"The History of a Family Begins When a Person Leaves Home"
Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang (2008)
The largest movement of people in history took place not even 30 years ago, when over 130 million people moved from China’s countryside to seek work in the cities. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang follows a group of young women over three years in the city of Dongguan. She tries to illustrate why, exactly, someone would move a 44-hour bus-ride away from home to grind out 80 hour work weeks in a shoe factory.
Prospects were limited back on the family farm. Life was circumscribed by the expectations of the community. A woman had little agency nor opportunity to break out of the rhythms of village life. But working in the city, she obtains a disposable income for the first time, with which she can buy food, clothes, perfumes, televisions, cellphones, and other luxuries. If she saves up, she might be able to put a sibling through university, or even start her own business, freeing her from the fate of her family’s (or husband’s family’s) farm.
Working in the city allows women to obtain money, and hence power. When they return home, the hierarchy of the village is flipped on its head. This is nowhere better seen than in the New Year’s tradition where elders once gave out red envelopes of cash to the young; now, in the age of the factory worker, it is the young who come home plush with cash and gifts for everyone. This is something I had just never considered, and it was the most striking point of the book. Not only economic necessity, but a whole range of psychological motives drew women to work in the factories: for some, it was the sense they might be able to direct their own lives; for others, the sheer sense of adventure.
If a migrant has the right mix of luck and cunning, she might work her way up and off the factory floor. The women Leslie Chang met go to ridiculous extents to obtain this better middle-class life. One of them—Chunming is her name—had worked her way off the factory floor by age 20. She had been at various times an office clerk, an English translator (despite only knowing a few words), the owner of a construction materials business (despite knowing nothing about it), a health supplement seller in a Pyramid scheme, and a recruitment agent. She moves 13 times in 10 years and almost gets tricked into working at a brothel.
To rise up the ladder, one has to bluff their way into the job and learn just enough by doing in order to get by. On rare days off, migrants go to crammed night courses to learn English, to learn how to speak in public, how to market themselves, how to date. Getting ahead requires unlearning the collectivist village mindset. It requires a total baptism in individualism and entrepreneurship and self-promotion.
The corollary is that life’s tenor is corrupt, precarious, lonely, and materialistic. It is common for people to simply lose contact with each other for any number of reasons: changing a job, changing a phone, moving house, moving city, not being able to get any time off. No one sticks around long enough to become your mate. Lying—to family, to friends, to employers, to clients—becomes second-nature. The only kind of person that can succeed is someone with a certain mixture of cunning and ambition. When Chunming’s friends meet her boyfriend for the first time, they tell her to dump him because of his weak personality: “In this society, if one is too soft, he will be left behind.”
Interwoven with migrant stories is a bit of Leslie Chang's own family history. The success of this book comes from the fact that Chang, being Chinese-American, is both an insider and an outsider. She knows enough of Chinese culture, language, and society to understand the motives of the factory workers, yet remains enough of an outsider to know which parts need to be explained to us. Her family history serves an important role in contextualising China’s history and the mentality it has produced in its people.
Somewhat scared of what lay there, Chang only looked into her whakapapa after ten years in China. Her family had sided with the Nationalists in the Civil War; her great grandfather, one of the first Chinese to get a university education in America, was ambushed and killed by Communists in 1946 while inspecting a mine. He was descended from a line of pioneers who, settling in the Manchurian wilderness, established a new branch of the family tree.
Chinese genealogy traditionally begins with an ancestor who moves away from home to establish himself some place new: “The history of a family begins when a person leaves home.” Chang draws a beautiful connection here. Though the migrants do their best to visit home, send money back, and keep in touch, with each passing year they find themselves belonging more to the sketchy world of sweatshop boomtowns, a world completely unintelligible from that their parents inherited.
Factory Girls was written in 2008, so it risks being a little dated. The epicentre of the sweatshop phenomenon probably isn’t China any more, but Vietnam or Bangladesh or Indonesia. All the same, Chang’s approach to the subject, more anthropological than economical, remains a great read. It’s hard to state just how quickly it all happened. Within a few years, the city of Dongguan went from a few hundred thousand to over 3 million (with unofficial estimates of undocumented migrant workers doubling or tripling that figure). And there were those like Chunming who threw themselves into the vertex: uncertain of what came next, but driven by the excitement and ambition of a new life in the city.