Factory Girls

Randy made his first trip to Shenzhen in September, 1995. Obviously, at that time he had no idea that one day he would live there. For the factory visit he was making then, he drove along a very unfinished gaosu, the same one, long since completed, he would one day travel every day to get to work. He tells of a highway finished in pieces: a few hundred meters of roadway, then a few hundred meters of dirt.

At the factory he visited then he had his first exposure to the Chinese migrant workers. It will sound so quaint to describe it as such, but at that time, the workers were mostly young women from the countryside, working under two-year contracts to earn enough money to buy a pig for their marriage dowry. At least, that is how it was described to Randy by the factory manager. At that time, he was told that was a typical factory worker, a young woman working for a short period of time before she moved back to her rural hometown and married, a brief interruption to an otherwise traditional life. True or not, this is what he was told fifteen years ago.

Years later, when he would be working in manufacturing in Shenzhen, the life of the migrant worker was much different. There were no more pigs, no more dowries. There were girls everywhere, more everyday, in their tight blue jeans and sparkly t-shirts, swinging the Mickey Mouse charms on their new cell phones as they walked down shop-lined streets.

It is this same factory world that Leslie Chang writes about in Factory Girls, my new favorite Book About China Now. Chang lived part-time in Dongguan (just north of Shenzhen) to learn about the current culture of the young female migrant workers. Any studies previously done dated back to the mid '90s (page 27) and obviously did not reflect at all what was going on in the 21st century. Chang also spent time in China researching her own family history, and alternates these two stories throughout the 400-page book.

I could have easily read two separate 400-page books on both subjects. The half of the book that is about the young, female migrant workers has a particular interest to us ( me & Randy) because we knew so many women that could have easily been in this book. Not just from Randy's work, but most of my Chinese friends in Shenzhen (with a few exceptions among some I met at church) came to South China as migrant workers originally. Some of them came specifically to work in factories, some to work in businesses that wouldn't be there if it weren't for factories (everything from Starbucks to chicken bars).

So often we see people we know in some of the people Chang writes about. For instance, one friend, the wife of Randy's co-worker, was talking proudly at dinner one night about how she taught herself Cantonese. I was curious why someone from Jiangxi province who had worked in an American factory in Shenzhen and now was married to a Brit would need to know that. It wasn't like we were in someplace like Guangzhou where Cantonese was the common language. It turned out when she first left her hometown, she worked in Dongguan, and the factory owners there were mostly Cantonese-speaking. At least one person in Factory Girls (p 54) has this as her personal goal, a path to advancement in Dongguan.

Chang gets close to a few young women, close enough to learn more about their lives, their hopes, their dreams than their families back home, their boyfriends, and even other friends at their factories would ever know. She is able to quote a ten-year-old diary of one woman, and go home for a holiday break with another. In Shenzhen my experience with these same type of women is often that they can be secretive or at most vague (Chang, p 121: "A new life began the day they arrived in this city, and they would do what they needed to protect it. The past didn't matter, and the present was everything") about their lives before leaving home. They had fiancees, husbands, and even children that they kept secret, even the years of their birth were often fudged. One American man I knew said that by the third time his then long-time live-in girlfriend celebrated her 18th birthday, he caught on that her ID had been a forgery. In Chang's book one of her subjects also had a fake ID to get a job (p 47). Through her time of working at that factory everyone knew her by the other name, not her own.

There's an entire chapter when Chang goes with one of the women she follows, Min, to her hometown for a visit. This was exceptionally interesting to me (and to Randy, too, when he read it) because of our living situation sort of straddling true city and village life. When we've been frustrated by lack of sinks or hot water in some of the apartments we've viewed for renting, when we've been surprised by the garbage on the floors of some homes we've visited, these all fall in line with Chang's descriptions in chapter 10. I had to laugh, too, about her seeing four-year-olds playing with lighters. Every Chinese New Year's I wonder if I'm culturally insensitive when I'm shocked at seeing this, too.

Chang writes about the women she follows "The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these women told me their stories as if they mattered." I think more important is that Chang treats their stories as if they mattered. This is why these parts held my interest.

The other half of the book is Chang's story of her family. She introduces it to show that her own family's story is part of the constant state of Chinese migration. "My grandfather left home for good when he was sixteen years old--although he probably did not know it then, just as today's migrants do not know it now. Chuqu, to go out. This is how the story of my family also begins." Her family's history goes back a few hundred years before that, actually, with an ancestor's illegal migration to Manchuria in the 17th century. But the 20th century is when the history really really gets interesting. Her grandfather, educated abroad, returned to China only to be murdered working to restore the post-war industries in China. The Communists blamed the KMT, the KMT the Communists, and the Soviet Union (who owned the train he was on at that time) blamed roving bandits. After the Communists came to power, her widowed grandmother and the children fled for Taiwan. Her telling of her grandfather's life, and then her own research about the family left behind in China, are fascinating stories of 20th century China.

Her personal story really helped me understand another part of the Chinese migrant story that I have not been able to comprehend, the recent waves of overseas Chinese that have been returning to China. I've mentioned here before, I think, about a Chinese-American friend of ours whose grandparents starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and who emigrated to the US with his family when he was a boy as soon as his father could get a job in his field. Today his parents talk about returning to China for their retirement. Our friend has already bought them an apartment in a resort community in the Pear River Delta. I've asked Randy time and time again how he, how they, could want to come back. Chang tells it so well:

When I tell my family story to American friends, they ask me how my father could go back to China and spend time with officials from the party that murdered his father. When I lived in Prague, I met the American-born children of Czech emigres, who were so opposed to the Communist regime that they had refused to teach their children to speak Czech growing up. The Cuban exiles are so virulently anti-Castro that they will not return as long as he is in power. But Chinese immigrants are different: No matter what terrible things happened to their families in China, they go back, on whatever terms the government allows. This is in part the pragmatism that runs so deep that is excuses the past, but it is more than that China to them is not a political system or a group of leaders, but something bigger that they carry inside themselves, the memory of a place that no longer exists in the world. China calls them home--with the weight of its tradition, the richness of its language, with its five thousand years of history that sometimes seems to be one repeating cycle of tragedy and suffering. The pull of China is so strong, which is why I resisted it for so long.

Obviously my reading of this book was very personal, though I think I still would have found it interesting had I not come to China. I think though, I would have been very surprised by the absence of dowries and pigs, maybe shocked at how not depressing this book is. This leads me to my only problem with the book, the cover art. I didn't think the woman in the photograph really gave a sense of Chang's Factory Girls, but perhaps girls in tight, embellished blue jeans and sparkly t-shirts would not be what the average reader would expect.