Factory Girls/Oracle Bones

(An old reflection dated on 1/20/11) The dance instructor dismissed us earlier than usual. I normally would sweat profusely during the dance lessons but not tonight. A sense of disappointment and unfulfilment swept through the class. I was not alone, I told myself. The teacher was visibly tired. She has long passed her prime and has another class to teach before ours. Maybe we could have her reschedule our session to a different date when she is less busy, someone suggested. Not an option, when we brought up the topic to the instructor.  

On the way home, to dissipate my disappointment, I thought of the book I just finished reading, Factory Girls,  by Leslie Chang, a Chinese American and wife of one favorite writer Peter Hessler.

   

Clearly Leslie’s writing style and subtlety are not as fine or to my taste as that of Hessler’s. I was interested in the book primarily because I wanted to see how Leslie approached such a popular topic: factory girls in China’s industrial frontiers and migrant life to a Chinese American eye. 

This nonfiction is more of a mixture of genres: journalism, narrative, history, personal encounters, and authorial reflections.    

Leslie befriended the factory girls, traveled with them back to their rural villages, dined out with them at the street side restaurants, visiting their bunk bed lined dorms, interviewing government officials, factory owners and managers, mingling with the night club crowds, getting behind the stories of the prostitutes. The self improvement of the factory girls and their saddened or succeeded accounts revealed in a wholesome way the part of China that western readers normally would not find in other sources.  

The pull and push between rural and urban permeated throughout.  

But Leslie is a clever writer. She, like all of us, has a quest. Her quest is to come to terms with her own cultural roots. Her own family history permeates the factory girls’ stories. In an interesting but not surprising way, reading Leslie constantly reminded me of Iris Chang’s book, The Chinese American Experience or Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club. Leslie’s family depiction in this book is like a mirrored image of what is in Iris Chang and Amy Tan’s book, endeavoring to bring alive through the written words her familial history, which in Chang’s case, the Chinese American experience and in Tan’s, the micro way of Chinese American encounters.  

My new reading is Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which I have put it off for so long and finally had it sent from Amazon.

  

(Finished reading Oracle Bones. Deeply impressed with the penmanship, the scholarship and the undercurrent beneath the seemingly objective narrative. Well, nothing is objective; all is relative. Our choice of what to include and what not to include in our writing is a subjective matter, isn’t it? A splendid blending of contemporary and historical China in its people, language, culture, domestic and international tensions. Very readable and enjoyable for a nonfiction narrative. Life is unscrolled before us by the author's pursuit of a person or event and passive or active participation in the events in China. Will try to write on this book when time permits.)