Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [43]
The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better-educated than their predecessors, they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city. There is no longer any shame attached to migration. The shame now lies in staying home.
Newer migrants have looser ties to their villages. Their trips home are no longer dictated by the farming calendar or even by the timing of traditional holidays like the lunar new year. Instead, younger migrants come and go according to their personal schedules of switching jobs or obtaining leaves, and these are often tied to the demands of the production cycle. It is the seasons of the factory, rather than the fields, that define migrant life now.
Migrants increasingly look and act like city people. Migrant magazines launched in the 1990s have folded or are struggling to find readers now. Songs about the migrant experience are no longer heard in the factory cities of the south; the workers on the assembly line now listen to the same pop tunes as urban teenagers. Today’s migrants spend money freely on themselves—on clothes, hairstyles, and mobile phones—and may send home cash only in instances of need. The newer migrants are more ambitious and less content than their elders were. One survey found that 12 percent of migrants who had left home in the 1990s were satisfied with their situations in life, compared with 27 percent of the generation that had come out a decade earlier. That does not necessarily mean that the newer migrants want to return to the village. But it suggests that their basis of comparison is already the city, and perhaps these greater expectations promise a greater chance of success. Or it may mean that this new generation is only bound to be disappointed.
GETTING TO KNOW the factory girls of Yue Yuen was not easy. Girls would make dates to meet me and not show up; if I found them later, they gave no explanation or apology. No one was willing to accept the mobile phone I offered so we could stay in touch, perhaps not wanting the responsibility. They might be friendly to me one day and cold the next, and if I struck up a conversation with one girl in a dorm, the others in the room would shun me. One girl instructed her roommates to lie and tell me she had left the factory, because her friends had told her I was not to be trusted. The company granted me free access to its dormitories, but winning the trust of those who lived there was the hard part. In the shadow of the giant shoe factory they flitted, insubstantial as moths, and more elusive than anyone I met in the city.
The girls were equally wary with one another and often spoke roughly among themselves. They frequently knew nothing about the people with whom they lived and worked; as I got to know them better, they often asked me for news of one another. Most girls seemed to have one or two true friends who lived far away, perhaps in another factory, preferring to confide in them rather than in the many close by. Maybe this was their defense against living in a colony of strangers: They took it for granted that someone who slept in an adjoining bunk one night would disappear the next.
It took willpower for any migrant worker to change her situation. But inside a factory as large as Yue Yuen, the pressure to conform felt especially intense. The girls all claimed in front of one another that they didn’t approve of finding a boyfriend in the city, although many of them already had one; they disparaged further education as useless even as some quietly took classes in an effort to improve themselves. Yue Yuen was a good place to work—everyone who worked there said that. But if you wanted something different, it took all your strength to break free.
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In July, the hottest season of the year in the farmer’s calendar, work at Yue Yuen slowed to a crawl. Dorm rooms gaped empty as more