i am so behind on these reviews. /o\

[extemporally]

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang

I didn't read this book. Me and this book, we had conversations. I paged through this book, I translated its speeches into Mandarin, I considered the things it said, thinking, "I agree," or, "Not really." Most of the time it was, "I agree, and..."

I can't pretend to be an expert on China. I don't really know anything, but what I will say is that Chinese culture is very close to my heart and modern China fascinates me because it is, it is fascinating. Hence the conversations with inanimate objects. This was, though, a good book.

I asked Yongxia for the phone number in her dorm, but she was so new to her job that she didn't know it yet. She promised to write me a letter. We agreed to meet in two weeks, on the spot in the square where we had met that morning. And then they vanished. They were sixteen years old, on the loose in one of China's most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.

What I really loved about this book was its core refusal to take the typical migrant narrative at face value; I think for me that's closely related to Leslie Chang's easy acknowledgment that she didn't know anything about China, really, and that she wanted to find out more-

Many of the things I had read about China's migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.

At times I found myself identifying with some bits of the migrant narrative:

Zhang Qianqian, a young woman from Anhui Province who was visiting from down the hall, watched the going home preparations. She was solidly built, with broad shoulders and a hard unsmiling face; she wore jeans and a black sports watch that made her look tough. She was a cutter, so she was staying. "When I go home, I'm bored to death," Qianqian said. "There's no TV and no cassette player. And almost everyone from home has gone out, so I'm all by myself all day."

"My grandmother gets up at down to make breakfast," she continued, "and calls me to come eat, and sometimes I'm still sleeping. Then my father says, 'You're lying in bed and won't even come to eat breakfast your grandmother has made for you.' At home they are always criticising you."

Also, for the things she says about Chinese society:

The White-Collar class forced students to break free of the group. In the course of the semester, every student had to give a speech introducing herself. These always started the same way: I am the same as you. It was a funny way for a person to begin her own story, and it wasn't even true. But perhaps it was only by establishing that she was part of the group that a young woman gained the courage to stand apart from it. When Chen Ying stood up that day and shook hands with a stranger, she reminded me, more than anything else, of an American.

Like - the way she discusses the whole spirit of 'collectivism' that is said to characterise so much of Chinese society without bringing up the term - I think that is, um, a good idea, because it's never so easy a split as 'Eastern collectivism' and 'Western individualism', to get the wider picture I feel it's important to go into how a society is organised; how the individual interacts with the rest of the group; how 'collectivism' meshes with the new need in (migrant) Chinese society to distinguish oneself:

Square and Round painted a bleak world of complicated relationships, intense workplace politics, two-faced friendships, corrupt dealings, and status-conscious bosses with absolute power over one's fate. Colleagues undermined one another in front of their superiors. Bosses exploited their authority in order to belittle others and obtain bribes. Cynical men got the most attractive women. Money and status were the measure of happiness. Honesty was never the best policy. If the government had been paying attention, it would surely have banned this book - never had I seen such a dark vision of Chinese society so calmly acknowledged as fact.

I'd say the only time something rang false (I wanted to say, Leslie Chang slipped up - but that isn't necessarily true) to me was this:

Spending time in Chunming's circle was like looking at one of those optical illusions that showed two things at once. Out in the city, they appeared plausibly middle-class. They owned apartments and cars, or planned to buy them soon. They took driving lessons and vacations; they got manicures and went on diets and learned Latin dance steps. They always knew about the newest Brazilian barbecue restaurant or the best place for frozen yogurt. At other times, the village seemed indelibly stamped on their DNA. Their apartments might be tastefully furnished, but the bathroom invariably had a squat toilet. Their medical knowledge was the folk wisdom of their grandmothers: To recover from illness they steamed chicken with ginseng, and when the weather cooled they ate pork lung soup to stave off respiratory infection.

Call me overdefensive, but I don't see how that is mutually exclusive with the middle class. I also think (and it's an assumption that arose in this book, I think?) the stereotype of 'Chinese people being hypochondriacs' may... partway hold water (in the sense that foods are assessed according to their nutritional/medicinal view a lot of the time), but I would also say that that perception gets exaggerated due to a Western framework where you take medicine when you're sick and stop when you're healthy. Foods like chicken with ginseng aren't purely medicinal, I think traditional Chinese medicine in general is holistic and preventive in a way that might be hard to grasp the implications of. So no, chicken with ginseng and pork lung soup aren't valued only for their medicinal value, and no, it isn't wholly the preserve of the rural classes.

Otherwise, this book was pretty good. I really appreciated it - it's still not quite the book I really want to read about China, but possibly that book hasn't been written yet.

The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby

Comments

[athenejen]

Out of curiosity, what is the book you really want to read about China?

[extemporally.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think there would be some (not an overwhelming amount of) history, especially the kind of history that talks about the 'scholars and beauties' narrative that forms such a huge part of folklorism and, uh, modern Hong Kong TV dramas, and also talks about the women who did exist in historical China (Xiang Fei (this hypothetical book would obviously talk about the role of minorities and territorial boundaries and vassals in Imperial China, and what it means that the modern hit TV show Princess Pearl basically appropriated her story but strengthened the notes of agency), Zheng Yi Sao and Wu Zetian get talked about a lot) and how they circumvented or worked with their circumstances. I think it is probably appropriate to mention here that when I was in secondary school one of my favourite books in the library was '100 Famous Chinese Women in History'. OH, and the Yang Family.

Since this is my Manic Pixie Dream Book, it would also take a detour into discoursing about Zhang Yimou films (and in general, modern Chinese film and literature). THEN it would acknowledge its ivory tower perspective and somehow try to go back to concerns of an empirical nature, obviously the kind of stuff I'm hugely interested in: to migrant populations, contemporary inter-ethnic relations in China and the shifting class system. And in my head the sort of ethos that has always driven the Chinese is not, as it should be (or people say it should be) Confucian morality but the kind of anarchic folk consciousness best expressed by Sun Wukong in the Journey to the West. And since Lisa Chang has written about the seemingly-new Chinese ethos arising from a society driven by the need to get ahead ('never had I seen such a dark vision of Chinese society so calmly acknowledged as fact'), I would love for someone who has had a look-in at the Chinese literary classics to interpret it through that lens.

... I have no idea how much of that makes sense! But, yes. These are a few of the things that I would like to read in this book about China, but I'm not sure how good a book it is. I think it's quite obvious that my China-lens is deeply selective, if not flawed, in the sense that I went for a visit last month and it was a huge trip [in both senses of the word, aha] out of my comfort zone, so I'm not sure to what degree my paradigms would apply, if at all.