Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:
Book: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang.
Read: Pages 1-119, (chapters 1-5) 171-245 (chapters 7-8).
Question: What cost do factory girls pay for the freedom they achieve when they leave their rural villages?
(Think back to the class reading early in this course on Shanghai courtesans and streetwalkers in early twentieth-century China. Compare those women and their circumstances to the karaoke clubs in Dongguan Chang describes.)
Chang is a former journalist for the "Wall Street Journal" who documents in her book the everyday lives of young women working on the assembly lines in the south China factory city of Dongguan. "Today," Chang writes, "China has 130 million migrant workers. Together they represent the largest migration in human history." The city of Dongguan is over 70% female, the majority of them young women from rural China who have left their villages to make their own way in the city. Dongguan is representative of the new industrial super cities that are now springing up all over China.
As a Chinese-American, Leslie Chang makes connections with her own family's migration out of China to the U.S. In several chapters of the book, she retraces her family history and visits the places in China where her grandparents and relatives had lived for several generations. I have not assigned these chapters, but I hope you will read them anyway. The information in them is relevant, but not essential, to the story Chang tells of the young migrant women.
As you will see, the lives of these factory women would have dismayed Mao Zedong, who glorified workers and despised those who managed them. Mao promoted a collective identity over that of an individualistic one. The women in this book dream of moving up and becoming managers, and they strive for greater freedom and independence, which they believe money and more money will buy them. Chang also documents the city's self-improvement businesses that lure the women into evening classes after their long work days. Chang describes the different markets that operate in Dongguan - the job market, marriage market, and education market. Participating in them gives the girls optimism that they will improve their lives.
