Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [22]
During her first three years in the city, Chunming did not return home once. She told friends that the factory break was too short, but in her diary she wrote: Who knows why I am not going home for the new year? The main reason: I really do not want to waste time. Because I must study! She also rejected her mother’s advice and wrote love letters to a good-looking young man who worked on the factory floor. Young men in the workplace were a rarity, and the better-looking ones were spoiled by the attentions of multiple girls. This one was not interested in Chunming, and he passed her letters around for others to read.
After six months on the assembly line, Chunming learned that her factory was hiring internally for clerks, and she wrote a letter to the head of her department expressing interest. The boss had heard of her boy-chasing reputation and ordered her transferred to another department. But his order was somehow misstated, and Chunming reported to work as a clerk. She performed well and the boss changed his mind about her. The new job paid three hundred yuan a month—triple what Chunming had made a year before.
THE STORIES OF MIGRANT WOMEN shared certain features. The arrival in the city was blurry and confused and often involved being tricked in some way. Young women often said they had gone out alone, though in fact they usually traveled with others; they just felt alone. They quickly forgot the names of factories, but certain dates were branded in their minds, like the day they left home or quit a bad factory forever. What a factory actually made was never important; what mattered was the hardship or opportunity that came with working there. The turning point in a migrant’s fortunes always came when she challenged her boss. At the moment she risked everything, she emerged from the crowd and forced the world to see her as an individual.
It was easy to lose yourself in the factory, where there were hundreds of girls with identical backgrounds: born in the village, badly educated, and poor. You had to believe that you mattered even though you were one among millions.
April 1, 1994
Yes, I am a person so ordinary that I cannot be more ordinary, so plain I cannot be plainer, a girl like all the other girls. I like to eat snacks, I like to have fun, and I like to look pretty.
Don’t imagine that I can be superhuman.
You are just a most ordinary, most plain girl, attracted to anything that is pretty or tasty or fun.
So from being ordinary and plain I will make my start.
* * *
Inside a Dongguan factory, the sexes were sharply divided. Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easier to manage. Men monopolized technical jobs like mold design and machine repair. They generally held the top positions in the factory but also the dead-end occupations at the bottom: security guards, cooks, and drivers. Outside the factory, women were waitresses, nannies, hairdressers, and prostitutes. Men worked on construction sites.
This gender segregation was reflected in help-wanted ads:
GAOBU HANDBAG FACTORY SEEKS TO EMPLOY
SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK
CANTONESE
SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS
OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS
FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS
The divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.
Women make up more than one-third of China’s migrants. They tend to be younger than their male counterparts and more likely to be single;