It's a magical world

deepad on vidding as a grassroots feminist praxis quilting together a female gaze.

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Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

This is a really good book. I had some quibbles (I always have quibbles, seriously), but all in all Chang has done a remarkable job of telling the stories she found rather than the story she wanted to write, and Factory Girls resonates accordingly.

To wit, in this book Chang, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is married to the writer Peter Hessert, explores the lives of migrant workers in China, mostly in and around the southern city of Dongguan, where (among many other things) 2/3 of all the world's running shoes are made. Migrant workers in China are overwhelmingly young and female, girls from the villages with varying levels of education whose only real option for economic advancement is moving to the cities to work. There are 130 million migrant workers in China, the largest migration in human history according to the back cover.

( Going out | 出行 )