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Title details for Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang - Available

Factory Girls

From Village to City in a Changing China

by Leslie T. Chang
Susan Ericksen
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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; and 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 5, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400190454
      • File size: 421026 KB
      • Duration: 14:37:08

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This book explores the lives of young women in China who venture from the countryside to work in the urban factories. It covers the social, economic, and political forces at work in their lives in a personal way. However, a sense of repetition emerges when example after example is presented. The women are unique, but their stories have a sameness to them. This weakness gives the book the feel of being an overly long magazine article. The author translates their comments into standard English, not a literal translation. So when they are read in the same tone as the rest of the work, it takes a moment for the listener to decipher whether "I" is the author or another speaker. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 25, 2008
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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