Factory Girls – Leslie Chang
- Posted by Shaun on May 12th, 2009 filed in Books
- Comments Off
It took a couple months of off and on reading, but I made it through “Factory Girls” by Leslie Chang. The book focuses mostly around the lives of young girls that leave their rural homes to move into southern China cities in order to work and make money in China’s factories. Chang includes various bits about her life and her journey to China to learn more about her family as well. I’m not sure if that fits very well within the book, but it isn’t horrible.
The book really opens your eyes into the lives of the people that manufacture most of everything that we buy and use on a daily basis. It’s interesting to see how leading these kinds of lives while young and away from family influence results in major changes in the way these girls view China and the world.
I would recommend this book to anybody interested in information about life in southern China’s factory cities and the people that live there. Having finished Factory Girls, I’ve move on to yet another book about China named “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed” by Michael Meyer.
Meyer takes a different approach to writing about China. He is an expat living in Beijing and this book is about his journey to China and he experienced life living in a hutong in Beijing. The hutongs of Beijing are razed in order to reclaim the valuable land that they sit on, which is essentially the gist of the beginning of the book. I don’t know what other parts of Beijing life he’ll cover. I’ve only read a small portion of this book and so far it is a decent read with a few small b/w pictures.