I highly recommend the nonfiction book “Factory Girls, by Leslie Chang. China is undergoing the largest human migration in history. In this book the author, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal follows two younger girls over the course of three years as they leave their home villages for work in the factories in Dongguan, a large industrial city. This is called “going out”.
It is with the author’s keen intelligent insight into the lives of the girls that gives the reader a strong sense of the significant and profound societal changes that are occurring in present day China. We follow along with the author as she interviews the girls and gets to know them on a deeper more personal level. They begin to share with her many of the personal details of their lives as we read journal entries, listen to cell phone conversations, text messaging back and forth, and hear about some rather funny online dating scenarios. In a particularly poignant section of the book we go back on a visit with one of the girls to her home village during the celebration of the Chinese New Year, where we begin to see that life in the village is forever changed for her. It has been said that you can never really go home again, but I wonder where will she go? She describes with the same kind of riveting detail the daily life in the factories as these young worker’s continually try to better themselves for higher better paying jobs.
As someone who prefers novels, I approached this book with skepticism as to it’s readability, but I found that in the authors intimate writing style that I was captivated and discovered that her telling of this interesting story is nothing short of astounding.