of 20 or 30 to 50 hours. They are mostly young and they arrive alone, dragging a suitcase or a backpack or a coarse burlap sack that once held rice. The vast plaza in front of the station seethes with travelers, and the first thing you hear is the jangle of announcements for people who, newly arrived, are already lost.”
Then it's time to find work. “At night, the factories lining the highways are lit. Look closely and you can sometimes see shadows moving against a window, erratic as fireflies – as long as there is light, people are still working. Each strip of blue-lighted windows against the dark signals a single factory; one strip is set apart from the next, like stately ocean liners on the sea. From a distance, they are beautiful.”
From the workers' daily routines and job grievances to shopping habits and guilty pleasures, from their relationships with parents and siblings to sex lives, Chang learns and reveals the details.
“They were 16 years old, on the loose in one of China's most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.”
Conditions fall far short of perfection. “Workers slept 12 to a room in bunks crowded near the toilets; the rooms were dirty and they smelled bad. The food in the canteen was bad too.”
Factory life takes a heavy toll. “Anyway, I am so tired, so tired. Really, really, I feel so tired. My body and my spirit feel so tired….”
China's manufacturing prowess creates a tidal wave of 130 million migrant workers leaving rural homes for unknown challenges at city factories. History's biggest migration, this dwarfs even the centuries-ago move of Europeans to North America.
“On the brick walls of rural villages, pro-migration slogans appeared: GO OUT FOR MIGRANT WORK, RETURN HOME TO DEVELOP. LABOR FLOWS OUT, MONEY FLOWS BACK. Migration is emptying villages of young people…. Money sent home by migrants is already the biggest source of wealth accumulation in rural China.”
Factory Girls focuses on the lives of several migrants among many. “It was easy to lose yourself in the factory, where there were hundreds of girls with identical backgrounds: born in the village, badly educated, and poor.”
Readers in Hong Kong and southern China already know much that Chang reveals. Those in distant lands will benefit more from the details of factory conditions, workers' motivations, daily lives and China's rural-city dichotomy. “Perhaps they took for granted that life was hard for everyone. The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate.”
The biggest insights emerge from basic details. For example:
-- Getting into a factory is easy. Getting out is harder;
-- Losing a mobile phone means losing contact with most friends;
-- Lying about qualifications and abilities may be the quickest way to better jobs;
-- A few computer or English classes can mean entering a higher social class;
-- Huge factories with thousands of workers have dormitories, cafeterias, hospitals, movie theatres and fire departments;
-- Despite so many co-workers, “you can only rely on yourself”; and
-- Corruption lurks everything. “ ‘It's very black,’ Chunming said. ‘But even if you don't do it yourself, you won't change anything.’ ”
Impressively, Chang balances pros and cons. The “factory girls” she follows endure crisis after crisis, but ultimately advance and thrive. “There was a lot to dislike about the migrant world of Min and Chunming: the materialism, the corruption, the coarseness of daily existence. But now there was an opportunity to leave your village and change your fate, to imagine a different life and make it real.”
Chang enters workplaces and dormitories, even witnessing rare leisure moments. In one insightful section, she joins a worker going home for the Chinese New Year. “The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue after you are gone. Spending time in Min's village, I understood why migrants felt so alone when they first went to the city. But I also saw how they came to value the freedom they found there, until at last they were unable to live without it.”
Production lines in southern China change the world economy. Factory Girls tells how they affect workers. The author excels when focusing on those young laborers.
Along the way, Chang made a bad decision to widen the book's scope, trying to weave in the entire back-story of China’s tragic 20th-century history. “The Cultural Revolution took everything the Chinese people had long held sacred and smashed it to pieces, like an antique vase hurled against the wall.”
The author musters a sense of history by also telling about her own ancestors, who experienced civil war, Japanese invasion, refuge in Taiwan and immigration to the United States. Eventually, the American-educated Chang returned to report from Beijing for The Wall Street Journal. Later she moved to Colorado. For readers, too many time journeys and topic-switches show that family trees belong in a different book.
Chang suggests that China's past, as seen in her family's history, helps to explain why the labor migration happens. For readers, that's almost irrelevant. The factory workers hardly care about national history or current events. As one girl idly asks, “Who is Chairman Mao now?”
Anyone using products made in China (almost everyone) should read Factory Girls to better understand the aspirations and frustrations that simmer along production lines. If only the book had been 100 pages shorter and stayed on topic, then its readers could have enjoyed it even more.
Approval rating: 81 per cent.
For more information: www.spiegelandgrau.com
(August 16, 2010)
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