Spy Babies: Leslie T. Chang on Factory Girls and Her New Family

Leslie Chang's Factory Girls follows the lives of the young women who've left their farming villages in search of material gain and self-development in the factories of southern China. She grows especially close to two women, Min and Chunming, whose stories about black market driving licenses and unstable work situations shed light on migrant subculture in a way other China reporting has failed to do. Before Chang appears at the Bookworm Festival this week, we talked with her about her work in China, and the challenges of writing with twin babies on her arm:

Congratulations on your new baby girls!

Yeah, it's exciting, it's a lot of fun. they're at a really good age, about 9 months. They're just really mellow and happy. It's amazing that they wake up happy in a way that you never do as an adult. I'm always wondering, why are they so happy?

How's the adjustment to working with babies in the house?

I'm much slower than I used to be, because I have fewer hours to work with, but in those hours I have to be really efficient, so in the past if I didn't have a four-hour stretch to write, I'd feel mentally really upset that I didn't have this big block of time, and now when I have 45 minutes I'll just jump right into it and then jump right out when I have to. I think that's what people do, you know, you just learn to be more flexible, more insant on/off. And hopefully the writing doesn't suffer, just things are accomplished much more slowly. But hopefully when I do work on it I'm as focused as I ever was, it's just that it comes in bursts rather than long stretches.

Sounds like you're adapting well.

Yeah, I think I'm pretty lucky, it's so immensely helpful that Pete (husband Peter Hessler) is at home and very devoted. Most fathers and mothers i know are devoted, but if you have a long commute, it's just really hard. We're lucky we have the space where we can just take a break, go hang out with the babies, and then go do something else, or if there's an emergency you drop what you're doing to help them. So that's the main reason things aren't as tough as they could be.

Having moved from China and having plans to move to the Middle East, what kind of closure has been good for you professionally or personally? Do you even seek closure with China?

Um, yeah, that's a good question. When I left China, I didn't feel burned out on it yet. And I felt like there were and are immensely exciting stories to write about, but I felt like it was a good time to leave when I was still positive and excited and felt like the book was a good closing point for this chapter of my life. But I don't feel like we're just dropping China, we continue to be engaged with it largely through friendships and relationships with people who are still there, and occasionally writing things, going back for these book festivals, so I feel like China will always be simmering somewhere in our lives, somewhere in our brains.

After the Middle East, where we'd like to live for a number of years, our plan is to move back to China. So it's sort of more like we're checking out for a while, and then we'll be checking back in.

Even though we're away from China, it's been such a huge part of our professional and personal and emotional lives, that it's always sort of the reference point for a lot of things.

Right, or maybe even with both America and China in your background, you can triangulate your next experience against it.

Yeah that's a nice way of looking at it. America and China are two very good points of departure as you say, and I think they're both unique countries in that most of the world is not like America: Most of the world has historical burdens that they carry around, and are expressed in the lives of the people, like when you think about a place like France, or England, or China. America's unusual in that people don't carry that burden with them, but once you leave America you realize that's something very unusual about America, and you notice the way Chinese people - at least the more educated people - they seem to carry their history around with them, and that's actually a more common thing. I imagine people in Egypt or Syria, they have that as well, they have this long long long tradition that's somehow fallen and they need to explain it to themselves. So it is nice to have America as a background but also to move away from it and see that most of the world is not like America.

Do you still keep in touch with Min and Chunming? Can you give us an update on their lives from where the book left off?

I do, yeah, I'm actually in good touch with both of them. Since the book finished, Chunming has probably joined and then left 5 or 6 different jobs, continuing her quest for the perfect job that expresses her desire to improve her life and also makes her a lot of money, and a bunch of very dicey direct sales opportunities (laughs), so she's kind of following her own path. She's still unmarried, still has all sorts of dating stories that would be comical if they weren't so depressing, with these horrible men. I think it's a pretty hard place to date, especially for someone like her where there's a part of her that's still pretty earnest and romantic and vulnerable, and I think she sort of gets hurt a lot. So that's where she is, but she's still her upbeat positive self, she's doing fine.

And Min actually, she continued to work at the job that she was in at the end of the book. And continued to make and save a lot of money and eventually she and her husband - oh, she got married, to a fellow migrant who I hadn't known by the time the book came out. She and he got married, they bought a car, and she also helped buy an apartment for her parents in town. And of course her parents kind of messed it up and they had a piece of land and you know, some screwed up thing, so they're still living in the farming village, but they have this land, and an opportunity to build a place in the town, so she's really kind of helped them move out of farming life if they want.

Sometimes I have a hard time reading about or working with migrants in China without at some point feeling conflicted by my responsibility or even my fortune at having things easier. Was this a struggle for you, especially when you connected your own family's history with the stories of the factory girls in Dongguan?

Um, I think it's just not really my temperament, I don't tend toward feeling that kind of guilt or conflict. Occasionally, it would really hit home to me. Once I was hanging out with a couple of the girls form the shoe factory, and one of their friends had come by and they were kind of making this simple dinner and we were all talking, and she was very interested in me because she had never met me before and I was a foreigner, and so she asked me how I got to Dongguan from Beijing. I told her I bought an airplane ticket and flew down, and next week I would buy another airplane ticket and fly back.

And she just said, "Wait, I'm just gonna sit here for a second and imagine I have your life." Then she paused for a second and said "Ok, next life then." And it wasn't out of self pity or anything like that, it was just playful. I get a chill just talking about that, and I think, My gosh, I'm so lucky. I have this life and she has that life, and yet we're sitting here talking, having fun, having dinner together.

So occasionally it would hit me like that. That our lives are so staggeringly different, and it's easy for me to not notice it every second, but they notice it every second, so that does make me feel that they're always aware of it. But you know most of the time you're talking with them and learning about their lives and sharing things and laughing so it's not like you're constantly feeling this difference or this gap or this turn of luck that made your lives turn out so differently. But sometimes it does really come into relief, and you remember.

Your book and your writings about China's middle class tell this bigger narrative about what people are reaching for in China today. How do you see that playing out over the next 5 years? Next decade?

I think there is a great searching in China. Some of it is spiritual in a broad sense, not so much searching for a god or a higher being, but kind of searching for a community to belong to, or for some form of happiness or meaning beyond material wealth. I think this is really widespread.

One of the most surprising things for me about reporting in Dongguan was meeting someone like Chunming, who is searching for all those things, even as she's also searching for financial stability and material comforts. I mean she said that so many times in many different ways: "I want to make my life fuller, I want more freedom." That was amazing to me because the feeling you get superficially about China is that everyone's just obsessed with money all the time. And I do think they very much want to make money and they see it as a measure of stability and comfort and security, all these things they never had. But I think people are also searching for something else. And I think that's going on all the time and will probably only get stronger.

I don't think this necessarily points to discontent or dissatisfaction, maybe it also means people will gradually work less and focus more on leisure pursuits - travel and hobbies, most of those things that people in the developed world enjoy. That's one of the huge differences that you notice the moment you move back to America, is that A) people just don't care as much about their jobs, and B) people often have hobbies that they're really passionate about, and that's what drives them. It's really really different from China, where people are just working all the time, and they talk about work endlessly, and they work all through the weekends, and take calls at night, I mean that's how you get used to doing things when you're living in China. So you know I think people might move towards where they might not focus purely on work and material gain, and start to develop these other sides of their lives, which I think is a good thing. Make it less extreme of a place, therefore less exciting to write about (laughs), but maybe healthier and more balanced in terms of the psychological and emotional health of the people who live there.

(Wow, that makes so much sense. No wonder I'm always exhausted here!)

Will this be your first time coming to BILF? What are you looking forward to or expecting?

Yes, this will be my first time. I'm really looking forward to in general, just being back in Beijing and seeing friends. It's been 4 years, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the city has changed and how other cities have changed. Getting back into the energy, going to good Sichuan restaurants, being among people and talk amongst people who are really engaged in China and many who have read my book, and who really live many of the things that I've also seen and written about. That's a pretty unique audience, so that will be very fun and interesting.

And the whole family's going. Anything you're excited about for the twins' sake, or nervous about?

Yeah, I'm kind of interested, looking forward to seeing how Chinese will react to them, because they're mixed race identical twin girls. I mean they're so freakish in so many ways, I'm looking forward to hearing people's theories about twins, or mixed race people, or mixed race twins. Yeah I think it'll be pretty funny.

Can you carry both babies at once? Are you building up some nice biceps?

I don't usually carry both at once. I can, but it's kind of like carrying a sack of potatoes over each arm and they're kinda just hanging limply down, so it's not the ideal situation. Plus often when one's crying it usually sets the other off, so if one starts to cry you kinda want to isolate her and have her move to another room. You don't really want to carry them both together where they both just get more and more worked up. So I don't often carry both of them at once.

Sounds like you have a lot of strategies in place.

[Laughs.] Yeah, yeah. You learn a lot.

Have you read Amy Chua's book?

Oh yeah, I haven't read it but I've heard about it. I feel like she has a lot of good points. I'm not just saying this to be a polite person. I really do feel like her general thing about assuming strength in kids, not fragility, and teaching them not everything in life is fun and sometimes it's hard work and the payoff comes later. I think those are all really valuable things, and I definitely feel like this self esteem movement has gotten out of hand with some parents, where everything is wonderful and everyone gets an A. I don't necessarily think that's the right way to prepare your children for life.

But I do feel that having grown up Chinese American and seen so many Chinese parents raising and browbeating their children the way she describes in her book - I don't see how as a person who has been the beneficiary of a really good liberal arts education and individual nurturing, how you can revert to that style of child raising. I think it's unconscionable. I know many kids who grew up with that and they were just shells of their former self by the time they were in college. The whole thing is geared toward cultivating perfect children and I think the goal is really cultivating adults, preparing someone to be a functioning, compassionate, creative, capable adult. It's not about winning prizes and awards or even getting to Harvard.

And that's not the reason we're living in a small town in Colorado then moving to the Middle East, but it is a huge benefit that we can kind of get away from all that. I don't want my kids to grow up in this pressure cooker, high competitive environment. I just don't think that's the best way to raise children. So we're gonna do the opposite and just drag them all around the world.

There are worse fates for children growing up.

Right! Well, Pete says the babies can grow up to be perfect spies, because they're identical twins who will speak English, Arab, and Chinese. So they can plug themselves into situations and one will disappear and the other will come, so that's his plan for them.

Ok, well we'll pretend we didn't hear that.

Catch Leslie as she discusses her book this afternoon (Mar 14), 1pm, at The Bookworm. Or, see her and husband Peter Hessler as they discuss their work together at Studio X Wednesday evening, Mar 16, 8pm, also part of the BILF. For details click here.