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She has hit the nail on the head documenting bosses who can't speak a single word of English nonetheless pontificating at great length about what makes an English lesson. Is the only way to be around honest people to hang around losers. So, some people do it the idiot way and go to school for 3 years or better to get a degree. At least at the beginning, it seems very choppy and then it smoothes itself out. Yes, you can buy fake things even when you are looking to buy something fake. It can't quite be skipped (because she comes back to it later in the book), but doesn't seem to go with the general flow of the book. The authors takes a babbling (yet concise) interlude about the history of her family.
Chang documents/ expresses typical (annoying) Chinese chauvinism. In the interlude about her parents, she talked about how they kept trying to extend China into their new home in the United States. So, 5,000RMB is an honorable mention and 20,000RMB is a glowing review.2. Can any single statement/ thing be believed in China. It's interesting to know (sort of), but reading "Wild Swans" would give a book length treatment of what turned out to be a very similar story for many families in China under the Communists.
If "people who are too honest in this society will lose out" (p. Yes, people here are very hostile toward the idea of inventing anything new. When you read about a product in the newspapers, the favorability of the review depends on how much the products owner has paid to the newspaper. (That could have been a whole book in itself).5. The field of EFL appears the same for all observers. This is something that is very common).4. Perhaps she wanted to avoid turning the book into a documentary on the poor working conditions of the workers.3.
6. Others just go and pay about $10 to have a fake certificate printed up.4. The prose is somewhere just between choppy and simple enough to read without too much effort. That is often true of any single product that you buy anywhere in China. Chang puts a positive spin on the working conditions of a lot of workers (which are often, in fact, abysmal). This is a very light (as in "easy to read") and entertaining book.
He preferred to talk about them in parts.but as a whole, people did not make sense to him.") I found myself laughing out loud often during this easy read, and her sarcasm really added to the book. ("Mostly, I could tell that human beings frustrated him. I can't imagine that a person as smart as she is overlooked the worst case scenarios. 189), then does that make every single successful person a liar. If I doubted it before, I KNOW it now).
Who ever knew that women under 1.5 meters can't easily get jobs. (I've heard it remarked that the probability of getting any three accurate consecutive statements from a PRC Chinese is actually lower than that of being struck by lightning. And so the author went to two schools in succession that each claimed to have independently pioneered a learning product (both products were identical to each other in every way). Since there are so many different stories/ vignettes, the text also takes on a phantasmagoric quality.2. Examples:1. As far as the structure of the book itself:1. People come to interviews and lie their way into positions- and that's no problem.
Mercifully, this was in the short interlude of the history of her family.Overall, I highly recommend this book. The witticisms used here are great. It can be read through in about 3 afternoons (it is at this point that I can mention that I picked this up as an interlude to all the medium-heavy books on Statistics that I've been reading-- and so this book can also be recommended as a light change of pace for other heavy readers).This book is not only about the transition of girls on the farm to the city life, but 1,001 aspects of living in China (which I do as of the time of this review) that aren't enough to make a book by themselves but are shocking/ surprising just the same. She could have taken any other of the concepts/ themes that characterized the people/ places she visited and flushed them out. (One example is her showing the heroine of the book leading two boyfriends on and setting them up to fight against each other. People here spend more hours in school than any people I have ever seen-- and come away with absolutely zero common sense/ practical intelligence.
7. After so many years in school, do people really need to go and pay yet more tuition to be told to look someone in the eye or speak with confidence. People here will go further trying to trick the customer into believing that something is real than actually (1) developing it; (2)delivering genuine article.3. You can almost see the facial expressions/ pauses that go along with her quips.5. Can an honest person get ahead in China. Wow.
Her choices of words in places seems so.apt. She also waxed on about the richness of the Chinese language and repeated the "5,000 years of history" line that has been repeated enough times to become fact by sheer force of repetition (the first emperor was 2,300 years ago).
These women view themselves as modern-day pioneers, establishing themselves in the modern industrial world in order to improve the future prospects of their families. In fact, the book is primarily about how these women strive for upward mobility in the workplace - how they learn (or fake) skills that will garner them a higher salary at the next job down the line, or how they start, fail, or succeed at their own businesses. Leslie Chang's "Factory Girls" From Village to City in a Changing China" is an exploration about the migration of primarily female workers from rural villages to fuel the demand for labor in the modern industrialized cities. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aggressive way in which these women approach the workplace and their determination to succeed was a real eye-opener. Through the eyes of these women, readers learn what life is like inside the factories, and how the working conditions are simply considered to be part of the price to be paid. While some working conditions such as holding back a month's pay for "security" are commonplace and accepted, other treatment is not tolerated and the women (at least the ones interviewed for this book), thought nothing of quitting their jobs at the drop of a hat, because they knew they could always find another one.
After short visits with rounds of friends and relatives in their villages, it is usually back to the city to continue the struggle.Interwoven in these accounts is Leslie's personal research into the path taken by her own parents and grandparents in their emigration to the United States - a fascinating story with many threads that Leslie explores on her trips. Through interviews spanning several years, Leslie follows a handful of initially naive, but also amazingly daring young women that move to the city in hopes of landing factory jobs and achieving economic success and independence. They are unabashed self-promoters.All of the women send some money back home to their families and the more they send back, the more power they wield on their infrequent visits - financial power brings real power when it comes to making decisions within the family - and the parents acquiesce to these decisions in order to obtain the benefits that their daughters can provide. I began the book expecting to read horror stories of oppression and servitude. What these women rapidly learn is that they constitute 70% of the labor force, and that number carries weight. While I found this story interesting, I would have preferred a more concentrated focus on the factory girls of the story.I came away from this book with a newfound point of view, that the industrialization of China is ultimately empowering for Chinese women in ways that life on rural farms can never accomplish. It would not surprise me in the least to find that 10-20 years from now, the majority of the factories and industrial businesses in China were run by women.
Leslie Chang did an excellent job taking us inside the lives of migrants from the rural sections of China to the city manufacturing centers.A first-hand account of the largest migration of 150 million people in the history of the world.China has changed and there is no turining back.
Additionally, my native-born Chinese wife often mentions that politics is a topic that generally only 'boys' are interested in, and this mindset does seem to come through fairly strongly during the author's interactions with the male factory workers of the area: they don't seem all that interested in speaking to an American about anything so mundane as factory life. The lives of individual factory workers are explored as they're lived, jumping from self-improvement classes to dating services, from factory floor to clerks' offices, and from timid country folk to self-assured figures in the centre of China's commercial life. The American-born author's Chinese ethnicity does her and her readers great justice in its power to get right to the real-life heart of factory life in the Guangdong city of Dongguan. The journey taken to one of the author's befriended worker's home village over Spring Festival was particularly valuable, given our present-day expectations in the West of personal privacy and individual liberty in our social interactions. In general, the narrative does seem to jump around a great deal, with a reader able to be forgiven for losing track of the narratives of the author's individual acquaintances as they're picked up and discarded as different practical subject areas are explored. The male factory and general employment experience is brushed upon briefly, and I would've loved more insight into this particular area, but understand the practical limitations in this regard given the norms of villager expectations and the author's sex. Given the evolved conventions of village life, it is no wonder that communism could have integrated so easily into a village's social norms, if still being largely incompatible with its economic practicalities. For anyone interested in the real life of China's upwardly mobile country folk, or life in a commercial city in general, this book will offer a thus-far unmatched insight.
Needed the book for a chinese history class and arrived just in time for the start of class. The books boring though, but interesting.
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