Leslie T. Chang: 'Learn to make your identity work for you'

Author Leslie Chang finally makes it to the Shanghai International Literary Festival with her husband and fellow writer Peter Hessler.

“I learned how to write in a different way [than business writing] and realized that I liked it much better,” she says. “I could pour my heart into a 5,000-word magazine story, but to pour my heart into an 800-word piece about auditing retail regulations? I couldn’t do that again.”

Business writing’s loss has been narrative non-fiction’s gain.

First published in 2008, “Factory Girls” made it onto many major “year’s best books” lists, including those compiled by “Time” and “The New York Times.”

“Leslie has been on our radar for quite some time, we’ve known her since she was a wee ‘Wall Street Journal’ reporter in Shanghai in the late 1990s," says Tina Kanagaratnam, one of the organizers of the Shanghai International Literary Festival, "but between writing the book, moving from Beijing and having twins last year, [her coming to the festival] didn’t happen until now.”

In “Factory Girls,” Chang chronicles the lives of Min and Chunming who migrate to Dongguan in Southern China to find work.

Chang visited the girls regularly over several years, watching them lie shamelessly at job interviews and quickly hop between jobs. She saw Chunming earn huge sums in a short-lived pyramid scheme, and witnessed Min consume her first Big Mac, which she ate layer by layer, beginning with the top bun.

The ongoing epilogue

Min is 16 years old at the beginning of the book, lying about her age in order to find a job on an assembly line.

People tend to want to find meaning in these acts and tie them in to the factory conditions because that makes them feel like, well, now we can do something, now we can pressure Foxconn to pay its workers 20 percent more than they have. But the reality of the situation is that these are just really complicated personal situations.— Leslie Chang, author and journalist

Since Chang concluded her research, Min has married, had a child and moved in with her husband’s family in Changsha, Hunan Province.

“Her future’s very up in the air,” Chang says, “but I have a feeling they’re probably going to do some sort of business in Changsha and then maybe come back out to the coast in a year or two when the child is a little bit older.”

Chunming is still in Dongguan.

“She’s probably cycled through 15 jobs since the end of the book, lots more ups and downs, still searching for the dream direct sales job, and lately she seems to have finally settled into a more traditional sales job at a pleather factory, a classic Dongguan enterprise. She’s still not married and still has all sorts of terrible dating stories to share with me.”

Dongguan itself has been through some big changes, taking a hit during the economic downturn in 2008-2009 but quickly recovering.

“You went from a string of stories saying there’s no jobs for workers to a string of stories saying factories are finding it impossible to find workers because they’re expanding so quickly,” Chang says.

Factory suicides

In “Factory Girls,” Chang mentions workers’ impressions of companies managed by different nationalities. They say that outside mainland China the worst bosses came from Taiwan, an observation that seems eerie in the wake of last year’s Foxconn suicides, but Chang is skeptical about the connection.

“I think there’s a sort of misunderstanding in the press. With the Foxconn suicides, people thought that this was a factory with horrible conditions and that’s why workers were killing themselves, when in fact when you compare it to a lot of factories in China it’s pretty good."

"It’s not a wonderful factory but it’s solid, predictable,” she says.

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“People tend to want to find meaning in these acts and tie them in to the factory conditions because that makes them feel like, 'well, now we can do something, now we can pressure Foxconn to pay its workers 20 percent more than they have.' But the reality of the situation is that these are just really complicated personal situations.”

Amy Chua, Chinese parenting and personal identity

Min and Chunming’s relentless efforts to improve their lives are a major theme of “Factory Girls.”

In a “National Geographic” article Chang wrote in 2008, she saw similarly high aspirations in China’s middle class.

The Zhou family paid for their daughter, Bella, to attend English, acting, swimming and piano classes, leaving little time to play, a parenting model infamously related by Chinese American Amy Chua. For both Chua and the Zhous, piano is a particular obsession.

“You’re talking to someone who played the piano for about 20 years, so, let me try to explain it,” says Chang.

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“I think there’s a complete Chinese obsession with piano and violin that’s probably genetically imprinted or something," she continues.

"In the case of Bella’s family, I think they feel like she has all these opportunities that they didn’t have, and they hear these rumors that are very unclear that say well if your kid does well at piano then it will add a few points to their college entrance exam score, which as far as I understand is not true.”

Chang says she has a lot of feelings about Chua’s book.

“Frankly, it’s bizarre that a person who’s raised in America will revert to an immigrant model when she comes to raising her own children,” she says.

The plus side for me is that I can blend in and wander through the factories and hang out in the dorms and not cause a crowd of people to come staring and pointing, you know. There’s plusses and minuses on both sides, and that’s one of the important lessons as you learn to be a writer: you learn to make your identity work for you.— Leslie Chang, author and journaist

“I think the beauty of America is that you don’t have to be as narrow and brutally competitive as your parents felt like they had to be. I grew up knowing many, many parents who were exactly like the philosophy that she’s espousing, and I also know many, many kids who were burned out by the time they were 21 years old.”

Chang’s husband Peter Hessler has also written narrative non-fiction about China. She says that while she learned a lot from him, she naturally has different stories to tell.

“There are a lot of things I’m always giving him shit for, like the story always comes to him. He goes into a public bathroom and someone’s telling him a story because he’s a foreigner. I don’t get that, I have to go out and find it,” Chang says.

“The plus side for me is that I can blend in and wander through the factories and hang out in the dorms and not cause a crowd of people to come staring and pointing, you know. There’s plusses and minuses on both sides, and that’s one of the important lessons as you learn to be a writer: you learn to make your identity work for you.”

East to Middle East

Having returned to the States to finish their China books, enjoy the outdoors and raise their twins, Chang and Hessler are now preparing for a move to the Middle East this summer.

“We looked at the map of the world and tried to figure out places to go,” Chang says.

“We decided that the Middle East is a fascinating and probably misunderstood place and we had a feeling that it’s similar to how China was when we first arrived, in that the coverage seems to be largely political.”

Chang and Hessler want to write more human stories, capturing the uniqueness and humor of the place. They were considering moving to Syria but after recent events, Egypt is at the top of their list.

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“We almost wish that [protesters] had waited a year, just for the sake of our careers,” she quips.

Chang and Hessler are curious about how their identities will inform the stories they write.

“Pete says he’s going to pass himself off as a Lebanese trader, and I’m going to be a freakish person there, so our roles will kind of be switched compared to what they were in China,” she says.

“I know it’s going to be hard in many ways being a woman there, not having access to a lot of things and being harassed at various times, but I hope that I can use that in a good way and get how women live, or how families operate, the story that’s often quite hidden or told in a very broad-brush way.”