Monday, August 24, 2009

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang


This was the selection for the book group this month. This is absolutely not a book I would ever pick out, and I guess that is one of the great things about a book club - broadening your horizons a little. I ended up really liking this book a lot.
This book was like 2 stories intertwined - the first was just what the name of the book described - factory workers in China, and how the young women leave their rural villages to go work in the cities. It discussed an overview of business, of what the workers do and have to do to get ahead, how these young women change the dynamics of the family when they are the primary breadwinners and also followed some women longitudinally over a few years to see what became of them. I liked this part of the book.
The other story this book told was how the Cultural Revolution affected China and how that affected the author's own family. This part of the book made me realize how much I had forgotten of 9th grade global history and reading The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. I may have to pick that one up....

No comments:

Post a Comment