Factory Girls
By Leslie Chang
Spiegel & Grau $26, 432 pages

When the Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie Chang arrived in the frenetic industrial city of Dongguan in 2004, foreign newspapers had already written of harsh conditions in China’s factories. She doesn’t hide those facts – girls sleep 12 to a room and work 13-hour days, seven days a week, for a base monthly salary of $50 – but Chang is less interested in exposé than in getting to know the young women of Dongguan’s assembly lines.