Introduction of “Factory Girls” Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China describes what the everyday life is like through the view of migrant woman in a factory city in China. The author Leslie Chang traveled to China in search for learning more about migrant workers and her own culture. She met a variety of people throughout her journey, but two young girls became very close to her. Chunming and Min, both young women who were searching for a better way of life outside of their family’s village. Leslie tells the testimony primarily through the eyes of Chunming and Min as she pursues their stories for three years as they attempt to rise the ladder from assembly line workers. The book takes place in the city of Dongguan, the largest In Dongguan, 70 percent of the workforce was female. Many women resorted to dating websites to find men. Chunming has a variety of stories of her dating life. For example, on her dating website she would look for guys that had a good job and a steady income. Women also wanted a man that was over 1.7 meters tall, at least 5 feet and seven inches. It was sometimes hard to find a man that fit those requirements. On the dating websites, Chunming showed Leslie a profile that resembled an ad that said, “ a 27 year old man... divorced with an open nature...possessing a five bedroom tile house with furniture modern appliances, and a motorcycle, seeks a women to be a partner for life.” In some cases, China marriages don’t mean you have to love the person, but that they offer the individual a better way of life. However, their parents prefer to arrange their marriages with someone that is from their village. This has also caused a lot of tension within the families. In the book, Leslie goes to Min’s village to visit and Min has to lie and hide that she has another boyfriend from another village. Also, Min’s sister brought her boyfriend with her to visit and he wasn’t from their village and their parents didn’t agree with it. Her parents treated him like he wasn’t there. They ended up getting in an argument and Min ended up leaving and only told her sister Min that she was going back to his village to live with him because they wanted to get married. The Chinese tradition is that the parents prefer to arrange the marriage from someone in their village already so they wont leave them. I can see how this causes tension and issues within the
In addition to Ying-Ying St. Clair, Lindo Jong and An-Mei Hsu both have their bad marriages. After going through this, the last thing they want is for their daughters to have to face the same challenges. In the mothers’ eyes, the least they can do is lend some of their Chinese insight to aid their American daughters.
Similarly, the relationship expectations in Chinese customs and traditions were strongly held onto. The daughters of the Chinese family were considered as a shame for the family. The sons of the family were given more honour than the daughters. In addition, some daughters were even discriminated. The only daughter in the family, Liang had to hear her grandmothers taunt: “If you want a place in this world [...] do not be born as a girl child” (Choy 27). The girls from the Chinese family were considered useless. They were always looked down upon in the family; they felt as if the girls cannot provide a family with wealth, this attitude would really affect the parents from Chinese family preferred boys as they thought; boys could work and provide the family income. Due to Chinese culture preference to having boys, girls often did not have the right to live. In the Chinese ethnicity, the family always obeyed the elder’s decision. When the family was trying to adapt to the new country and they were trying to learn th...
Wang Interracial marriage: Who is 'marrying out'?)The hardship in which to get today’s “American Dream” or trend has had its ups and downs but the outcome has been wonderful. The author, Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in a similar setting as the novel and even though the novel was fictional the story divides a piece of America’s beauty. Interracial relationships have kept individuals from being together like Marcus and Louise and Bonbon and Pauline. The laws and the Cajuns made it difficult for them and the individuals that lived in the “Jim Crow South.”Meanwhile in today’s society families have relationships among each other. Families do not have to hide the love they have, but can express it also. The fourteenth amendment granted an amazing thing so the two unique ethnics will not be discriminated. “For many people, mixed-race children symbolically represent racial harmony.” (Craig-Henonders 181)The children of the interracial breed give a since of pride because like America, the obstacles were beat and it is an honor. America has truly grown to respect one another not only because of the relationship companion wise but a relationship as peer.As stated before “despite the increase in the numbers of interracial couples, particularly those including Blacks and Whites, a taboo against these types of relationships remains. The taboo makes it possible for
In a village left behind as the rest of the China is progressing, the fate of women remains in the hands of men. Old customs and traditions reign supreme, not because it is believed such ways of life are best, but rather because they have worked for many years despite harsh conditions. In response to Brother Gu’s suggestion of joining communist South China’s progress, Cuiqiao’s widower father put it best: “Farmer’s have their own rules.”
Factory girls by Leslie Chang is a book that looks into the lives of two migrant workers in China, and the author carefully scrutinizes their journey in search for a better life. Having a sense of self-fulfillment, both of these characters desires success, and they will go above and beyond anything to reach their purpose in life---which is, transitioning into a higher class. With their independent-driven mind set, both are able to reflect upon themselves the necessity and extravagance appropriate to their knowledge. Both shows different flaws on how they handle economic exigencies, however they are able to face those with simplicity just by recognizing their dreams and ambitions. Nonetheless, both characters shows different innovation and
The Chinese mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promise. This means nothing to you because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(Tan 42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(Tan 64)
For a country which has thousands of years of history, China, like majority society in the world, still remains some kind of patriarchy and it is continuously affecting the gender roles in China and all around the world. As a person who born and raise in China, I evidenced how gender roles alter with the development of China.
However, this “ladder of success” was not as simple as it seemed. First of all, the class of both families will be a huge barrier. We are not even talking about freedom to love here, there is no such thing in late imperial China. Although we can’t say that love doesn’t exist even in such systems, such as Shen Fu and Chen Yun, but most marriages are not about love. Rather, it was about exchange of values. For example, when two families want to become business partners, the parents of the family will have their son and daughter married, so the two families will have closer bonding which made the business much easier. In this sense, we can see that the couple is simply a tool. In the same sense, the families which has not much “values” can only have marriages with the same class of families. Meaning for a women to climb up the ladder of success is not quite possible as the class of her family is a huge deciding factor for marriage in the
In her book, The House of Lim, author Margery Wolf observes the Lims, a large Chinese family living in a small village in Taiwan in the early 1960s (Wolf iv). She utilizes her book to portray the Lim family through multiple generations. She provides audiences with a firsthand account of the family life and structure within this specific region and offers information on various customs that the Lims and other families participate in. She particularly mentions and explains the marriage customs that are the norm within the society. Through Wolf’s ethnography it can be argued that parents should not dec5pide whom their children marry. This argument is obvious through the decline in marriage to simpua, or little girls taken in and raised as future daughter-in-laws, and the influence parents have over their children (Freedman xi).
June-May fulfills her mother’s name and life goal, her long-cherished wish. She finally meets her twin sisters and in an essence fulfills and reunites her mother with her daughter through her. For when they are all together they are one; they are their mother. It is here that June-May fulfills the family portion of her Chinese culture of family. In addition, she fully embraces herself as Chinese. She realizes that family is made out of love and that family is the key to being Chinese. “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” (Tan 159). Finally, her mother’s life burden is lifted and June-May’s doubts of being Chinese are set aside or as she says “After all these years, it can finally be let go,” (Tan 159).
“The Bridegroom” by Ha Jin, is a short story about a man struggling with homosexuality in modern day China. The narrator, Old Chang, is the non-biological father of a young woman named Beina. Old Change promised to take care of Beina after her father, a close family friend, passed away. Beina then gets married to a very handsome man named Huang Baowen. Baowen quickly becomes the focus of this story. The climax of this short story is Baowen being revealed as a homosexual. This short story highlights Jin’s theme of homosexuality and shows the internal and external struggles of both Baowen and Old Cheng, through first person narrative, setting, and emotional appeal.
Hairong, Y., (2008) New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. (Duke University Press; Durham).
“Factory Girls” by Leslie T. Chang provides an inside look on migration in the inner cities of China. The book follows the lives of women who have left their home villages to work in factories. Primarily, Chang focuses on the lives of two women, Min and Chunming. Min left her village at the age of sixteen with her older sister to chuqu, or to go out, and see the world. She often changed jobs while in Dongguan because she is never satisfied with her position. Chang met Chunming at a dating agency where men and women could mingle with one another. Chunming began her career at a toy factory. In her diary, she often wrote out the goals she wanted to accomplish and how to accomplish them. She was very determined to become successful. Her persistence
Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...
Examples of cultural constructions can be seen throughout history in several forms such as gender, relationships, and marriage. “Cultural construction of gender emphasizes that different cultures have distinctive ideas about males and females and use these ideas to define manhood/masculinity and womanhood/femininity.” (Humanity, 239) In many cultures gender roles are a great way to gain an understanding of just how different the construction of gender can be amongst individual cultures. The video The Women’s Kingdom provides an example of an uncommon gender role, which is seen in the Wujiao Village where the Mosuo women are the last matriarchy in the country and have been around for over one thousand years. Unlike other rural Chinese villages where many girls are degraded and abandoned at birth, Mosuo woman are proud and run the households where the men simply assist in what they need. The view of gender as a cultural construct ...