Book Review: Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang

Title: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Author: Leslie T. Chang
Enjoyment Rating: 9/10
Referral: This book came up in my Audible queue
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 4

I've read a whole bunch of books about China in the last year. Some have been instructive for what our experience might be like (many of the adoption memoirs, for example), and others have been less relevant (The Man Who Loved China). But Factory Girls is the first book that's given me some insight into what Rose's life might have been like if she'd stayed in China (if she'd stayed with her birth family). Chang originally started her project, following several girls working in the factories in Southern China, while working as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She followed two girls over the course of years, from their first jobs on the factory floor, moving up the ranks and switching factories, always angling for a way to get ahead.

As an American of Chinese descent, Chang also took the opportunity to track her own family history in China. At first, these two storylines don't seem related enough to work together, and I listened to the first part of Chang's family history, which was interesting in and of itself, wondering if this was a gratuitous sidetrack, but eventually it felt that Chang's grandfather, who came to America to get trained as a mining engineer and then returned to China and was ultimately murdered by the communists served as both a guide and a counterpoint to the girls who are making it in the shoe and cell phone factories of Guangdong.

While we in America tend to look down on products made in China and on Chinese labor laws, one of the most interesting things that Chang shows is how migrants, especially young, single women, have gained a lot of power through their work experience. Yes, the hours are long and the conditions are inhumane by US standards, but one of the most poignant parts of the book for me was when Min goes home for her first Chinese New Year and she suddenly has enough clout to call the shots around the house. She requests that her parents purchase a hot water heater. She tells her younger sister to do well in school because Min is her support. Rather than receiving money in red envelopes from her elders (a Chinese New Year tradition) in recent years it's become customary for the young migrant girls to give money envelopes to their elders. It's interesting that hundreds of years of tradition is being completely turned around by the migrant economy. While the book didn't address adoption directly, it did show me a lot about what modern China is like, and showed a much more nuanced portrait of Chinese factories than I'd come to expect.