by Leslie T. Chang
Very good point! The author did include a number of stories demonstrating that although many parents in the villages still hold on to the tradition of building a place to live for their sons so they can start families close to home (usually with the money earned by their daughters), and although parents still ask their daughters to find husbands in their home provinces (even while depending on the money their daughters are earning in the cities) the daughters come home from the factories in a position of leadership, able to break with tradition and make their own decisions. Many pay for their younger siblings to stay in school and attend college. ]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
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bookshelves: currently-reading
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What a pleasure to read and listen to! I so wish I hadn't been sick and missed my fellow Bluestocking Babes and the Reader's Theater planned for our meeting. Thanks to Suzy for helping me rediscover the magic of Wilde. ]]>
Charming! Classic Western-European style fairy tales. Love The Light Princess the best. I'd have marked it with four stars, but I so recently read a gloriously illustrated and prefaced book of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales that MacDonald pales a bit by comparison. ]]>
I expected details of horrible factory conditions to be the focus of the book, but was pleasantly surprised to find so much more. Through her own explorations of her family history as well as her observations of the girls she followed, Leslie Chang also shows us how much and how quickly China itself has changed. The effects of the Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution were profound, but seem to remain largely unexplored by the average citizen. The past, even recent past, has been glossed over, re-written, or erased entirely, making it difficult for the people to understand their own history or even why such knowledge should be important.
Today the people in the factory cities live entirely in the present, constantly seeking the next business adventure or self-improvement project, hopping back and forth across the divide between home village and city, depending only on one's self, for "the easiest thing in the world is to lose somebody." Most relationships are superficial and fleeting, nothing feels permanent, nothing feels planned...the people seem as restless and anonymous as birds flitting from tree to tree. No wonder products from China have been found to be dangerous in recent years. The factory cities are mostly teenagers led by people I came to think of not as adults but as older teenagers, concerned only with material wealth, flitting from job to job, and bluffing their way through life with no tangible knowledge or experience.
I've read some reviews that complain about how disconnected and incoherent the book feels, jumping from one thread to another even within the same chapter. I appreciated this, though, and thought it created a stronger sense of how it feels to live in the factory cities and how it feels to try and find a sense of continuity between China's long history and the jumble of the present day. I was left wondering how a more stable, grounded society with strong, smart, compassionate, leadership that can focus on long-term consequences and strategic planning could be formed in today's China, and it seems like a problem of scale. The population is staggering: many factories are cities unto themselves, and it's not uncommon for workers in the largest ones to rarely leave their factory facilities. Now picture thousands of factories in cities all over China, filled with young people bluffing their way through jobs, often living under false names, reinventing themselves every few years or months (or weeks), sometimes on purpose but sometimes by necessity because the loss of a cell phone can mean forever losing touch with everyone you'd ever met outside of your village.
I'm very curious now to learn about the other facets of Chinese society, the academics, politicians and business folk who operate at a national level and in the global playground. Who are the leaders who represent China in negotiations with other nations? What is their connection to the rest of the population?
In the end, I was also struck by how much America and China have in common. I re-read my second paragraph and thought this could also describe the big-box retail, fast-food, and agricultural industires. (See "Nickle and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich and "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser.) We, too, suffer as a society from the effects of limited education and the emphasis on instant gratification over patience, greed over contentment, consumerism over conservationism, and profit above all else. How then shall the nations of the world come together to address issues of global importance? How shall the people of the world learn to live compassionately and sustainably? ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
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by Brad Kessler
It sounds wonderful! "Then--click--a world opens." ]]>
Danna
added a quote:
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." — Oscar Wilde
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." — Oscar Wilde
Danna
added a quote:
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." — Albert Einstein
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." — Albert Einstein