Telling the Untold Story: Leslie T. Chang’s “Factory Girls”

Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.

 

Leslie T. Chang: [Reads Factory Girls, pages 27 - 28.]

 

Carlin M. Wragg: So this is Dongguan, this is the place where you spent quite a lot of time doing the research for this book, Factory Girls. I wanted to start by asking you who are Wu Chunming and Lu Qingmin?

 

LTC: I started to go down to Dongguan in 2004 because it was a huge factory city that especially attracted young men and young women from the countryside. Going in I was pretty clear that I wanted to write about young women. The reason for this was that I felt their stories might travel the longest distance from the very traditional rural Chinese village to the most modern, freewheeling, chaotic, no-rules-barred urban area.

 

I actually met Lu Qingmin, one of the two women that I write about, on my first weekend in town. I had met a Chinese reporter who was herself a migrant, and who had written a series of articles about migrant workers, and I said to her, “You know, I’d like to meet a young woman”— and I didn’t know what I was looking for — I just said, “I’d like to meet a young woman who’s going through a lot of change.” I later realized that this basically refers to every woman in the city. So she invited me over to her house for dinner and she invited her younger sister, who also worked in a factory, and her younger sister brought a number of her coworkers. Min, as I call her throughout the book, was one of the women she brought. As soon as I started speaking with her I “She was just very lively, very talkative, a good sense of humor; all things I felt were missing from the portrait of migrant workers, factory workers, that we’d so far seen in foreign reporting.”realized she was very interesting. She was just very lively, very talkative, a good sense of humor; all things I felt were missing from the portrait of migrant workers, factory workers, that we’d so far seen in foreign reporting. Those reports tended to focus on people who had terrible things happen to them, who were failures or who had traumatic experiences in the factory world, and I was curious to find a young woman who hadn’t had anything especially good or bad happen to her but who was nevertheless interesting, to learn what her outlook on life was. So I got to know Min and I ended up following her over basically two years of reporting.

 

The other woman I write about is named Wu Chunming. Once I got to know Min I decided I’d also like to get to know someone else, someone who was a number of years older, who could talk more about what the city was like in the early days, how it had changed, and also some of the pressures of what it was like to be an older woman who was not married — the conflicts between the very traditional village mentality, which is that you have to marry by the age of eighteen or nineteen or twenty and have a child, and that’s your purpose in life, and this new cohort of women who were becoming semi-middleclass somewhat urbanized people, the conflicts and emotions that they felt.

 

I found out that in Dongguan there was a dating agency that matched up men and women so I went to one of their gatherings. That was really funny, I write about this in my book, because dating is something that’s not really in the Chinese tradition. Traditionally people would be introduced through family or matchmakers or village members. It was a known quantity; you would meet someone that you’d already heard about, or your families would know each other. But in the city suddenly these young people had to learn how to date for the first time, how to meet strangers and “But in the city suddenly these young people had to learn how to date for the first time, how to meet strangers and make small talk…they would sit in classroom chairs and stare at each other for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.”make small talk, so this dating agency set up this gathering where thirty or forty people would sit in classroom chairs and stare at each other for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. I went to one of these dating meetings, what I call in the book a “group blind date,” and that was where I met Chunming. She stood up — everyone had to stand up and introduce themselves — and said, “My name is Wu Chunming and I’m here today to give myself more opportunities.” I thought that was a really neat way of talking about her life so after the meeting I went up to her and talked with her. She struck me as having a very personal view of her experience; she wanted to make money but she also wanted to be happy, she wanted to be healthy, she was looking for true love. It was kind of amazing in this city, which seemed so hard and ruthless, that she was still having these somewhat romantic dreams.

 

CMW: There are a couple of things you mentioned that I want to parse out, if I can. One of them is about your information gathering methods. You spent a lot of time with these women, in one case you went home for a holiday and met her family, and I’m curious about what you told them you were doing, about what that line for you was between the professional reporter or writer, and the friend — I can’t imagine that you didn’t establish a friendship of some kind with these women over the time that you spent with them.

 

LTC: Definitely, we definitely became good friends. I started off pretty straightforward. I would tell them right away that I was an American, a Chinese-American, which was a concept they had never heard of before, and then I would say, “I’m a reporter,” because at that time I was still working for the Wall Street Journal as a reporter in China. Then I would say, “I’m interested in learning about the lives of migrant workers, what kinds of things you guys go through and what you think about.” Interestingly, Min and Chunming, who I ended up writing about, got that right away. They were like, “Okay, yeah, I get that.” I think both of them felt like, “My story’s kind of interesting.” or like, “This experience is kind of unusual.” That was one of the reasons I felt drawn to them and I think that they may have felt drawn to me as well because they were kind of curious about this project.

 

In terms of being a reporter and being a friend, it happened pretty naturally. As you say, when you spend that much time with someone, spending weekends and meeting their family, going home with them for the Chinese New Year, “One thing I was careful about was that I didn’t want to unduly influence their lives. I worried that they would be asking me for advice or that I would somehow be altering the course of their lives… I think they understood that my world was so different from theirs.”you definitely become friends and I definitely think of them as among my closest friends in China, but I never felt like I had to choose between one or the other. One thing I was careful about was that I didn’t want to unduly influence their lives. I worried that they would be asking me for advice or that I would somehow be altering the course of their lives, which is not only poor journalism, it’s also a big responsibility personally to bear, but the fact is that they were quite independent and they rarely asked me for advice. I think they understood that my world was so different from theirs, that I would be an observer and a friend but that it was up to them to figure out what they needed to do.

 

CMW: One of the questions I’m curious to ask you is how you sustained your energy for this project over such a long period of time?

 

LTC: In terms of energy, it was extremely exhausting to be in Dongguan, as you probably intuited which is why you asked me this question. I was actually living in Beijing, which is where my base was, and I’d go down to Dongguan for two week periods. I rented an apartment there and I would stay there for two weeks. While I was there I would report fourteen hours a day, being on buses and in factories and squares and parks, just go all out, and then at the end of that I would just be completely exhausted and would go back to Beijing, go through my notes and figure out what was going on.

 

You need to protect yourself. In a place like China where there’s so much going on and everyone’s working really hard there’s this tendency to want to work all the time, or even if not to want to work all the time to feel like you have to work all the time or you’re going to miss something. People don’t take weekends, they’ll call you at ten o’clock at night with a story idea; it just never stops. So that was one thing that I did that I felt worked out really well, in retrospect.

 

CMW: What was the hardest thing you had to do, where you were pulling on all of your expertise to try and negotiate a situation?

 

LTC: One chapter in the book talks about life inside a factory, a massive shoe factory called Yue Yuen, which has about 75,000 workers. It took a while to get into a factory. I tried many, many factories and most of them just don’t want anything to do with a foreign journalist, not because they have anything to hide, they just don’t want to take the risk. Finally I hit on Yue Yuen because I was told by various labor activists and NGOs that Yue Yuen had made a lot of improvements in their factories in recent years so they were feeling more confident about the outside world. But that was only the beginning of the battle. My original idea for Yue Yuen was to get to know a circle of young women — I was thinking, I’ll get to know them, become friends with them and trace their ups and downs, how some rise and some fall, how they have falling outs or fights over boyfriends — it was going to be this dynamic, intimate picture of a small circle of young women, and that just never happened.

 

For a long time I was really frustrated because I would meet young women and they would be perfectly nice to me and then, two weeks later, I’d go down and try to call them again and they wouldn’t answer my phone call, or they would lie and tell me they left the factory, or their friend would say, “Don’t trust her, she’s not one of us. Don’t tell her anything.” It was “…this part of the book was really about the factory, about the shoe factory; that was my character — it was big and overwhelming, it had a life of its own, and these young women flitted in and out.”just really, really hard to build trust with these young women. That really surprised me because at this point I’d already gotten to know Min and Chunming and was having really nice interactions with them. I ended up realizing that I was never going to have an intense bond with these young women and that this part of the book was really about the factory, about the shoe factory; that was my character — it was big and overwhelming, it had a life of its own, and these young women flitted in and out. Sometimes they stayed long enough to get to know you, and sometimes they disappeared. I was kind of haunted by it but this was how the factory worked. The outside reporting about the factory, as I said, is often about the injuries and the abuses, but this seemed to me like the sadder thing, that these young women appear and disappear, they make friends and then they’re cut off from their friends forever when they leave the factory and no one knows where they’ve gone. That is a very sad thing and that’s what I focused on writing about.

 

CMW: One of things that you mentioned that I think is important to pull out of what you just said is that you chose to do this because you really wanted to show a different side of the factory workers’ experience, a side that the exterior reporting about the abuses or the poor conditions hadn’t shown. You really wanted to get inside the factory, but also inside these lives. One of the things I wanted to ask you about in relation to that is if you saw this migration affect traditional family structures?

 

LTC: I think that the migrants are at the same time very modern and very traditional, that they can hold both of these ideas in their head at the same time. I definitely watched this transformation with Min. Over the course of several years in the city she came to decide that her parents were basically useless in terms of giving her advice, in terms of telling her whether to stay at a factory or leave, and so her modus operandi became to lie to them or not tell them anything. That seemed really poignant; she’s an eighteen or nineteen-year-old girl and she has to survive by hiding things from her parents because the advice they give her is so bad.

 

At the same time, that did not take away from her incredible sense of responsibility to her family and her younger siblings — her three younger siblings — who were still in school at the time we first met. Every year she would send home almost all of her savings, other than the little “So at the same time she was realizing her parents were very limited and that her world had completely changed; she didn’t break her ties with the family at all. In fact it may have made her feel more responsible because she realized how backward or how far away they were from the modern world.”that she needed to live in the city, to her family. She said this money was used for fertilizer for the farm, her parents are both farmers, and also for school fees for her three younger siblings. So at the same time she was realizing her parents were very limited and that her world had completely changed; she didn’t break her ties with the family at all. In fact it may have made her feel more responsible because she realized how backward or how far away they were from the modern world.

 

CMW: I’d imagine it was interesting to watch that from the reporter’s perspective but hard to watch from the friend’s perspective. It seems like it could be sort of painful to see this change in the family, and to see the struggle that Min was going through — when I was reading I had this sense that she was trying to do her best but was really struggling with it.

 

LTC: Yes, it’s definitely really poignant. At the same time I think people are remarkably resilient and have a “can do” sort of mentality. I think that’s really, really common at this time in China. There’s just so much stress and anxiety, every five years there are new ideas and new terms, the term for “private businessman” now is different from the term that was used in the Eighties or Nineties, and people feel like they always have to stay current, keep up with things, otherwise they’re going to fall behind forever and be forgotten. Things are happening at an amazing rate, people are going through incredible conflicts and stresses and yet they seem, in general, like they can handle it and go on. It seems amazing as an outsider to watch this; that people somehow manage to make do and generally be pretty upbeat and pragmatic about everything.

 

CMW: I was so surprised in reading, just as you said, that there’s so much “can do” attitude, that in the face of challenge people say to themselves, “Well this is what I’m going to do to get by,” — and excel as well. I mean, there’s a lot of hope and optimism very deeply ingrained in the choices that are being made.

 

LTC: You know, to get back to what the other coverage had been about migrants before, I felt like people had taken a very American perspective, by which I mean they went in thinking, “Where are the abuses? How can we write articles to try to improve the system?” Even, “How can we as consumers do things to make things better for these workers?” What I wanted to do was look at it from the inside China point-of-view. To ask, “What is it like for these young people?” They’re not sitting here thinking, “I need an eight hour workday, and minimum wage, and this much, this much,” all these things that Western people would think about right away. They’re just thinking, “I want to get to the city, I want to make some money, and I want to improve myself.” So from their perspective life looks very different than it does to us. That’s what I wanted to capture in trying to get as much as possible inside their lives and inside their heads, to see how they saw their experience rather than how we would judge it and in many ways criticize it and find problems with it.

 

CMW: You know, this is a minor point, but one of the things I found amusing and interesting as I was reading was the focus on height that comes up again and again for so many different purposes. It seems emblematic of just how different Chinese culture is from the one that is familiar to me as an American person.

 

LTC: Absolutely. You know, height is one of those great things that you never stop noticing in China. I’ve been thinking about the height thing for a long time because when I was growing up — my dad and mom came from China, immigrated to the States and I was born in the States — and when I was growing up my dad was obsessed about my height. He would measure me all the time and, starting when we were ten or twelve, he instituted this barbeque cookout once a week so I could get some protein “You know, height is one of those great things that you never stop noticing in China…I think it’s a reminder that China’s a country that only a generation ago was dealing with famine and malnutrition. To them to have someone who’s healthy and tall is the ultimate sign of what they call a ‘high quality person’…it’s a shorthand for everything good that they’re looking for.”and increase my height — I’ve been dealing with this all my life.

 

But I think it’s a reminder that China’s a country that only a generation ago was dealing with famine and malnutrition. To them to have someone who’s healthy and tall is the ultimate sign of what they call a “high quality person,” a person whose height tells you everything you need to know about his background, his upbringing, his diet, so it’s a shorthand for everything good that they’re looking for. It’s interesting that this obsession still continues, even in the cities where people are increasingly overweight rather than underweight. The height requirements for jobs and people saying, “My boyfriend has to be at least 170 centimeters or I’m not going to consider him,” that kind of remains. It’s a really good reminder of how people who appear on the surface to be like you are actually deeply different in ways large and small.

 

CMW: I want to shift just a little bit and talk about the evolution of your reporting for the Wall Street Journal into this book. I heard you mention in another interview that you had taken a leave of absence to write the book and then realized in the process that you couldn’t go back. I wanted to know what shifted in you.

 

LTC: Well, I think I was always ill-suited to be a journalist, I just didn’t know how to write and make a living at the same time. In my many years at the Journal — I worked there for a total of thirteen years — I was always casting about for something that I could write in a longer, slower way, that I could turn into a book. When I started researching the migrants I realized pretty quickly that this was a way to do it. It was always in the back of my mind but it wasn’t until I sat down and started writing page one of the book that I realized how different writing for a newspaper and writing for a book could be.

 

The reason it was so clear to me was the material I was writing was material I’d already written in a different way in a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal, starting out with Min’s first days on the assembly line in Dongguan and the things she went through. For the Wall Street Journal article I’d written a very straight piece about how she worked on the assembly line, this is what she was paid, and it was kind of purposely very matter-of-fact, low-key, bare bones style in the way that their world is — no extraneous details or excess emotion or anything like that, just very straight and flat. So that was fine.

 

But then when I started writing a book I realized that what I wanted to do was start out inside the mind of a factory girl and describe the world: What it was like when you met a woman from another factory, what it was like when your friend helped you because you lost your job, what it felt like on payday when everyone crowded into the post office to send money home, how the girls “I realized that what I wanted to do was start out inside the mind of a factory girl and describe the world: What it was like when you met a woman from another factory, what it was like when your friend helped you because you lost your job, what it felt like on payday when everyone crowded into the post office to send money home…”looked at each other, how they were envious of the ones who had nicer clothes or who had boyfriends but also how they also looked down on these girls because it meant that they were saving less money to send home. I felt like I had gotten to know enough of these young women well enough that I felt confident to write the beginning of the book in this way, thrusting you into this world. Even if you don’t know exactly what’s going on you’ll hopefully be drawn in by it and then later I’ll step back and explain.

 

As I was writing it I realized I really enjoyed this more imaginative writing, that’s imaginative based on fact, and that I could never, ever do this in a newspaper setting. Nothing against the Wall Street Journal, I think that they’re actually a lot more open to longer stories and personal stories than a lot of newspapers, but just that the newspaper format does not allow that.

 

CMW: Did you have any models that you were looking to as good and effective pieces of nonfiction in this longer, more literary form?

 

LTC: Yes. I’d been reading a lot of nonfiction, long narrative nonfiction, when I was reporting, and also when I started writing, to try to solve problems and think of models, how to get into things, how to present history and move into scenes, all sorts of things you don’t learn when you’re a newspaper reporter. John McPhee is obviously a huge, huge writer in the nonfiction world. He’s actually a friend and professor of my husband, who went to Princeton and studied creative writing under him, so I came to read a lot of his books to try to get inside the work. I would ask myself, “How does he get this material? How does he present it? How does he step back? How does he get into a scene? How does he get out? How does he use humor?”

 

A lot of it is learning about pacing. Sometimes you look at a paragraph that’s just chock full of — every sentence is its own discrete fact, and when you think about it you realize, “Oh my gosh, he probably found out these facts over maybe three weeks of reporting and put it all into one paragraph,” it’s so chock full of information and it works perfectly. Then other times you need to know when to draw out a scene, when to flesh it out with all the details, that what was maybe a two hour scene ends up being a huge section.

 

CMW: Did you always think that you would write something that was nonfiction or did you consider telling the story through fiction?

 

LTC: I turned toward nonfiction pretty early. I guess it was partly the fortune of covering a part of the world, China, that was changing so quickly. My formative years were spent at the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and Taiwan and China. In all those places you got a strong sense that there is so much going on that it is just impossible to keep up with it, and that your job is to figure out the way into it, the way to tell the story. So I felt with that level of intensity and depth of material that there was more than enough to work with just through writing nonfiction.

 

CMW: When did you think to introduce a memoir portion into the story? You tell a bit about your own family history and your journey to learn more about it is interwoven with the stories of the migrant girls and Dongguan.

 

LTC: Initially it was a little serendipitous. I had taken a leave from the Wall Street Journal to start intensively reporting this factory city book so I had some free time on my hands. I decided to visit my ancestral village in Northeastern China which is in so many ways the diametrical opposite of the factory cities of South China where I was working. This is a part of the country that’s still quite traditional, that has a lot of state-owned enterprises and that has a very unusual history with Japanese occupation during the Second World War. It was just a step back to the past in every way.

 

So I went to my ancestral village that my grandfather left as a young man in 1916 to go to school in Peking, and then to America for further study. I went to the village and I learned little bits and pieces about his background, about our family history, and when I got back from that trip — that was right after I’d gone to Min’s village for the Chinese New Year and spent “I suddenly realized I’d made these two trips to villages at opposite ends of China and at opposite ends of the time spectrum. One is a trip into the future with this young woman and one is a trip into the past, my own family’s past and China’s past..”twelve days with her family — I suddenly realized I’d made these two trips to villages at opposite ends of China and at opposite ends of the time spectrum. One is a trip into the future with this young woman and one is a trip into the past, my own family’s past and China’s past, and I realized that it might be a nice thing to join these two stories together, to tell the story of both a past and a future at the same time.

 

I think that if you just tell the story about the factories and the assembly lines and these young women it feels like an incomplete version of China. History is always there, even if the young women don’t necessarily care about it or know much about it, and even if the city of Dongguan is not a place where you ever hear people talk about history. In China history is always there. The terrible things that happened in the Twentieth Century, the revolutions and the famines and the Cultural Revolution, villages turning against each other, people killing their neighbors and friends and relatives, that is always there, even if it’s not spoken about. I felt by going into this family history, where my own family suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution, it would be a good way to bring in the past in an honest way, and also a personal way, to give a more complete picture of where China is today.

 

CMW: I would love to have you read just a little taste so that we can hear what that piece of the story sounds like. This is just at the beginning where you meet Zhao Hongzhi, who is the self-appointed keeper of your family history.

 

LTC: [Reads from Factory Girls, pages 167 - 168.]

 

CMW: Did Zhao give you a lot of information about your family?

 

LTC: Oh yes, he knew more about my family history than any one person that I met, which is kind of amazing. He had dated my Aunt Nellie, who is my father’s oldest sister, back when they were teenagers, in 1948. They had been split apart because she went with her family to Taiwan when the Communists were about to capture Beijing, and he stayed behind because he was already a college student and all the college students then were very pro-Communist, “Theirs was a story that I knew all through my childhood — that my father told me about. It seemed like such a tragic, romantic love story, but also the story of people torn apart by political events larger than themselves.”very idealistic about the revolution. Theirs was a story that I knew all through my childhood — that my father told me about. It seemed like such a tragic, romantic love story, but also the story of people torn apart by political events larger than themselves. That really seemed to represent that earlier generation for me, people whose personal desires and plans were subsumed by larger political events, which was in such contrast with the migrants who are living in this world devoid of politics or national events, and whose only impetus is their own desires. It’s a huge difference.

 

CMW: What was the most surprising thing that you found out as you were tracing your family’s history?

 

LTC: I guess I was surprised at how people talked or did not talk about their family history; I think that was my major discovery. As an American, when you go out — I know many Americans also research their family histories, often just for their own interest or to write something for their children, just to share personally — and the standard is that you go meet this older generation and they’re sitting there just telling you all of these amazing stories, that they love to tell you all this stuff about how they came over from the old country, there’s this pattern that you expect with these really nice long stories and imparted wisdom.

 

When I went to get to know and interview my Chinese relatives, many of whom I’d never met before, almost universally the response was “I don’t know anything. I can’t tell you anything.” It wasn’t like they were afraid or being hostile, that’s just how they would start the conversation: “I don’t know anything. My father died, I don’t know anything about it. We left China when I was young.” But after that little bits and pieces would start to trickle out. You would be talking to someone for a few hours and they would very casually mention that their father committed suicide and they didn’t find out for years, or that a family member died and that no one in the family ever talked about it once, the circumstances of his death. These amazing little telling things that they would relate to you and you would suddenly realize “Oh my gosh, this is what it’s all about, this is the thing that will shape the whole story, this detail.” So the discovery was that people in China who have had such incredible suffering don’t really give credit or value to those experiences because they feel like everyone else had them; “I’m not any different, just to dwell on this has no point.” Again, they’re very pragmatic and quite stoic, and it’s really the American in me that wants to bring out the drama, and the trauma, and the poignancy of these stories and write them down.

 

CMW: Did you see any cultural resonance between the impulse you just described in the older generation and the impulse to be hopeful and optimistic, to move up and on, that you learned about in the migrant workers that you spent time with?

 

LTC: That’s a good question. I think that overriding both is a sense of stoicism and pragmatism. It’s like, “Why should I dwell on the fact that I lost family in the Cultural Revolution? I’d rather focus on making money, getting a nice apartment and giving my kid a good life.” You hear that over and over, all across China, in different forms and different expressions. I think there’s a huge national movement among millions of people to move on, to get on with their lives, and not deal with these very troublesome issues of the past.

 

When people say there isn’t a full accounting of the Cultural Revolution, all of these terrible things that were done under the Communist Party, often they tend to blame it on the government and say that the government suppresses information, that once democracy comes there will be this huge flowering. Maybe there will be some kind of flowering when the political system changes, but I also think that what the government does really reflects what average people want at this point, which is “Let’s not deal with this, it’s too painful. Let’s move on.” Maybe someday they will deal with it when they feel more settled and secure in their lives, or maybe they won’t and it’ll just disappear — which is a frightening thought.

 

CMW: One last question before we close. This is about the passage of time. Since you published Factory Girls, the world economy has changed a lot and I imagine that impacts the lives of the people you spent time with. I just wondered, either anecdotally, or by having spent time in China since the change in the economy worldwide, if you’ve noticed any effect on the culture that you came to know.

 

LTC: I think there’s definitely a downturn. Definitely Dongguan factories are being affected. But my general feeling is that the migrants are quite resilient and pragmatic, as you can see from the book, and this is also how they deal with the latest economic crisis. I haven’t been back but I’ve been in very close touch with the women I wrote about, I talk to them fairly often on the phone or by email, and both of them are doing fine. Min is still employed at the same factory. She’s had to take a pay cut because their orders are down so much, but she feels pretty solid about her long-term prospects. She recently got married and had a baby, they bought a secondhand Buick and an apartment for her parents in the town near the village where they live, so definitely the trajectory is upward, life is improving, and they see this as a setback but not a dramatic tragedy or some long-term disaster. Chunming has jumped to a whole bunch of different companies since we last saw her in the book, still searching for her ideal job and her ideal man. I think the overall theme of people looking to improve their lives and looking for adventure and opportunity in the city is a story that makes a lot of sense and it’s going to go on for a long while yet.

 

CMW: Well, Leslie T. Chang, thank you very much for talking with us.

 

LTC: Thank you.