As someone who lives in Beijing and has been part of the East Asian Studies scholastic community for years, I can honestly say that this book sums up everything my mountains of pretentious textbooks and Dashan-esque snooty white dudes have ever said about life in China. The book is long, as it should be, because there is so much to observe. The author's analysis is thoughtful, and never condescending or presumptuous. Her personal family history is so fascinating. Many reviews say it interrupts the rest of the book, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It provides a concrete historical background so that you see a snapshot of modern culture, then a digression to find out more about China's past. Her comments about various ironies of Chinese modern culture are spot-on but always kind. I would teach an entire course on this book, and it should certainly be required reading for any class on modern China, women in China, Chinese economics, etc. I haven't been this excited about a single book in a long time. Thank you Leslie T. Chang for writing this book!!!

I enjoyed very much reading this book. I read the author's WSJ article long time ago, so I was eagerly waiting for this book to come out. The stories are very interesting yet poignant at the same time. These girls' ambitions, hard work, & constant desire for self-improvement put those Americans who take everything they have for granted to shame.

I admire the author's courageous effort in her research, following the girls to their factories, villages, and business meetings. Joining millions of migrants in the crazy Chinese New Year travel BY TRAIN & then BY BUS - is not for the ones with fainted hearts... TO live in the rural village with no heat in February (below freezing point weather)for TWO WEEKS - is not an easy task for someone who's American born, or even native Chinese from the northern part of China (where there is heat in winter). Mao in the old days arbitrarily decided that "north of the Yangze River is allowed to have heat in winter, south of it no need". What a tyrant!!

I gave the book 4-star instead of a 5-star only because:
1. I found the stories a bit choppy. I had a hard time tracking all the names & places & found myself flipping back to see who's whom. A clearer timeline might have been helpful.
2. I would like to see some pictures of Dongguan, factories, dorms, places where the author & girls have been to, and a detailed map perhaps, tracking each girl's job hopping steps. A picture is worth a thousand words. Author might want to set up a website with some additional information.
3. The author's own family history, while very touching to read, is somewhat distracting from the girls' stories, despite the author's effort of drawing the analogy of "her grandfather was just like these migrant girls by leaving their own village decades ago". I think that the author should've saved that material & write another book about it.

Overall, this is a great book, and kudos to Leslie for her hard work & incredible effort to make these girls' stories known. Bravo!

Factory Girls is a non-fiction book written by an Chinese-American journalist. It focuses on the stories of girls who immigrate from rural Chinese villages to factories in more urban areas of China. The girls work in shoe factories, purse factories, factories that make one specific plastic piece for a larger item, and a lot of other factories, but their stories are all the same -- they left the village for better opportunities.

I'm glad that someone finally wrote a book like this. People in America like to focus on poor working conditions of factories in China, but what they don't realize is that a lot of the people working in those factories would rather work 14 hour days sitting in an assembly line and earning 10x the amount they make doing back-breaking work on a farm. The author does a great job showing the lives of these girls who leave their village without imparting any judgement on them or their bosses.

I enjoyed reading the stories of the handful of girls who worked at one factory, jumped to the next, jumped to another job, and so on, but I thought the author's own story of her family felt a bit tacked on. It made the book feel like it was trying to be two separate books. The author's story could have gone in a separate book about families affected by the Communist Revolution.

The book is easy to read. Even though the factory girls' stories started sounding similar toward the middle of the book (that was the point), it never felt like a chore to read. I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in the side of the story that doesn't usually get covered in western newspapers.

If you are anything like me, you have wondered about the lives and work conditions of the workers in China that manufacture the good we buy and use on a daily basis. In addition, I wonder if they know what they are making and have any desire to own these things. If these questions, and more, make you curious, then this is the perfect book for you to read.

The author looks at the lives of the (mainly) women who leave the country side to come to the factories to make money for themselves and for their families. Focusing on the city of Dongguan, which is known as a manufacturing city, the author looked for and found 2 subjects that were interested in telling their stories. She actually found more, but do to the turnover rates at the factories, she lost touch with them fairly rapidly.

Imagine, if you can, a factory that makes most of the athletic shoes for many of the main brand names in the industry, along with a few lesser brands. What would that factory look like and how are the workers treated? Would you be surprised if I told you the factory compound employs 70,000 employees (no, that isn't a misprint) and that the workers work forced overtime, make less than $200 a month (on average) and live and eat within the factory compound? I know I was amazed and tried to picture what a factory of that size looked like.

Interspersed with the information about the factories, the city, and life in the city, the author presents a history of her family. While it may seem out of place, the information is very useful in demonstrating how China has changed financially, as well as socially, over the past 100 years. The information paints a stark change in the way society functions and demonstrates that China is a different country now from what it was even a mere 10 years ago.

This was an excellent read that had me looking at electronic items I used every day in a totally different light. And, I am sure it will cause me to think twice when I next purchase something made in China. I will wonder if the people who made it are treated as slaves or if this factory is one of the better ones. And I will wonder if they aspire to own whatever it is I want (and probably don't really need). This is an excellent book that puts a face on the globalization of industry and I cannot recommend it highly enough!

In this book, Leslie Chang delves deeply into the world of migrant workers to find out who these people are and what their collective dislocation means for China. Chang skillfully sketches migrants as individuals with their own small victories and bitter tragedies, and she captures the surprising dynamics of this enormous but ill-understood subculture. In many ways, migrant workers embody the fundamental changes underway in China today.

Chang covered China for the Wall Street Journal, and she's an insightful interpreter of a society in flux. People who leave village life, with its intense cocoon of family and community ties, find themselves untethered in a city, scrounging for work and a place to sleep. "They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information," she writes. And yet many migrants also feel freed from a suffocating web of traditional habits and mores. Able to explore and grow in the lawless free-for-all of China's boomtowns, many cross an invisible line into the modern world, and there is no going back.

Chang got to know dozens of young women who have ventured to Dongguan, a new metropolis just north of Hong Kong. She focuses on two particularly compelling ones, Min and Chunming, who gradually came to trust her enough to share their stories, as well as diary entries, late-night phone calls and heart-to-heart confessions. Each is ambitious, impulsive, endearing. Each left home as a teenager and experienced a big adventure. Through their lives, Chang shows us how unmoored China is, erratically yearning for something better, and surprisingly resilient.

One of the women describes her blurry, confusing arrival in a new city, getting lured into a whorehouse, escaping, begging on the street, stealing another woman's ID card to get work at a toy factory, graduating to clerkdom, learning about business, striking it rich with direct sales only to see her company crumble overnight. Chang explores a "talent market," where workers offer themselves to any prospective employer -- a sneaker factory, a dating agency, an illicit nightspot. She reads magazines about migrant life that the women eagerly pass around, with articles titled "Be Your Own Master" and "Ambition Made Me Who I Am." Interactions among migrant women seem a cross between high school networking and wartime bonding. Being far from home, the women depend on each other to survive, yet they unite and separate with remarkable ease. Everyone lies. Promises are made and broken. "Dongguan was a place without memory," Chang writes.

Partway through "Factory Girls," Chang abruptly changes gears to tell her own family history. It is fascinating. Her great-grandfather was a landowner in northern China and a Confucian patriarch with four wives. His son, Chang's grandfather, studied mining in the United States and then returned to China. At the height of China's civil war, working for the Nationalists, he was assassinated. Chang's grandmother escaped to Taiwan with her children, leaving relatives and family wealth behind. Chang's father later immigrated to America, where Chang was born and raised. He did not like to talk about family history. Only after Chang had worked in China for some years did she begin to explore and discover the truth, including the myriad resentments and injustices that festered among her relatives, as well as the government's suppression of accounts of the past.

Chang writes about her family and its dislocations with special sensitivity and grace. That story is almost like a book within a book, and it gives a poignant perspective to her accounts of the dislocated migrant workers she gets to know. More than that, it completes her portrait of China.

If the lives of migrant workers seem to represent the new China, with all its unwieldy promise and economic possibilities, Chang's family history reflects the old China, its stubborn intractability and severe injustice. For now, the two still go together.

With the recent headlines about Chinese milk still lingering in the news, this book could not have come at a more unique time. It examines the costs of modernization through the lives of workers themselves, the workers being women.

And while it offers opportunities which these women otherwise might not have experienced back in their villages, they also get newfound opportunities to experience exploitation and danger.

American-purchased products are cheap because Leslie Chang reveals that idealistic young women soon discover that they lack many of the protections which American women had to previously secure in our factories. Labor is cheap where there are no labor protections.

A strength of this book is solidarity with the women themselves. Rather than wanting to send them back to their villages, Chang realizes that these women work for survival. Nobody forced them to come--or stay-at the factories. They need money and want to learn 'new' skills which they realized would not be available in the world which they had previously known.

Myself and other feminists cannot seriously talk about expanding women's agency without then acknowledging that this expansion also leaves women open to the same wider world which men historically have occupied.

China has 130 million migrant workers, 70% female; Chang tells their story primarily through the lies of two young women over a three year period as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines. Most leave home for these jobs for the money, to see the world, to have something to do, and learn new skills. Parents, however, are usually unhappy with this decision as it frequently leads to marrying someone outside the village and very few visits home.

Ten are interviewed for every one hired, many have college diplomas. Typically girls sleep 12 to an unheated room at a factory site. Fines for sharing a bunk with a down and out friend (ten yuan, about $1.25), missing work (100 yuan) and various other infraction are deducted from their pay. Workers are usually required to stay 6 months, and the factory holds the first two months of pay as leverage to enforce this. Work days in some factories last 13 hours and go on every day for weeks, with some Saturday afternoons off. All this for 400 yuan/month (plus room and board), and almost as much again in overtime.

Min (one of the girls followed by Chang) managed to leave the factory for a clerk position because of her neat handwriting. Her pay doubled, only 8/room, and ten hours/day. She planned to stay 7 years, sending money home to repay her parents for raising her; after that Min intended to return home and marry. (Min eventually obtained a position as a purchasing agent for 1,200 yuan/month, plus about 8,000 yuan/month in kickbacks. This not only enormously raised her standard of living, but her status at home as well.)

Dongguan (estimated 10 million people) is divided into 32 towns, each specializing in a specific manufacture. American and European bosses rate best, then Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwanese. Chinese bosses are rated the worst - always going bankrupt.

Seventy-thousand work at the Taiwanese-owned Yue Huen shoe factory in Dungguan. It is the largest source for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, and others. Turnover is 5%/month, theft is rampant. (Dishonesty is common in all dimensions - purchasing kickbacks, official corruption, lying about marital status, product quality, corporations failing to pay employees.)

Chunming (the other girl) became a direct salesperson for a foreign health products firm, making $1,000/month; 2.5 years later, however, she was working for a Chinese company and only earning $150/month - a considerable downfall (not explained), though still much better than if she had stayed in her home village or original factory job.

Job-hopping and lying about one's past appear to be the best way to get ahead. Counterfeit vocational college degrees are available for $7.50.

Karaoke companions earn about $25/night; prostitutes about $2,500/month.

Chang also describes how the locals strive to learn English - enormously hampered by their instructors' lack of expertise - almost all Chinese, and many Ugandans.

It was also interesting to read about Chang's visit to her family's former village and talk to those who knew her relatives, as well as learn of the Cultural Revolution's impact on them. Trains and buses are difficult to board near the lunar new year - so crowded that on long trips toilets become stopped up and passengers squat in the aisles.

Bottom Line: "Factory Girls" excellently conveys the incredible drive and sense of self-responsibility possessed by China's massive number of young migrant workers.

China has 130 million migrant workers, 70% female; Chang tells their story primarily through the lies of two young women over a three year period as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines. Most leave home for these jobs for the money, to see the world, to have something to do, and learn new skills.

Ten are interviewed for every one hired, many have college diplomas. Typically girls sleep 12 to an unheated room at a factory site. Fines for sharing a bunk with a down and out friend (ten yuan, about $1.25), missing work (100 yuan) and various other infraction are deducted from their pay. Workers are usually required to stay 6 months, and the factory holds the first two months of pay as leverage to enforce this. Work days in some factories last 13 hours and go on every day for weeks, with some Saturday afternoons off. All this for 400 yuan/month (plus room and board), and almost as much again in overtime.

Min (one of the girls followed by Chang) managed to leave the factory for a clerk position because of her neat handwriting. Her pay doubled, only 8/room, and ten hours/day. She planned to stay 7 years, sending money home to repay her parents for raising her; after that Min intended to return home and marry.

Dongguan (estimated 10 million people) is divided into 32 towns, each specializing in a specific manufacture. American and European bosses rate best, then Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwanese. Chinese bosses are rated the worst - always going bankrupt.

Seventy-thousand work at the Taiwanese-owned Yue Huen shoe factory in Dungguan. It is the largest source for Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, and others. Turnover is 5%/month, theft is rampant.

Job-hopping and lying about one's past appear to be the best way to get ahead. Counterfeit vocational college degrees are available for $7.50.

Karaoke companions earn about $25/night; prostitutes about $2,500/month.

Chang also describes how the locals strive to learn English - enormously hampered by their instructors' lack of expertise - almost all Chinese, and many Ugandans.

Bottom Line: "Factory Girls" excellently conveys the incredible drive and sense of self-responsibility possessed by China's massive number of young workers.

From this book's opening paragraph positing two factory girls meeting each other with an opening question of, "What year are you," the China-knowledgeable reader knows with certainty that author Leslie Chang has her literary finger firmly on the pulse of mainland China. The good news is that Ms. Chang sustains her dead-on rendition of Chinese culture and factory life throughout the full length of this deeply engaging look at China's massive migrant work force. FACTORY GIRLS is informative and insightful, offering a first-hand view of the (mostly) young women who make up what the Chinese aptly call the "liudong renkou," the "floating population."

Ms. Chang, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and spouse of China author Peter Hessler (RIVER TOWN and ORACLE BONES), directs her attentions to the industrial heart of southeastern China, in the city of Dongguan. There she meets and obtains the confidence of several young women from peasant families who have migrated from small villages in the country's interior, agricultural provinces to take factory jobs. There's Lu Qingmin, a migrant from Hubei Province who follows her older sister Guimin's trek to the factory world in Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. There's Wu Chunming, the inveterate diarist and self-motivator, a native of Hunan Province who left her village for factory life in 1993, long before the migration became a massive movement.

Amazingly, as Chang reveals, some of the young women had no idea what factory work was like before arriving there, imagining it as some sort of chatty, casual environment. What they discover is, of course, far different, but Chang uses her personal entrée to explore their motivations. First and foremost is money, both for their own use and equally to send back to their families. As time passes, however, some of the young women find themselves motivated by life style changes, new opportunities, chances to learn new skills (including the English language), and even to remake themselves into urbanites. Along the way, Ms. Chang picks up the stories of others whose orbits intersect with those of the factory girls. For example, there's Mr. Wu, inventor of an absurd "assembly line English program," and his devoted student, Liu Yuxia, and Ding Yuanzhi with his bizarrely successful perversion of a self-help book entitled "Square and Round."

Without doubt, FACTORY GIRL's most affecting segment concerns Lu Qingmin's return trip to her parents' home. Here Chang illustrates the widening gulf between generations and life styles as well as the spectacular role reversals that modernization has forced upon families. No longer can the elderly be revered for their experience and wisdom. Now they are obsolete, unable to earn even a modest income, unconnected in a wired world, ignorant of everything from fashion and job-hopping to flush toilets and dating.

Ms. Chang takes a somewhat risky approach to her story of a changing, industrializing China. Instead of focusing strictly on her factory girl subjects, she intersperses their stories with her own rediscovery of her family roots in and around Beijing. The literary purpose is clear: to delineate through generational differences the shift from the Mao-era, collectivist approach to and philosophy of life to the burgeoning sense of individualism and self-actualization in the present-day world of a developing, Westernizing China.

Unfortunately, Chang's excursions into her own family history distract from the far more interesting stories of her young female subjects, the village migrant villagers struggling to survive, make money, and find their place in the changing world of Chinese life. Chang's family was clearly a privileged one, filled with college educated professionals and migrants to Taiwan and the United States. They seem strangely out of place here, in much the same sense that tales of the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution ring hollow and anachronistic in the lives of the young factory girls' lives. As a consequence, these personal biographical interludes feel more intrusive than illustrative. I read them impatiently, wanting only to get back to the stories of Lu Qingmin and Wu Chunming and their factory girl colleagues. If anything, Ms. Chang's efforts to climb inside her subjects' skins do not go far enough. We want to learn still more from the forward-looking stories of Qingmin and Chunming and less about the buried past represented by the pathetic, backward-looking obsessions of her father's first cousin, Zhang Hong.

FACTORY GIRLS is nevertheless a revealing portrayal of a rapidly changing society seen through the least of its players, the young women who populate the factories that now produce so much of the world's goods. Her stories exemplify beautifully her book's catch phrase: "The history of a family begins when a person leaves home." Ms. Chang's strong eye for the telling detail brings fascinating tidbits of Chinese life and culture to the reader, and she does so in a style that is both entertaining and highly readable. We can only hope to see more from her in the coming years.

Interesting subject, thorough research, well-written. Even the digressions (about the author's family and their histories in and out of China) are fascinating, though they don't quite mesh with the rest of the book. The experiences the factory girls have and their personal transformations will resonate with American readers - here is the self-improvement, hard work and confidence Horatio Alger stuff that used to inspire America transplanted into a culture that is receptive and eager to absorb it, and here, too, are lucid accounts of the sad gaps between ambition and ability, ideals and reality, success and failure that go with immigrant experiences. The author was able to get closer to her subjects than anyone else I have read and writes very well indeed. Her account of how the internal migrant experience has mutated in China over the last 10-15 years is particularly fascinating. I read this cover to cover with great interest and hope the author is a work on a new book. (I don't know what is bothering the one star reviewer -- this review is written in Henan where I am visiting my Chinese wife's family, and I have read countless books on China and spent lots of time here and can vouch for the authenticity of this book).

Interesting subject, thorough research, well-written. Even the digressions (about the author's family and their histories in and out of China) are fascinating, though they don't quite mesh with the rest of the book. The experiences the factory girls have and their personal transformations will resonate with American readers - here is the self-improvement, hard work and confidence that used to inspire America transplanted into a culture that is receptive and eager to absorb them, and here, too, are lucid accounts of the sad gaps between ambition and ability, ideals and reality, success and failure that go with immigrant experiences. The author was able to get closer to her subjects than anyone else I have read and writes very well indeed. Her account of how the internal migrant experience has changed in China over the last 10-15 years is particularly fascinating. I read this cover to cover with great interest and hope the author is a work on a new book. (I don't know what is bothering the one star reviewer -- this review is written in Henan where I am visiting my Chinese wife's family, and I have read countless books on China and spent lots of time here and can vouch for the authenticity of this book).

In summary, Factory Girls is very difficult and slow to read, and the content is highly suspect. There are too many simple sentences that make the reading choppy, making the author's thoughts disjointed and lacking in cohesion. Complex sentences are often used at awkward places in the paragraph, contributing to the difficult reading. The author's experience as a factory girl was approximately 20 years ago, not a couple of years ago like she tries to make it in the content. I have worked and lived in China for many years and have traveled for both work and leisure to over 30 cities in China. I can tell you this: Most (as in 90%) of the girls who work in factories do so because of one primary reason - money. Secondary reasons would be for personal development or what have you, but it would be intellectually dishonest to say that money is not the only primary reason. Maybe that is true for a small number of the girls (as in 10%), who go to work in factories for personal development and "see the world," but I can assure you, from first-hand experience and having been in the trenches, most are motivated by money as THE primary reason to migrate to the cities and work in factories. Other items (content) are also suspect, but I don't need to make this review an essay.