Job & Edu

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

From Spiegel & Grau

Author : Leslie T. Chang
Binding : Paperback
DeweyDecimalNumber : 331.40951
EAN : 9780385520188
Edition : Reprint
ISBN : 0385520182
Label : Spiegel & Grau
Manufacturer : Spiegel & Grau
NumberOfPages : 448
ProductTypeName : ABIS_BOOK
PublicationDate : 2009-08-04
Publisher : Spiegel & Grau
ReleaseDate : 2009-08-04
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Customer Reviews

Rating:
Summary: Who Made our Nikes?
Comment: This is a well researched book about the lives in the city of young women with limited schooling who are from the country side of China. The author followed their lives for 4 years. During that time, she interviewed them and lived with them briefly both in the city and in the village. The stories are about their hard work to improve their own lives and those of their families against unfavorable odds and taking risks at the same time. The author also tells the history of her own very well educated family as parallel and contrast.

The narrative has an impetus that keeps readers wanting to share the workers triumphs and defeats. The stories are poignent at times but exhilarating and even comical at others. Anyone who ever bought anything made in China should read this to get some idea about the people who produced them.
Rating:
Summary: fast and faster
Comment: People come and go so quickly around here. The story is fascinating, frustrating, lonely, hard and hopeful. The book is well written and the narrator perfectly propels it. Everything here is in flux - dirt, roads, small shops, large factories, the jobs, the buildings, the worker dormatories, the buses. People jump jobs over and over, inching up the ladder toward a yearned for success. In Thomas Friedman's books he is the one on the move; here, Leslie Chang stands in stillness to capture the whirlwind around her. A very good read.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern Classic
Comment: The emotions of Factory Girls are strong and easy to relate to for all women and that is what makes the book so powerful. The stories happen thousands of miles away, yet they could be the story of any young woman today trying to survive in a liberated and modern world - one her parents do not understand and where there are no real rules or guidebooks. If you are a woman who wants to understand the choices you have made in life I would recommend reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: New Industrial China Frees Country Girls
Comment: The industrialization of China's Southeast has afforded young women born to lives of dull existence in rural small-holdings the opportunity for independence, education, and self-fulfillment through upward mobility from blue-collar factory jobs to white-collar careers. This theme is contrary to the received wisdom that China is exploiting its children by using them in cruel, inhuman sweat-shops.

Chang, born and educated in the United States, lived for 10 years in China as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, follows three women from factory floors to factory offices to non-factory employment to their own businesses. She uses her own family history as the back-drop for old China to contrast it with this new China. She describes the irony that traditional China's world-view of "first son" which keeps men near home and women from any accomplishments outside their families but made it necessary, when industrialization came to China, women "go-out" to work and thereby find independence-- find themselves.

This is a big topic--the changing of the status of women in the largest population ever known. Chang handles it fairly well with a few slips that take the reader in the wrong direction from time to time. Chang shows us three different perspectives on success but does not show much of the results of failure. Only tangential characters return to their father's houses and traditional marriages to local village men.

Chang's training as a journalist shows in her diction and pace. The reader seldom must consult a dictionary and is never left wondering what the subject of a sentence was by the time she reaches the verb. The short to-the-point phrases means the reader is asked to trade smoother transitions for added clarity. That is a sacrifice this reader is always happy to make.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Insight
Comment: A few years ago, I spent about 6 months in the Ghuangzhou area helping setup a factory. While I made friends with 2-3 people who spoke reasonably good English, the language barrier prevented really getting to know anyone very well. This book finally helped fill in the gaps a bit. Very enjoyable read. I would recommend it especially to anyone who travels to China for business.