Migrants from Countryside to the city

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Migrants from Country side to the city
In Factory Girls, immigration plays a prominent role in transforming the lives of ordinary Chinese and China in general. The factory workers who provide cheap labor are not there simply to produce, but mainly to earn a living out of their own free will. The forces of globalization have made his possible, with cheap labor enabling China to become a big player in the international market. However, young unmarried people faced family resistance in the early 1990’s when going to work in Chinese towns (Chang 285). Child labor also features in the story, as there were children who started working at twelve years of age (Chang 286). This paper highlights on the techniques of theme foreshadowing, scenes characterization, dialogue and flashback as used in Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang to portray migrant workers from Chinese countryside to cities.
The main theme of the story is that Chinese migration from rural areas to cities in transforming the country. Focusing on two characters, the story revolves around the lives of factory workers and their concerns about life in the industrial city. Even though, the country espouses communism, capitalism is at the heart of transformation where profits have driven businesses to use cheap labor in factories particularly young women from rural areas. The sheer scale of labor force required in the factories in Dongguan capture the emerging trends in the country where growth in industrial scale projects and labor requirements are enormous (Chang 8). Wu one of the characters in the story describes her life working 14 hours with little pay as a teenager, and her narration is similar to that of Min who has also worked under strenuous factory conditions (Chang 100).
The use of foreshadowing highlights on what is expected about the lives of migrant workers in Chinese factories. It is the choice of the workers to work in the factories, but it is not easy to make friendships in the factories (Chang 1). The workers merely asked general questions about their colleagues, with up to twelve girls sleeping in one room. Similarly, there were girls who never gave out their real names (Chang 2). Even those who simply socialized with workers from their provinces risked having their secrets and private lives being exposed by their colleagues (Chang 3). The situation in the factory is not ideal to establish relations it is simply a place where people sought work.
Characterization plays a prominent role in the story rather than ordered narratives, and the author’s fluency in mandarin Chinese is essential to interacting with Min and Wu who work in the factories (Freudenberger). The tour of factories is an eye opener to Chang who points out the poor living conditions of the workers, but is more interested in getting to understand the lives of female migrant workers. Nonetheless, migration is also portrayed as a hopeful journey as migr...