Travel Book Review ~ FACTORY GIRLS by Leslie T Chang

I picked a copy of the book Factory Girls at Hong Kong airport to read on the flight home, it was a night flight and I never slept, I read the book all the way home. I haven't read any books on China since overdosing on the flood of excellent cultural revolution memoirs that sold like hotcakes in the late 1990s. Since I had just been to China for a grand total of three hours in (Zhu Hai on the border of Macao, eating street food, drinking beer and getting a very painful foot massage and eardrum prodding ear clean), I felt the urge to learn a bit more about the modern day China.

Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang jumped out of the shelf at me. The author, Leslie T. Chang is an American Chinese woman who lived in Beijing for a decade as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Looking and speaking Chinese, Chang is able to get her foot into places a tubby whitey like me could never even dream of.

As the title suggests, Factory Girls is  a look at the lives of the girls that work in the factories in booming modern day China. It is fascinating stuff, sad yet full of hope at the same time. The factory girls are mostly poor rural villagers who flock to the cities to find work. These girls are working 12 hour days often seven days a week for very little money. They live onsite in factory dorms, they rarely see their families and friendships are fleeting, it's a hard, lonely life. These are rural girls living in huge industrial cities, when they lose contact with friends they it can be near impossible to find them again, hence a mobile phone is one's life, losing a mobile phone can be a very serious blow.

The factory can be dismissed or penalised financially for trifling matters and the jobs can be very difficult to leave, many girls often do a runner leaving up to a month's pay behind. Or often the factories close down or go broke leaving the workers unpaid. When applying for jobs girls are unable to see the factory and working conditions until they have signed on, at which point it is too late to leave.

And for all this they are likely to be considered too old for employment at the ripe old age of 25, at which time they may either return to their villages or seek work in far dodgier factories. Conditions vary greatly between factories, generally foreign owned companies treat the workers much better than Hong Kong or mainland China owned factories. So there are worse shoes to wear than Nike...

This passage from the book says a lot:

For a long time Lu Qingmin was alone. Here older sister worked at a factory in Shenzhen, a booming industrial city an hour away by bus. Her friends from home were scattered at factories up and down China's coast, but Min, as her friends called her, was not in touch with them. It was a matter of pride: Because she didn't like the place she was working, she didn't tell anyone where she was. She simply dropped out of sight.

Her factory's name was Carrin Electronics. The Honh Kong-owned company made alarm clocks, calculators, and electronic calendars that displayed the time of day in cities around the world. The factory that had looked respectable when Min came for an interview in March 2003: tile buildings, a cement yard, a metal accordion gate that folded shut. It wasn't until she was hired that she was allowed inside. Workers slept twelve to a room in bunks crowded near the toilets; the rooms were dirty and they smelled bad. The food in the canteens was bad, too: A meal consisted of rice, one meat or vegetable dish, a soup, and the soup was watery.

A day in the assembly line stretched from eight in the morning until midnight - thirteen hours on the job plus two breaks for meals - and workers laboured every day for weeks on end. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon they had no overtime, which was their only break. The workers made four hundred yuan a month - the equivalent of fifty dollars - and close to double that with overtime, but the pay was often late. The factory employed a thousand people, mostly women, either teenagers out of home or married women already past thirty. You could judge the quality of the factory of the workplace by who was missing: young women in their twenties, the elite of the factory world. When Min imagined sitting on the assembly line every day for the next ten years, she was filled with dread. She was sixteen years old.

...Talking on the job was forbidden and carried a five-yuan fine. Bathroom breaks were limited to ten minutes and required a sign-up list...

Many factory girls will work a few years while sending money home to their families, then return to their village to marry. Others however find it impossible to return to village life and build lives in the city. There is an army of factory girls doing self improvement courses to better themselves. Some will manage to get off the factory floor and into an office role, then off to big and better things. The author gets herself into a bizarre self improvement course for joining the "white collar classes" and also a dating service, Making Friends Club.

This is a fascinating book, highly recommended.

We have a copy of this book in stock at the time of writing this review, click the link to check if it is available ~ http://www.usedtravelbooks.com.au/factory-girls-leslie-t-chang-voices-from-the-heart-of-modern-china.html