Factory Girls meeting highlights

With several ladies not able to make it to the meeting, we had a smallish group of just six...which was fine, because that meant more yummy food for us! :)

All of us enjoyed the book to varying degrees.  The majority of us found the writing style, due to the author's journalistic background, very disjointed, which did not always make for enjoyable reading.  We were surprised to discover that as a whole, the migrants liked their lives and their work; we had envisioned a book detailing the terrible working conditions and poor wages and so on, much like The Jungle, but we found this not to be the case at all.  We wondered if the author had entered into the story with the same expectation, and was as surprised as us at her discoveries.  We did note, however, that the unhappy migrants and the harsh factories would have been far less likely to talk with the author, and so we questioned the reliability of the data, as it might not give us the "whole picture".

Some of us enjoyed the story of the author's own family, while others felt like it didn't really belong in the book.  We were all surprised by the way that the migrants behaved when they returned home, mostly sitting around the house and watching TV.  We determined that if the communist government would allow the broadcast of more western shows in English, at least the time spent watching TV would not be completely wasted, as they could learn some English from it.  :)