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Jan 10, 2012

Sandybanks rated it:

In the early 2000s, my brother briefly worked as an executive for a Taiwanese-owned manufacturing company in China. It was a company of truly epic proportions, employing hundreds of thousands in China and abroad, and manufacturing for virtually all the big names in consumer electronics sold all over the world. If you used an IPad or any other Apple product, it would have passed through one of its gargantuan production facilities. Its ‘campus’ in Longhua, an industrial suburb of Shenzhen, was pra More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2012

Maggie rated it:

3 stars but at times 2 1/2. Parts were very interesting while other parts seemed repetitive. The author focuses on a couple of young women who leave the country areas of China, travel to the main cities and seek work in the factories there. Their stories are sad mostly, as they are at the mercy of unscrupulous employers. However they also live an unreal lifestyle - easily moving from one factory to the next (often just on the say so of a stranger) in the hope that conditions would be better els More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 03, 2009

Jennifer rated it:

There are two great reasons to read this book! One, the direct relevance it has to almost everyone alive today who consumes products of any sort (shoes, bags, cell phone parts, computer parts) made by the intrepid young working ladies of Dongguan in Southern China that the author describes in this book. Second, Ms. Chang's narrative voice was truly a pleasure to read.

The material itself is fascinating and up-to-the minute-timely; the book details how a huge migration is taking pl More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 05, 2009

Kristine rated it:

A little longer than it needs to be but it's very enlightening. It really makes you realize how fortunate we are to be employed or even unemployed in the USA.

These girls leave home as young as 14 and are hired at talent markets so they don't even see the conditions of the factory until the first day on the job. They also live at the factory, sleeping in dorms. Working from 8am to midnight with two short (10 minute) breaks is not unheard of. Employers also withold pay so they cannot More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 30, 2009

Chrissa rated it:

Ms. Chang created a fascinating portrait of several women (including herself and her family) who "went out" from their birthplaces and from the cultural strictures of those places. For a place that is often in the news as The People's Republic of China is, one seldom seems to glean much of the life of the people within. For most of this book, I felt like a child with my nose pressed to the glass, unable to look away from the lives of the women portrayed within. This is an interesting r More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 07, 2009

Ann rated it:

I was very disappointed in this book. It was very disorganized.
The way it jumped from one thing to another with no transition beyond some extra space on the page was quite disorienting. (E.g., one section ended with a statement about an old relative laying in bed waiting to die and the next paragraph started with a description of a table loaded with food.)

The descriptions and conclusions also seemed very superficial. I chose the book because I was very interested in learni More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 23, 2009

James rated it:

This book is a bit hard to review because it is somewhat more complex than one would first expect.
The story turns out to be a bit different than the preconceived notion also.

For the positive, the writer had a background at the wall st journal,
probably the least biased newspaper in America and this gave her the mindset and habit to write an interesting and unbiased account of this unusual mass migration from rice patty to factory.

She also integrated her life More...

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Jan 13, 2012

Mark rated it:

Leslie is an American of Chinese decent. She goes to China to write a story about Chinese girls who leave the farm to work in factories (if it isn't obvious from the title). This mass migration of people leaving the farm to go work in factories is creating a whole new dynamic in China that has yet to play it self out. Leslie does a good job of discussing many of the issues associated with this mass migration from a peasants perspective. However I found the book to be a little slow at times a More...

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Dec 29, 2011

Joe rated it:

The world is full of growing economies, but to thrive a society requires those with fierce and deliberate minds- the dreamers with ambition, the fighters with a cause and the innovator who sees a cityscape where others see only shadows cast by clouds. In this vein of thought, China has been able to catapult itself forward by the entrance of women into the workforce- opening the way for additional intellectual capital and growth.

The rise of women migrant workers, however, is a tenuou More...

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Aug 10, 2011

Katie rated it:

Listened to this on audiobook while jogging. It was long and could've used some editing, I thought--particularly with the long sections detailing the author's ancestor's stories and history. I suppose some would find that part interesting or enlightening but I just thought it distracted from the main story in an already long book. The "main story" being the factory girls.

Now I thought the factory girl stories were really interesting. First of all, I had always pictured Chines More...

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Aug 05, 2011

sacha rated it:

this was not as informative as i thought it would be, since it was written by an american and not an insider, in fact half the book is about how difficult it is to get information or even interviews. however it probably would get a native in trouble to write about it from the inside, so perhaps this is all we can get? also the author decided to 'weave' in her own irrelevant 'history,' but she is not maxine hong kingston and so it became annoying, rambling and even less informative. the writing w More...

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May 15, 2011

Timothy rated it:

This is the best book I've read about the human side of 21st-century China. Chang, the former Wall Street Journal Beijing correspondent, worked for more than a year to create relationships with the young womenwho have left their villages behind and gone into the factories of the South. In focusing her narrative on such a humans scale, Chang puts a face on the Chinese industrial juggernaut -- and it's the face of young women and teenage girls, who have walked away from everything and everyone th More...

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Apr 03, 2011

Marks54 rated it:

This book is the story of a small number of young women working in the newly developed factory town of SE China, such as Shenzhen. They are a few in a population of well over 100 million Chinese, mostly women, who travel thousands of miles from home to work in these factories in towns that have arisen almost from scratch to cities with millions of inhabitants. If you want to understand the evolving economic life of China and how the Chinese government needs to maintain growth, you need to read More...

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Jan 15, 2011

Jenny rated it:

I learned a lot from this book, and found it an interesting read. It’s an account of a particular segment of Chinese culture, seen through the eyes of an American. And it’s true that only a foreigner can see a country clearly, and also true that foreigners always bring their own beliefs and prejudices to the country they’re describing.

However, given that, this book gave me a real sense of what it’s like for young women in China today. Chang does a clear, thorough job of detailing More...

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Sep 13, 2010

Betsy rated it:

If I could, I'd give this journey through changing China three and a half stars. It's well-written and paints a spot-on picture of the changing landscape in China's factory-centric cities. Much as the industrial revolution changed the face of the United States in the late 1800's, China is now evolving with massive migration to cities and a changing economic future. Chang chooses to follow young girls who have migrated to the city for factory work and explore their ups and downs through job ch More...

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Jul 25, 2010

Mona rated it:

Reading this during my first months living in China, I really learned a lot from this book. I bought it with a skeptical mind, thinking that the author might try to give an account of "the way things are in China today" as if any single narrative would do. However, I was impressed as Leslie Chang (the author) is appropriately self-reflexive throughout and goes to lengths to make it clear how she found, engaged with, impacted and was impacted by her sources, the "factory girls" More...

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May 16, 2010

Aban (Aby) rated it:

In 'Factory Girls', Leslie Chang describes the lives and working conditions of young women who move from rural areas to work in Dongguan, a town in China dominated by factories and little else. (She also, at times, interweaves the story of her own family, who left China to settle in the United States.)

I certainly learned a great deal about the lives of these young women and was filled with admiration for them in many ways:
- their courage in leaving their villages to travel to a More...

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Oct 07, 2009

Kathleen rated it:

The interwoven stories of two migrant workers and the family history of a Chinese-American journalist might be a very intimate tale; it is a very personal narrative. Yet the scope of this book is as broad as the middle kingdom itself. Discussion of Chinese history plays off modern global economics which flows seamlessly into societal norms and the changing role of women in modern culture. Everything is discussed so easily within the much smaller story of the lives of three women.

More...

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Aug 10, 2009

Mateo rated it:

Some people, when they travel, are most amazed by the differences they find ... the donkeys, the tuk-tuks, the rat-on-a-platter, the strange drinks and weird foods. Others are most taken aback by the unexpected similarities: the corn farmer with a cell phone, the slum dweller playing Grand Theft Auto 4, the kids who rock out to punk and metal. The best travel writers and foreign reporters, though, simply see.

This is a splendid, splendid book. It's not only better than I expected, More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 24, 2009

Debbie (Readerbuzz) rated it:

Chang spends three years in China, following the lives of several young women who have moved from rural China to find jobs and money and success and love in urban China. This is not the story I’d been expecting; city life turns out to be a big plus for most of the women in this book. Those for whom city life is not so well suited quickly return home, usually to try again on another day. For the most part, the women have a place to stay and are earning money. There are sad stories, too; companies More...

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Jul 15, 2009

Stephanie rated it:

IT has widely been reported that the largest mass migration in all of human history is happening today in China, with about 130 million workers who have flocked from rural villages to the cities. Of these, more than one-third are women.

American journalist Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, spent 10 years in China, during which she sought out young women from the countryside who had migrated to the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province.

More...

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Jun 23, 2009

Louise rated it:

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. Peop More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 09, 2009

Shinynickel marked it as to-read

Off this Guardian review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun...

Other writers have chronicled the exploitation of China's migrant workers, whose dirt-cheap labour provides most of the leisure and electronic goods which fuelled our credit boom. Chang's brilliant book Factory Girls also portrays the hard side of life for those who have left the land, but it is, above all, a tribute to the determination of China's "factory girls" to make a better life for themselves. The " More...

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Apr 14, 2009

Lynn rated it:

I really learned a lot from reading this. It is about a place I am curious about but have no desire to visit personally. Leslie Chang, an Asian American reporter, spent years in China first with the Wall Street Journal in Beijing and then in a coastal factory city doing the research for this book, which consisted in befriending and hanging out with a couple of migrant workers in one of the factory cities near the south China coast. She really gives an insightful plausible description of what dai More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 05, 2009

Dwhren rated it:

This book was not really what I expected. The author of the book spent several years interviewing and creating relationships (or at least trying to as it was hard to keep in contact with many of the girls as they were constantly moving and changing jobs) with girls working in factories in the Dongguan area of China. I expected the book to concentrate on the horrid working and living conditions of the girls, but it didn't. It did mention those things to a degree, but they were really ancillary More...

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Jul 29, 2010

Lori rated it:

I picked this book up originally because a lot of my artist friends have had their work purchased and then copied in factories in China, among other places, and I wanted to read about this from the viewpoint of the Chinese factory worker. After reading the book, (which didn't mention much about copyright infringement and the like), I have a better understanding of WHY it happens.

Life in China as a migrant factory worker is HARD, and the only way they see to advance in life, help sup More...

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Oct 12, 2009

Kate rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Feb 16, 2010

Tony rated it:

Leslie Chang did a splendid job of capturing the essence of the migrant workers and their social conditions in Dongguan, China. She followed the daily lives and struggles of Min and Chungmin, two of the 130 millions migrant workers. These migrant workers, mostly women, flocked from the nearby farming villages to the industrial city of Dongguan (north of Hong Kong), where they competed for factory jobs and played the chess game of getting to the top. With grace and compassion, Chang painted More...

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Sep 01, 2011

Chia-Yi rated it:

While being able to relate to Chang certainly is not a prereq for enjoying this book, I think I've had a different experience reading this book than non-Chinese-Americans may have. My mom grew up working in sweatshops and factories in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, so this book has been really interesting as a look into the generation of girls that came after her. She had limited schooling, and worked with her hands her entire life. The mentality of moving up and switching jobs a More...

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Feb 05, 2012

Crystal rated it:

"Factory Girls" is an examination of the largest human migration in history, from rural villages to the industrial cities of Southern China. But if you're expecting to see a dirty expose of harsh working conditions in Chinese factories, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that migrant life is actually full of opportunity, independence and rewards. Author Leslie Chang interviews dozens of teen girls who leave their villages for the big city, and charts their progress through rapid jo More...

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