Factory Girls
by Leslie T. Chang
First reviewed April 2013
I loved this book when I read it nearly ten years ago. I still think it’s great.
—edit from July 2023: really cool to see the author’s spouse writing about their family in the July 3, 2023 issue of The New Yorker :
Most things I had read about China’s migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.
Another decade has nearly passed since Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China was researched and written; a pall of uncertainty hangs over the reader—has this world “utterly changed” yet again?
An exposé on factory conditions in mid-2000s China might be interesting as a deep read into a society in flux—an epochal curiosity like a memoir unearthed from the U.S.’s own California Gold Rush—or its appeal might diminish as each day marks one step further from any practical relatability. Does Factory Girls cover a unique temporosocial construct, one doomed to languish as a historical footnote in the story of the 21st century’s burgeoning global commerce engine, unlikely to be replicated; an age built from a one-time shift in pattern?
When describing the factory details, the writing is tense, the sentences clipped. It feels like something is compressed, just about to burst: an overworked machine stressed beyond the recommended amount. There is a purposefulness to the prose, a function:
After the big American brands came under attack from unions and workers’ rights groups for harsh conditions in their factories, Nike and Adidas began pushing their suppliers to improve the working environment. Yue Yuen changed to an eleven-hour workday and gave employees every Sunday off; many workers quit, complaining that the overtime pay was no longer enough. The company set up a business unit to oversee working conditions and a counseling center where workers could seek help and file complaints. It improved safety measures, banned hazardous chemicals, and abolished military-style calisthenics. Yet even as the brands have pushed factories to treat workers better, they are also pressuring them to cut costs. At times these goals work at cross-purposes. The Yue Yuen plant for Adidas used to issue workers’ uniforms free of charge. But because of cost-cutting pressure from Adidas, Yue Yuen started charging workers for uniforms, but Adidas objected to this practice too. Yue Yuen abolished uniforms altogether, and workers now wear their own clothes on the job.
But Factory Girls truly shines within the conflux of personal narrative and cultural concept; be it from Min or Chunming—the girls that get the most focus—or the author herself.
Because, while the general structure does follow the factory girls, there is another story that ads heft to the often flighty tales coming from the youthful, independent teenagers. The author, an American reporter whose family is two generations removed from China, interweaves her personal narrative: a homecoming to her historical village; a reunion with extended family; a discussion with ancient neighbors. In the beginning she is a simple point of entrance for the reader—an outsider to China who needs everything explained: “I once asked Chunming if she had ever met a man older than she who wasn’t married. The minute I asked I thought it was a dumb question—of course she had—until she answered. “Very, very few,” she said.” As the stories from the factory girls develop, an eerie parallel arises.
Migrant workers use a simple term for the move that defines their lives: chuqu, to go out. There was nothing to do at home, so I went out. This is how a migrant story begins.
To come out from home and work in a factory is the hardest thing they have ever done. It is also an adventure. What keeps them in the city is not fear but pride: To return home early is to admit defeat. To go out and stay out—chuqu—is to change your fate.
As the author’s resurgent cultural interest, the sociopolitical history of China, and the contemporary lives of the factory girls intermingle, the reader is pulled into personal engagement by virtue of positioning. Far from being self-indulgent or superfluous to the narrative of factory girls, the author’s personal stories allow the reader, whose point of view began as foreigner, outsider, to internalize the similarities between the lives of migrant workers and the rest of the population.
The history of the author is jarringly distinct—a foil to the lives of the factory girls. At the same time, hers is just another story of chuqu, migration, that ended in America rather than a Dongguan factory. As the author travels to her ancestral village, it is like watching the factory girls return home during holiday; everything is the same, but they are so very, very different:
The road narrowed, crossed a mud puddle, and appeared to stop abruptly at a broomstick stretched across the backs of two chairs. An old woman demanded payment. It was a common sight in rural areas—a makeshift tollbooth, operating under no greater authority than poverty and stubbornness.
Nothing changes but the people who leave.
The author is still American, the default—unreflective—perspective of the intended audience. The view of China is still that of an outsider:
I had always felt that social interactions among the Chinese were needlessly complicated. Confucian tradition, which emphasized not the individual but his role in a complex hierarchical order, placed great value on status, self-restraint, and the proper display of respect. The Chinese had been living in densely populated communities for several thousand years, and they had developed subtle skills of delivering and detecting slights, exerting power through indirect means, and manipulating situations to their own benefit, all beneath a surface of elaborate courtesy. Even Chinese themselves often complained that living in their society was lei, tiring. I had not appreciated just how tiring until I read [Square and Round], which devoted eight pages on how to smile and forty-five pages to lulling others into letting down their guard.
As the book moves forward, the distance between the author and the subjects diminish; because the reader has been so carefully bundled up with the author's perspective for so long, the uncovered parity creates space for self-reflection without forced empathy or literary coercion. And while the essence of the book is on the people, the plurality of words remains dedicated to the factories themselves:
Counterfeit college diplomas are for sale at street corners. In Dongguan there is a fake IKEA and a fast-food chain whose name translates as “McKFC” and a ten-story building that calls itself the Haiyatt Hotel, with a marble lobby and a decidedly lax attitude toward copyright violation (“We have an ‘i’ in our name, they don’t,” explains a young woman at the front desk).
When the story brings the narrator out into the country, the style becomes more languid, more historical, less direct:
About the only unusual thing about the village is the extravagance of its name—Liemahuitou, “fierce horse turning its head.” The name was derived from the shape of a nearby mountain. Generations have lived and died here without traveling twenty miles from home. A popular old saying celebrated the isolation: To live an entire life without making a long journey is good fortune.
Gone are the quick tales of whirlwind greetings and disposable interactions, replaced with semantic history lessons and recitations of aphorisms; nothing is a poor mimic of Western businesses—McKFC—but named from geographical permanence—Liemahuitou. The setting dictates the tone, and there is always something new across each page.
Factory Girls twines a contemporary movement with a personal journey. It gives a reader a dozen different entryways into one esoteric aspect of modern China. Whether the literal description of life in a Chinese factory becomes ten years out of date or two hundred, the stories of people, of chuqu, of finding your way, are timeless. Factory Girls will not age, and it will not disappoint.