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From Village to City in a Changing China
Spiegel & Grau
October 2008
On Sale: October 7, 2008
432 pages
ISBN: 0385520174
EAN: 9780385520171
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls
is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant
factory population in China.
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; 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.
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