Factory Girls: from Village to City in a Changing China

Factory Girls: from Village to City in a Changing China
Leslie T. Chang
Spiegel and Grau, 2009, 431 p. Nonfiction

Leslie Chang doesn’t just describe the lives of the young women who leave their small rural villages in China to work in the factories that make our shoes, belts, purses, clothing, gadgets and appliances. She takes us into their lives in an intimate way, revealing their hopes and fears, their personal transformations and the ways in which they are also transforming China. The author follows a number of young women as they leave home, change jobs, gain skills and change jobs once again. We follow the young women as Leslie did, meeting them, learning about them, sometimes losing contact and never knowing the ending of their stories, sometimes finding them again and seeing the trials they’ve endured. She describes each of them with insight and compassion.

The girls appear in alternating chapters; each girl is unique and rarely do their stories overlap. The only difficulty I had with the book was that I often wanted to read one girl’s story from beginning to end. The book isn’t organized that way but is arranged chronologically, as Leslie Chang experienced the events. Nonetheless, I highly recommend the book. It is a must read if you are interested in modern China or in the lives of women around the world.