Factory Girls

The first time I ever visited a factory in China was about 10 years ago.  It was to an electronics factory in Dongguan that primarily made calculators.  I was there to make a promotional video for the company, and it was definitely an eye-opening experience.  Seeing the thousands of workers, and rows upon rows of assembly lines, it was in some ways fascinating, but it also raised so many questions.  As I watched them with their heads down, screwing in the calculator covers, one after another, or pressing all the buttons to make sure they worked, doing this non-stop for hours on end, it made me wonder about the life of a factory worker.  Was this as good as life got for them?  Was leaving the rural countryside for a factory job what they aspired to?  Did they realize there was more out there beyond living in a factory dorm and working 14hr days only to make a couple hundred dollars a month?  What did they think about all day as they repetitively worked on the assembly line?  Did they dream of something more?  Were they hoping this was just a stepping stone for them?

Well, I just finished reading a book called Factory Girls: Voices From The Heart Of Modern China, by Leslie T. Chang, which answered a lot of these questions.  The book takes an interesting look at the everyday lives of migrant factory workers - their motivations, their goals and dreams, their struggles, even their social lives.  Here is an exerpt:

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure.  "What year are you?" you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars.  "How much a month?  Including room and board? How much for overtime?"  Then you might ask what province she was from.  You never asked her name.

To have a true friend inside the factory was not easy.  Girls slept 12 to a room, and in the tight confines of the dorm it was better to keep your secrets.  Some girls joined the factory with borrowed ID cards and never told anyone their real names.  Some spoke only to those from their home provinces, but that had risks: gossip traveled quickly from factory to village, and when you went home every auntie and granny would know how much you made and how much you saved and whether you went out with boys.

When you did make a friend, you did everything for her.  If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a 10 yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught.  If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work - this time, the fine 100 yuan - to spend the day with you.  You might stay at a factory you didn't like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to.  Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish.  They sent messages by mobile phone instead.  Friends fell out often because life was changing so fast.  The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

The best day of the month was payday.  But in a way it was the worst day, too.  After you had worked hard for so long, it was infuriating to see how much money had been docked for silly things: being a few minutes late one morning, or taking a half day off for feeling sick, or having to pay extra when the winter uniforms switched to summer ones.  On payday, everyone crowded the post office to wire money to their families.  Girls who had just come out from home were crazy about sending money back, but the ones who had been out longer laughed at them.  Everyone knew which girls were the best savers and how many thousands they had saved.  Everyone knew the worst savers, too, with their lip gloss and silver mobile phones and heart-shaped lockets and their many pairs of high-heeled shoes.

The girls talked constantly of leaving.  Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted.  The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay;  leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else.  That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside:  Getting into a factory was easy.  The hard part was getting out.