Factory Girls Review

Larissa Sturm
Norwin High School, Cultures of the World, Tenth Grade
Factory Girls: from Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang is a very detailed book that opens up the eyes of those not living in China’s booming factory cities. The author gives a lot of detail regarding the lives of several young girls living and working in factories in large cities. Young women in the book leave home at a very young age to work in the factories. Many of them leave with very little and have to start a new life in a strange place in order to help their families back home in their village. The book goes into detail about how lonely the girl’s lives are. They work extremely long hours and get very little time off. The time they do get off is usually spent with the few friends that they do have. Conditions in most factories are not great and the girls live in cramped dorm rooms with people they do not know. Factories would also routinely change the girl’s dorm room assignments frequently so many of them did not have time to connect with others and have true relationships. Many girls would use false identifications in order to obtain a better job and literally become a different person. Also, many fell into one of the many pyramid schemes that would pop up and lose everything that they had worked so hard for. It seemed so easy for girls to lie about experience that they had in order to move up the ladder. Some factories discussed in the book were so vast that they had their own hospital on the grounds as well as shops and restaurants. If you worked there you literally did not need to leave in order to get any kind of necessities that you needed. This particular factory was where popular shoes that are bought throughout the world are made. There was also many detailed regarding the horrors of public transportation and how you could lose money to a crooked bus driver or left in the middle of nowhere if you were not willing to pay more money than originally told.
The book also gives some details regarding life at home in the village and how it is a life of poverty. This is the main reason the girls go out to work. They want a better life for themselves and they also send money home for their family. Another major difference in the book that is showcased is how life in the country is nowhere near as lonely as life in the city. You have friends and family around you all the time that you can talk to and trust.
Another aspect of the book is the author describing her own family in China and how they had once been a well-respected, noble family prior to the major changes that occurred after the Communist regime and Cultural Revolution.
Overall, I found this book to be quite difficult to read. The author goes back and forth quite a bit and I found the book difficult to read. I found myself re-reading parts of the book because I was confused about whom the author was talking about or just trying to keep up with what was being written. Because of this, I would not recommend that high school students read this entire book. I would however, have the students read parts of the book especially those that showcase factory life and the harsh conditions that go with it. I think that using this book along with a documentary like 10,000 Shovels would help the student understand the mass migration that is going on in China and why so many people choose to leave home to work in factories. I would also want them to try to compare what they read to their own lives.
• Would you be willing to leave home now (age 15-16) to work long hours in a factory, support yourself and send money home for your family to help better their lives?
• Would you be comfortable moving to a large city where you knew nobody to start a new life by yourself?
• Can you compare/contrast working conditions in China to those here in the United States? – I would probably have to provide the students with charts that showed them normal working hours.
• Would you be willing to work 14 hour days and only get two days off a month?
• For the female students- would you be comfortable marrying a man and moving back to his village which could be thousands of miles from your old home and family? I would explain to the students that this was normal for women living in China.
I would recommend this book to other educators so they could get a better understanding of life in the factories and then share that information with their students. I do plan on using this book in one way or another this year in class and will be purchasing my own copy so I will have it on hand. I gave this book four stars because it was very insightful and provided a lot of detail but couldn’t give it five due to the confusion when bouncing back and forth.