Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [10]
Over the next two years, I spent a week or two of every month in Dongguan. I got to know a few young women well, and I met a great many others who told me their stories and disappeared, like the two girls on the square whom I never saw again. Their tolerance for risk was astonishing. If they didn’t like a factory or a boss or a coworker, they jumped somewhere else and never looked back, and when they recounted their stories to me, there were unexplained gaps in time from stays at factories they no longer remembered. Their parents back home were only dimly aware of what their daughters were up to. Existence, to the factory girls, was a perpetual present, which seemed immensely liberating but also troubling. Making it in the city meant cutting ties to everything they knew.
The young women I became closest to had something in common: They understood the drama of their own stories and why I wanted to know about them. I think they also understood me, better than I might have expected. I was from America and I had gone to college; in education and class, I was a million miles away from them. But I knew what it was like to be alone, as a single woman, in the city. I was also bullied by Chinese men, and yelled at by police, and cheated by bus drivers; I also had boyfriend dilemmas and parents who worried that I was still single. When I got married in the spring of 2006, one of the migrant women who knew me best surprised me. “Your mother must be very happy” was the first thing she said. “I have a feeling that she is a traditional Chinese person.”
Perhaps my strongest link to the girls was one they never knew: I, too, had left home. After graduating from college in America, I moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia. Altogether I lived abroad for fifteen years, going home to see my family once every couple of years, as the migrants did. For a long time I resisted the pull of China. In college, I avoided Chinese American organizations and took only one Chinese-language class; I majored in American history and literature and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Larry McMurtry’s novels of the American West. In Prague, I reported on Czech politics and society for an expatriate newspaper. One winter day in 1992, a Chinese couple dragging their suitcases along the slushy sidewalk asked me for directions in Mandarin. I waited a long moment before answering, resentfully, in their language—as if they were forcing me back into a world I had already left behind.
Initially, China’s appeal for me was pragmatic—in the early 1990s, its booming economy began to attract global attention, and my fluency in Chinese suddenly became an asset. I went to Hong Kong in 1993 to work as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and began to read books on Chinese history for the first time, eventually to the exclusion of everything else; to me, China has always felt like the test I neglected to study for. When I moved to Taiwan two years later, people there frequently asked me what year I had chuqu, gone out, to America—their unspoken assumption that everyone in the world had been born in the Chinese nation. Later after I moved to China, I often heard the same question. That was one of the ways that Taiwan and China, which until recently had been technically at war, were more alike than they imagined.
One of the first things most Chinese Americans do when they go to China is to visit their ancestral hometowns, but for twelve years I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China without making the journey. I worried that I wasn’t ready to understand what I would find in my family village; secretly, I was afraid it would mean nothing at all. Either way, I understood the factory girls when they spoke of their complicated feelings for home.
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YOUNG WOMEN from the countryside taught me the city. From them I learned which factories were well run; without ever leaving Dongguan, these workers had figured out the global hierarchy of nations. American and European bosses treated workers best, followed by Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, and then