FACTORY GIRLS, CHANG LESLIE T.

Though is a book on China 's factory ,one can draw a lot of parallels to this story-especially with India and its IT boom. The book also gives a fair insight on China's culture, past and the present.A must read for someone who is interested in China 's growth story.

vivid details of girls working in production his of China, also gives account of their social aspect.

A really must read to understand china culture of work.

I enjoyed this book for many reasons, firstly for my first hand experience of much of the facts and details in the book. everything seems to change in China and yet nothing changes. After 27 years of work with the Chinese I thought I knew it all, Chang's well written book proved me wrong, because much in the past has gone 'over my head' and not realised. I like the Chinese and have great friends there, however I can never understand some of the devious ways of conducting there lives. I fail to understand how they can hurt each other purely for social or financial gain, I know this happens worldwide, but it seems to be accepted as the norm in China. Many are good people, certainly hard working and with immense ingenuity. I give two examples of my experience: I once felt sorry for a farmer in a village near Longyan Fujian, he was a good man but unfortunate with his health. I gave him $200 to buy a few pigs. Another villager stabbed and poisoned his pigs out of Jealousy. A factory worker who I thought was sound had a blind mother. She used to shuffle up at lunchtime with some food or washing for him, she only had 'cataracts of her eyes which was Easily cured with an inexpensive operation. I gave him a small advance of pay and a small gift of 500 yuan for her to have it done. She didn't have it done because he blew the money on himself! These sort of things upset me but my Chinese friends just nodded their heads and changed the subject, ( but to really understand Chinese thinking then read the book 'Mr China' by Tim Clissold) Factory girls is a well researched and very readable book. recommended.

I found this book whilst searching on amazon for biographies and it sounded fascinating. When it arrived it was over 400 pages of tiny writing and I thought that this would be a bit of a challenge.From the start, the story of modern China is personified in the various characters that the author follows around, this makes the book very readable and easy to connect with. Even though the characters are imaginable, their situations are very difficult to picture and their attitudes are even harder to empathise with. Industrial China is far removed from our world, although in some ways there is a lot of commonality.I've never been to China but the descriptions from friends who have been tally with this book, with one of the main impressions being the pace of life and the fast changes - "everything is in the process of becoming something else". The atmosphere created is exactly how I think it is at the moment, plenty of people on the move and relationships all very short. Some people are brought into the narrative and disappear very quickly, never to be mentioned again.The author digresses away from the story of the factory girls as she takes the opportunity to investigate and report on her family's history. This is not completely in the spirit of the book but does give the chance to present a whistle stop summary of Chinese modern history, giving a background to the personal stories. I got quite confused in this section, a family tree would have been great as all the the Zhangs started to merge at one point.Great book which is very accessible.

[Book group review]We chose this book because we wanted to find out about the lives of modern Chinese women, and a number of us had this book recommended to us.Leslie Chang seems to be doing two things in the book and we were not sure that they worked together well. First she explores the lives of young Chinese women who are internal migrants to factories from rural areas. They see themselves as poorly educated and that factory work of some kind is their only chance to lift themselves and sometimes members of their families out of lives of rural poverty where there is no opportunity for social mobility or even low paid work. These young women see factory work as the opportunity to learn `modern' skills, earn some money that they can choose to spend and increase their chances of getting better husbands and possibly careers. The Chinese call this migration: `going out' (chuqu). Chang describes the lives and attitudes of young women workers who she got to know and spend time with in Dongguan 2004/6. Dongguan is one of the biggest factory cities in China employing 10 million migrant workers in the mid 2000s, 70% of whom were women.Chang's second theme is that of her own family: parents and grandparents who `went out': to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the USA. This second story although interesting in its own right seemed to us to be such a different story of migration - that of middle class well educated Chinese becoming part of a cosmopolitan global elite - that it sat awkwardly with the stories of the lives of the young women factory workers. It was a different biography, and a more political one.We found the lives, opinions and values of the young women workers fascinating. Their lives in factories - no matter how hard they seemed to us- offered them a new kind of freedom: breaking the established Confucian rules of obedience to parents and ideas of what constituted proper female behaviour. We were surprised by the apparent lawlessness of their lives: the way the women `acquired' other people's identity cards and their identities, slept in the dormitories of factories where they were not employed, told lies about their skills, their employment history and their qualifications. The surprise was as much that the Chinese employment and worker registration systems were inefficient enough for them to do all this successfully as much as the fact that they did it at all.It seemed as if these young Chinese workers had completely adopted simplistic US motivational psychology, they believed that having the confidence to apply for a job was more important than having the skills to do it, that they could pick up skills by learning on the job and copying others, and that acquiring western social etiquette eg table manners, was more likely to get you a better jobs than acquiring more vocational skills. As educators we were fascinated by Mr Wu's Assembly line English where people learned English by repeating the sounds of words they did not know the meaning of. We wondered how far this was a particular outcome of Chinese education, and how much was to do with an employment market that was expanding faster than the availability of skilled workers.One weakness of the book for many of us was the way young women were introduced to us in some detail - leading us to expect that we would follow their lives - then they simply disappeared from the story, while the narrative continued to follow others. Chang writes about the transience of friendship in this world- as identities change, and as people lose their friends' contact numbers when they lose their mobile phones. Perhaps she was illustrating this through the appearance and disappearance of women in her narrative, but we didn't enjoy this. But it is a relatively small annoyance compared to the amount we learned and enjoyed from the book.

I'm not a big non-fiction fan. The books are usually very dry and despite how interested I might be in the subject matter, I can't remember what I've read from one page to another. This book, however, flows well and is an easy read. Each chapter focuses on a particular issue (i.e. dating, speaking English, money, etc.) and the girls' stories are centered around this topic. By choosing to relay the stories this way, and not in chronological order, it was at times a little confusing.Chang put a lot of family history into this book and to be honest, I'm not sure why. I can only imagine that it was to paint a larger picture of China and what the country and its people have been through in the last century, but it felt shoe-horned in. Also, these chapters were the longest in the book and not the most interesting. I feel that Chang should've written a separate book about her family.The main focus is on two girls, Min and Chunming, and stories of various other girls and their plights are interwoven. In Chang's attempt to remain neutral, there is a distinct lack of judgement and/or opinion and in this case it comes across as unfeeling. If anything, the book is more positive than negative and given the girls' somewhat dire situations, this seems wrong. Is this a feminist book about women finding their own way in the world in a society where women are generally overlooked? Could it be that this new-found independence is still better than being trapped at home in rural China?

This book offers a very different perspective to the western narrative about migrant workers, as Chang herself has stressed in interviews. It is a story of (repeated) new beginnings, hope, social transformation, and a society's sense of history. Completely engrossing.Sure, the migrants' working and living conditions, and hours, are bad but Chang effortlessly shows how the life in Dongguan is utterly liberating to the girls she writes about. Some of this new-found liberty is daunting - especially to what are very young girls - with questionable decision making and rationalisations.Chang's telling of her own family's history is a thread throughout the book. This was a very interesting story, as was the 'history of the history,' but I did wonder at times what this had to do with the story of the migrant workers. Chang manages to tie this together neatly though, and in the end I think the book benefits from its inclusion.All in all a thoroughly enjoyable book, and a real page-turner at times.