Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China by Leslie T. Chang

Author:Leslie T. Chang
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780330506472
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHUNMING SELDOM SPOKE of her early days in the factory. I don’t think she was ashamed of it, exactly—it was more that the girl who had worked on the toy assembly line, who had kept a diary and struggled to learn Cantonese and memorized Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen rules of morality, was so far from the person she had become. She still worked tirelessly to improve herself. The shelves of her apartment were almost entirely self help books: One Hundred Success Stories and Mary Kay’s Nine Leadership Keys to Success and an etiquette series with English titles like Tone and Crass. (Of all the ways to misspell class, that was the worst way.) On the living room wall was a giant glamour photograph of Chunming with shiny pink lip gloss and a jeweled barrette clipping back her hair. The apartment was a reflection of her character—carefully crafted, relentlessly self-examining.

Everything was an educational opportunity. From Korean soap operas, Chunming learned that you must hold a fork in your right hand and a spoon in your left, but a fork in your left hand and a knife in your right. It was also on Korean television that she saw Tupperware containers for the first time. Once I gave her a DVD of Roman Holiday—she had asked me for some American movies—and out of Hollywood entertainment she spun a Marxist morality lesson. “The poor journalist could have made a lot of money on the story of the princess,” she summarized the plot for me. “When he gave up his chance to make a lot of money, he rose in morality.” She did not know who Audrey Hepburn was but pronounced her “not as beautiful as Julia Roberts.”

She was ruthlessly observant; in a sense she was taking notes on me the same way I took notes on her. The first time we met up, she picked the place—the European Style Coffee Western Restaurant—and then ordered the same thing I did, spaghetti Bolognese. She noticed that I often drank beer with dinner, and one night she announced that she had been practicing in private and could now have a glass with me. She asked how I liked my steak and which country had the most considerate men and how American mothers raised their babies. She was constantly trying on new versions of herself: coloring her hair, or perming it, or straightening it. Her clothes always matched, and I never saw her wear the same outfit twice.

Until I came to Dongguan, most Chinese people I knew belonged to the educated class, and they felt keenly the difference between us. They wanted to know whether I considered myself American or Chinese; they were invariably surprised, even offended, when they found out that I could not read Chinese well, or that I dated American men. They lectured me about democracy and the Iraq War and the inability of the foreign press to understand China. Their nation had experienced 150 years of submission to the West, and this troubled history rose up between us whenever we talked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.