Factory Girls: From Village to City in Changing China (Essay Sample)

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Name:
Institution:
Instructor:
Date:
Introduction
Leslie Chang is an American author who explores the Chinese culture in detail. In her work, Factory Girls, the main theme revolves around the greatest migration in the history of over 130 million people in the previous thirty years (Andrew et al., 1). Youths from the rural areas move to urban-developed China to improve their living standards and those of their families. These migrants symbolize the deceptive inexhaustible source of cheap human labour that China needs for developing its sprawling towns with their high-rises and industrial facilities. They take part in maintaining and cleaning its structures and offices, give care to households and kids of the advancing town middle-class, and fill and restock the assembly lines and several receiving and shipping sectors of China’s mushrooming industries.
Body
The author focuses on the town of Dongguan, a section of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, just 30 miles from Guangzhou (Canton) (Andrew et al., 1). This town is an illustrative industrialized town, well known as a multitudinous within the distinct economic regions initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1980 to entice external investments to China to enhance its reforming process. 70% of Dongguan’s population are females working in its industries roiling textiles, electronic materials, footwear, playing toys, and ceremonial decorations. It is a natural place for the author to be in touch and learn more about her factory characters. Chang applies dogged determination couples with persistence to achieve constant contact and put a human appearance on individuals with real names to an otherwise detached stone of the country’s monolith laborers and floating inhabitants.
There exist lively personalities with stimulating stories to narrate, like those of Lu Qingmin, who seems as “Min” by Chang (Andrew eta l., 2). Through these personalities and their network of allies and friends in their association with the writer, we come to realize the thousands carefully upon thousands of factory females who come and settle in Dongguan, a town whose people are always migrating. These females, aged between 16-25, are not well educated, and normally start their initial factory employment as army assembly employees. The author states that the moment they start working, they are already discerning of ways to free themselves from their droning and draining responsibilities. Besides being attracted to the town by the likelihood of enhancing their living standards and the anticipation of seeing the world, they are also driven by the dullness and redundancy of the hum-drum rural life, which their parents and young ones easily tolerate.
Being young and steeped in the Chinese culture of self-cultivation and despite sufficient basic education, they normally ask the basic enquiry of what life is all about (Howard, 1). They are concerned to look for opportunities, acquiring computer knowledge, speaking fluent English, gaining composure and self-confidence in firm exercise- all to re-create themselves into more sought-after human resource personnel in the numerous personal-growth learning institutions that have burgeoned in their factory town. The heritage of Dongguan is an overstated secular form of the ancient revolutionary concept of self-sufficiency. In that rapid industrial setting, one can only rely on oneself, and being truthful is not a significant quality of being ahead of others. One must take loud one’s strategy into being ahead by lying about his/her qualification and work skill, if compulsory, to find being out of the assembly-line confinement. Relationships, both men and women, are transitory at best as Chang states it. With the population majorly made up females, prostitution is common and much valued than working in the assembly department. The Silverworld Restaurant in town is said to engage approximately 300 females who offer massaging and other services to entertain its customers (Howard, 2). Just like normal youths, Chang’s factory females adore the meek joys of life like hanging out with friends, eating snacks and fast foods, drinking bizarre beverages, buying fashionable clothes, doing various hairstyles plus makeups, and always charting about men.
Towards the culmination of the book, Chang narrates obtaining a present. Min, a youthful female working at a handbag factory, offers him an original Coach purse obtained directly from the assembly sector (Howard, 2). It arises that Min’s residence-style bedroom is full of high-end leatherwear. When Chang suggests offering one of the purses to the mum of Min’s lover, she scoffs. She feels that since his mother stays on a farm, she doesn’t have any use with the purse.
The evolution of China’s immense industrial base has been recorded in various books and business journals in the recent past, but Chang decided to center her story on individuals, particularly females, who abandon their rural homes and look for fortunes on the urban areas of China. Ever since 1970, China has experienced the highest migration in the human account, “three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century,” (Patrick, p.1). A few years ago, a countryside laborer could imagine staying and dying on his ancestral farmland. Nevertheless, the nation’s volatile economic growth has permitted the youths to exchange the stifling certainty of countryside life with the enthusiasm, chance and risk of the industry boomtown.
Freedom and Individualism in the Factory Girls
The sprawl of migrant laborers in modern China changed the whole society (Patrick, 1). One of the major social effects was on the expanding liberation of females and their break from outdated gender roles. In illustrations of the dilemmas of some of the females in the book Factory girls, their lives were intensely transformed as they encountered their chuqu. They attained this by abandoning their villages and families behind, interrogating their ethical worth as humans, and then stimulating themselves to rise above the industry floor. Abandoning family members and friends as a woman in Contemporary China was not common.
Females were likely to be married at a tender age and join the family of their spouses (Patrick, 1). Even after the emergence of factory females in towns, which were anticipated to work for work for some time and cater for their families back at home, they were still compelled to go back to their villages and get married. But, as factory settings changed and the work became more bearable, many females stopped going back home after a few years. They began demanding their freedom and break from the mundane lifestyle in the countryside. Despite the working conditions being turf, the girls loved the urban life in their leisure time. They would put on the latest fashions, hang out with boys. Ost significantly, their parents were far off hence were free from their directives of who to love and eventually marry. The urban life away from the countryside was much more enthusiastic, daring and alluring to the majority of them.
As illustrated in the case study of both Ming and Min, the daily grind of the ind...