Factory Girls
by Leslie T Chang
She describes the young women as working in very difficult conditions, but often experiencing them as liberating, because they have so much more freedom and control over their private life than they had in their villages.
Recommendations from our site
“Leslie Chang’s book focuses on interviews of women who moved out of their native villages to work temporarily at export bases. And it talks about how they feel and what they encountered. And those are issues that are really underrepresented.” Read more...
Books to Change the Way You Think About China
Anne Stevenson-Yang, Entrepreneurs & Business People
“I love the way it’s written, and the way that Chang blends her own life story in with it. She pairs the story of her family’s migration out of China to the United States, where she grew up, to the movement of young women from rural China to urban China today. And she sets up a parallel between the way that American cities were transformed by overseas immigrants who fuelled the American industrial rise, with the enormous migration today – that doesn’t involve crossing an ocean or leaving one country for another – of rural dwellers to the world of Chinese cities.” Read more...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
