2008.10.04: October 4, 2008: Headlines: Figures: COS - China: Writing - China: Financial Times: Leslie Chang is married to author Peter Hessler and shares with him a preference for characterisation and idiosyncratic detail over a tightly ordered narrative
Peace Corps Online:
Directory:
China:
Special Report: China RPCV and Author Peter Hessler:
2008.10.04: October 4, 2008: Headlines: Figures: COS - China: Writing - China: Financial Times: Leslie Chang is married to author Peter Hessler and shares with him a preference for characterisation and idiosyncratic detail over a tightly ordered narrative
Leslie Chang is married to author Peter Hessler and shares with him a preference for characterisation and idiosyncratic detail over a tightly ordered narrative
Leslie Chang's Factory Girls reveals the workplace through the workers' eyes: "They were 16 years old, on the loose in one of China's most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives." Interwoven into Chang's narrative is her own family history, also a story of migr-ation. Her grandfather studied in 1920s America and returned to China only to die in the struggle between the nationalists and the communists; her parents emigrated to America through Taiwan after the communist victory. Chang had been investigating that history for more than a year before her father casually mentioned that two of his father's diaries had survived. "It isn't very interesting," he explained. "He just writes things like, 'Today the Japanese army is closing in around the city.' Stuff like that." "Actually," Chang told her father, "that's pretty interesting." Author Peter Hessler served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China.
Leslie Chang is married to author Peter Hessler and shares with him a preference for characterisation and idiosyncratic detail over a tightly ordered narrative
Industrial evolution
By Nell Freudenberger
Published: October 4 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 4 2008 03:00
When the Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie Chang arrived in the frenetic industrial city of Dongguan in 2004, foreign news- papers had already written of harsh conditions in China's factories. She doesn't hide those facts - girls sleep 12 to a room and work 13-hour days, seven days a week, for a base monthly salary of $50 - but Chang is less interested in exposé than in getting to know the young women of Dongguan's assembly lines.
Factory Girls reveals the workplace through the workers' eyes: "They were 16 years old, on the loose in one of China's most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives."
Interwoven into Chang's narrative is her own family history, also a story of migr-ation. Her grandfather studied in 1920s America and returned to China only to die in the struggle between the nationalists and the communists; her parents emigrated to America through Taiwan after the communist victory. Chang had been investigating that history for more than a year before her father casually mentioned that two of his father's diaries had survived. "It isn't very interesting," he explained. "He just writes things like, 'Today the Japanese army is closing in around the city.' Stuff like that." "Actually," Chang told her father, "that's pretty interesting."
Chang is married to author Peter Hessler and shares with him a preference for characterisation and idiosyncratic detail over a tightly ordered narrative. Following two young women, Min and Chunming, Factory Girls meanders through the migrants' Dongguan, where Chang's fluent Mandarin is essential.
She spends time inside the massive Yue Yuen factory, which makes Nike and Adidas shoes, employs 70,000 workers and operates its own kindergarten, hospital and fire department. She tours the karaoke underworld, where migrants work as prostitutes, and sits in on a "white-collar secretarial skills special training class", which instructs ambitious students that "purple eye shadow suits all Asian women". When the migrant girls start looking for boyfriends in a discouragingly limited pool, Chang follows them to the "Making Friends Club", home of the "Eight-Minute Date". "The problem is", one girl says, "sometimes eight minutes is too long."
Chang visits her ancestral village but uncovers only traces of her family. It's in Min's village that the historical and contemporary strands of Factory Girls intertwine. Chang finds that the remittance economy has upended traditional village hierarchies, so that young women such as Min are making financial decisions for their elders. Some village traditions do survive, such as a wedding celebration in which older villagers humiliate Min, playing a game with a nasty edge. "Suddenly I felt like an outsider," Chang notes, but it's her ambivalent perspective - Chinese and foreign - that allows her to make her sharpest observations: "I sensed that the Cultural Revolution was rooted in the dynamics of the Chinese village, with its rituals that enforced the safety of the group."
The mob violence of the Cultural Revolution seems irrelevant to girls such as Min, working their way up in the new China. "Who is Chairman Mao now?" Min asks Chang, searching for the current premier's name. "I don't even know." But from Chang's point of view, Min is part of a new revolution among China's youth, with the potential to be productive rather than murderous: "Perhaps China during the 20th century had to go so terribly wrong so that people could start over, this time pursuing their individual courses and casting aside the weight of family, history, and the nation."
That hopeful vision remains to be proved but Chang's elegant book is evidence that the best trips home often require a circuitous approach.
Nell Freudenberger is author of 'The Dissident' (Picador)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Links to Related Topics (Tags):
Headlines: October, 2008; RPCV Peter Hessler (China); Figures; Peace Corps China; Directory of China RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for China RPCVs; Writing - China
When this story was posted in October 2008, this was on the front page of PCOL:
Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers
| Peace Corps Suspends Program in Bolivia Turmoil began in Bolivia three weeks ago sparked by President Evo Morales' pledge to redistribute wealth from the east to the country's poorer highlands. Peace Corps has withdrawn all volunteers from the country because of "growing instability." Morales has thrown out US Ambassador Philip Goldberg accusing the American government of inciting the violence. This is not the first controversy surrounding Goldberg's tenure as US ambassador to Bolivia. |
Read the stories and leave your comments.
Some postings on Peace Corps Online are provided to the individual members of this group without permission of the copyright owner for the non-profit purposes of criticism, comment, education, scholarship, and research under the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Government copyright laws and they may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. Peace Corps Online does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the postings, which is the sole responsibility of the copyright holder.
Story Source: Financial Times
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Figures; COS - China; Writing - China
PCOL42316
72