Factory Girls: ‘To Die Poor Is A Sin’
October 7, 2008
“Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China is a fascinating ethnography of the young women who labor in the factories of Guangdong, China’s richest province, a land of boomtowns where wealth and scams and exploitation and warmth and courage all abound,” writes boingboing’s Cory Doctorow. Read his entire piece here.
Chang, the Harvard-educated former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan. The author’s incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls-with their incredible ambition and youth-to emerge powerfully upon the page.
This summer, Chang wrote about her creative process at The China Beat.
Here’s some Barnes&Noble flackistry: “A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family’s immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance.”
