“FACTORY GIRLS” AUTHOR’S NEW BOOK CONTRASTS WOMEN’S LIFE CHOICES IN CHINA, EGYPT

Former Wall Street Journal correspondent Leslie T. Chang’s award-winning book “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China,” published in 2008, explored working conditions for young factory workers in southern China. Chang’s follow-up book, “Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation,” appeared last month, and focuses on the greater obstacles facing women and the broader economy in that Middle Eastern country.

“Many Egyptians hold the view that daughters are worth less than sons and that their chief purpose in life is to get married and care for their families,” limiting the country’s economic potential, Chang told me in an email interview this month. By contrast, “economics trumped tradition” in more prosperous China, said Chang.

The Harvard graduate is married to fellow author Peter Hessler and currently lives in Ridgway, Colorado. Excerpts from our exchange follow.

Flannery: China hands are familiar with "Factory Girls," your book from 2008 that explored factory life for young women in southern China. What brought you to Egypt?

Chang: I lived in China between 1999 and 2007, first as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and then reporting among migrant workers to write Factory Girls. Before that, I was a journalist in Hong Kong and Taiwan. After almost 15 years in Greater China, I wanted to explore a different part of the world and learn a new language; it’s important as a writer to not get too comfortable being a so-called “expert.” My husband and I moved to Egypt in 2011 with our twin toddlers.

I’ve always been curious about the lives of women in the Middle East. As I write in Egyptian Made, “Like Chinese factory workers, women in the Arab world are a fraught subject that people tend to have strong opinions about.”

Flannery: Why did you want to write the book?

Chang: I feel that media coverage of women in the Middle East tends to cycle between extremes. We read about women activists, or women who have been kidnapped into ISIS, or women who run lingerie shops or are learning how to drive. I wanted to get beyond women as heroes or victims or symbols and write about ordinary people and how they live between tradition and modernity. In China, I found that factory employment changed the fates of young women from the countryside, putting them on a path to the urban middle class. In the new book, I write: “Economics trumped tradition: That was the lesson. Why couldn’t the same transformation play out even in a country with a different culture and history on the other side of the world?”

Egyptian Made focuses on the relationship between women and work, which allowed me to explore individual stories along with broader issues including economic policy, the textile industry, the legal and education systems, and changing interpretations of Islam. My main characters include an entrepreneur who runs a garment factory outside Alexandria; assembly-line workers in a large factory in Upper Egypt; and shopkeepers in a Christian village. I wanted to see if work was liberating for these women—and if not, what were the historical, economic, cultural, and religious factors that locked them in their places.

Flannery: How did the process of reporting and researching "Egyptian Made" differ from your China book?

Chang: When I started reporting my China book, there was a lot of media coverage about working conditions inside factories, which were usually described as oppressive and abusive, as well as scholarly studies on migration. So there was a lot of published work that was either confirmed or contradicted by my reporting, and that helped shape my book.

Egypt is more of a blank slate—its female labor participation rate is among the lowest in the world, and I heard wildly contradictory things from experts in Cairo about whether ordinary women worked at all. Some of them told me that most women in rural Egypt worked, while others said that no one from this group worked. Which was it? I traveled to villages and towns around the country to find out. I discovered small garment factories in the industrial zones near Alexandria that employed young women. I stumbled on a clothing factory that employed hundreds in the middle of the desert. I came across a Christian village where single women worked as shopkeepers and nurses.

In some ways, Egypt is an easier place in which to report. People tend to be outgoing and hospitable, even to clueless strangers like me. I would frequently show up at a factory gate, walk inside, chat with the owner, and interview his workers. In China there’s more reflexive suspicion—that you’re trying to steal commercial secrets or somehow get them into trouble. And people tend to be more reserved. In China the young women I met often said, “I’m just an ordinary worker; there’s nothing special about me.” In Egypt I once asked a fourteen-year-old factory worker to tell me about her life, and she folded her arms and announced, “I’m going to take up a lot of your time.”

Flannery: What are some of similarities and contrasts between the themes you develop in "Factory Girls" and "Egyptian Made"?

Chang: Both China and Egypt are countries with long histories and patriarchal traditions. It used to be common in China to hear that girls are expendable, because they leave home and marry into someone else’s family. Many Egyptians hold the view that daughters are worth less than sons and that their chief purpose in life is to get married and care for their families.

But China has broken dramatically with its traditions. The 1949 Communist revolution mobilized women to participate in the workforce and outlawed discriminatory customs such as arranged marriage. Thanks to economic reforms beginning in 1978, the economy has grown at nine percent per year for the past several decades, which has significantly remade both the economy and society. As I found when reporting Factory Girls, a young woman could enter a factory and immediately earn more money in a month than her parents could in an entire year through farming. This turned teenage girls into the family breadwinners and gave them authority at home and the freedom to make their own life choices.

The Egyptian economy, in contrast, has grown at less than half China’s rate, and the government has repeatedly failed to build a significant and globally competitive manufacturing sector, which is what employs so many women elsewhere in the developing world. Even if a young woman in Egypt does get a job in a factory, the money she brings home isn’t enough to make people change their minds about women’s abilities. So the traditional idea that a woman’s place is in the home has remained; for most women, there are many risks and few rewards for leaving home and trying something new.

As I write in my book, “When I lived in China, I met young women who made critical life choices minute by minute…In Egypt, I learned that change is hard.”

Flannery: What do those tell us about the future economic and social prospects of China and Egypt?

Chang: It’s night and day. When I reported in China in the early 2000s, the country was known as the “factory floor of the world” and produced everything from plastic toys to coat hangers. China still dominates global manufacturing, but its exports now include solar panels, electric vehicles, and wind turbines. Factory Girls was published 15 years ago but it already reads like a time capsule from an earlier era.

In Egypt, the same policies are discussed over and over—programs to build manufacturing, train workers, and empower women—without being put into practice or having a large-scale impact on people’s lives. I think a visionary leader could turn that around, but I don’t see the current military-led regime drafting a coherent economic policy, overhauling the education system, or spreading the message that women’s abilities are equal to men’s. That’s what it would take to set the country in a different direction.

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2024-04-30T02:27:58Z dg43tfdfdgfd