Leslie T. Chang
Hardcover | Pages: 420 pages Rating: 3.91 | 7636 Users | 939 Reviews
Describe Books In Pursuance Of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
| Original Title: | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China |
| ISBN: | 0385520174 (ISBN13: 9780385520171) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Narrative Supposing Books Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
China has more than 114 million migrant workers, which represents the largest migration in human history. But while these workers, who leave their rural towns to find jobs in China's cities, are the driving force behind China's growing economy, little is known about their day-to-day lives or the sociological significance of this massive movement. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women whom she follows over the course of three years. Chang vividly portrays a world where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a cell phone; where lying about your age, your education, and your work experience is often a requisite for getting ahead; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Throughout this affecting portrait of migrant life, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family's migrations, within China and to the West, providing a historical frame of reference for her investigation. At a time when the Olympics will have shifted the world's focus to China, Factory Girls offers a previously untold story about the immense population of unknown women who work countless hours, often in hazardous conditions, to provide us with the material goods we take for granted. A book of global significance, it demonstrates how the movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and the fates of families, transforming our world much as immigration to America's shores remade our own society a century ago.List Appertaining To Books Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
| Title | : | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China |
| Author | : | Leslie T. Chang |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 420 pages |
| Published | : | October 7th 2008 by Spiegel & Grau (first published January 1st 2008) |
| Categories | : | Cultural. China. Nonfiction. Asia. History. Sociology. Economics. Womens |
Rating Appertaining To Books Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Ratings: 3.91 From 7636 Users | 939 ReviewsPiece Appertaining To Books Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Review of Factory Girls, by Leslie T. Chang, 2009Leslie Chang spent two years with women workers in Guangdong, China to produce this book. It is basically an ethnographic account though she does not convey it in these terms being a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. The basic message is simple: women workers find their work meaningful. Not the work itself which is mindless and alienating. Rather, meaning emerges as the by-product of the work: money, status, skills, and mobility.
This book explores two related topics: the conditions and situation of female migrant workers in China, and the author's family history in China (she is American but her family immigrated in the mid-20th century). The former is much, much more compelling than the latter, which to me seemed meaningful for the author but ultimately not compelling enough, or connected enough to the broader story, to warrant being included in the book. Some of the interesting things I learned from this book:
There are two great reasons to read this book! One, the direct relevance it has to almost everyone alive today who consumes products of any sort (shoes, bags, cell phone parts, computer parts) made by the intrepid young working ladies of Dongguan in Southern China that the author describes in this book. Second, Ms. Chang's narrative voice was truly a pleasure to read. The material itself is fascinating and up-to-the minute-timely; the book details how a huge migration is taking place in China,
I suppose for a reader not yet familiar with China, much of this book content would be quite shocking and enlightening. I did not particularly feel that way, yet still there are many insights worth reading. The main focus of the book, these factory girls, or we should rather call them migrants (since at first I mistook the word "factory girls" for workers on assembly lines only), are fascinating. Instead of knowing them through the usual presentation of statistics, numbers and graphs, plus some
This is a novel one can spend hours contemplating. The development of factories in China is often compared to our own Industrial Revolution. It is similar yet different in many ways some of which are cultural, some of which are born of necessity. It's fascinating to follow the migrants who move into the cities from their rural origins. The author discusses migration of young women from the countryside to the city where they seek jobs in the factories in Dongguan. She tells stories about several
This is a novel one can spend hours contemplating. The development of factories in China is often compared to our own Industrial Revolution. It is similar yet different in many ways some of which are cultural, some of which are born of necessity. It's fascinating to follow the migrants who move into the cities from their rural origins. The author discusses migration of young women from the countryside to the city where they seek jobs in the factories in Dongguan. She tells stories about several
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