求书--《工厂女孩》中文版 Factory Girls ，作者：张彤禾Leslie Chang

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《工厂女孩》 Factory Girls ，作者是WSJ前记者张彤禾Leslie Chang

找到了英文版的，求中文版

谢谢！！

以下是她的创作手记：

2006年3月份我开始写这本书。刚写了一刻钟，不安袭来：“现在光坐在桌边写书是没工资拿的。”但早上十点左右，我想明白了，自己是不会再回去当报社记者了。


《工厂女孩：巨变的中国，从乡村到城市》一书，为读者打开了在中国南部城市东莞流水线上工作的女孩们的内心世界：


看见其他厂的姑娘，你马上开始打听。你们问对方：“你是哪年的？”好像聊的不是人而是出厂的车。“多少钱一个月？算房子和床位么？加班多少钱？”然后可能问问她是哪个省来的。不过你从来也不问名字。


要在厂里有个真心朋友不容易。宿舍里12个姑娘睡一个屋子，在这个狭小的空间内，最好还是守住自己的秘密。有些女孩进厂时用的是借来的身份证，她们从不告诉任何人自己的真名。有些也只对自己的同省老乡说，但这样也得冒险：流言很快就从厂里传回家了，等你回去，发现七大姑八大姨都知道你一个月赚多少、存多少、是不是和男孩儿出去约会。


从报社编辑的角度出发，这样的开头怎么看也不会顺眼：“谁在叙述？这个故事要讲什么？你是怎么知道的？”以描述工厂内部生活开始，接着，我引入了一位名叫陆青敏（音译）的16岁外地打工妹，记录了她在东莞初来乍到、找工作，以及后来绝大多数农民工刚进城都有的强大的疏离感。在书中我仅用十余页去介绍背景：“中国今天有1.3亿在外务工人员……他们共同构成了人类历史上最大规模的迁移，其数量是百年间欧洲前往美国移民数量的三倍之多。”不过我相信读者还是会跟随我的思路——先沉浸在工厂生活的详尽细节中，想要知道这位年轻女孩的故事。然后我才停下来讲述的那个大环境。报纸是不可能有这个底气的：编辑会坚持认为讲述这些事实需要高调，要立刻告诉读者这是个非常重要的故事。


我脑海中不时回响起这么个编辑的声音——我怀疑每个记者都有这种经历。这个声音总提醒着你要拿有据可依的事实讲无懈可击的故事。新闻是个沾沾自喜的行当，以自己敢在统治者面前讲实话、敢打破禁忌而自豪。但当论及自身时，新闻从来不谈自己的规矩有多僵化。


*


大学毕业后，我在《迈阿密先驱报》实习过，继而在布拉格的一家外籍报纸工作。1993年我进了《华尔街日报》，先是在香港、然后是台湾，之后转往中国大陆。曾经我认为报社的工作为年轻人提供了最好的写作机会。逐渐地，我才意识到，做新闻并不是写作，它的价值另有所在——尤其在于解读一个如当下中国般复杂又被误解的国家。因此目光长远且善于挑战传统观念的《华尔街日报》很适合我。并非每家报纸都会登载关于研磨厂的系列报道以此提升自己的影响力——正如我们总编所说。我喜欢并尊重自己的记者同行们和编辑们。我的挣扎并不是针对他们而是他们不得不面对的、这个行业缺乏弹性的规矩。


随着写作的开始，我意识到自己必须把之前作为记者学来的很多东西忘掉。新闻报道最大的局限是它没有不同的声音；用第一人称叙述读者就会皱眉，或许因为它丧失了中立观察者的理想状态。当一名记者偶尔在故事中写道自己，就会出现滑稽诡异的结果：文章的主人公对“一位记者”或“一位外国访问者”或“本报记者”说道——总之要变着法地绕开那个禁忌的“我”字。记者必须学着像自己不存在一样地去写作。


要搞明白怎么写自己，是这本书带来的最大挑战。除了讲述几个年轻女工的生活，书中也穿插了我的家庭移居中国又迁往西方的过程。这是最初的计划，但实现它的过程颇痛苦。“你像尊冻僵的旁观者。”， 看完首稿朋友说。“你是联系女孩和自己家庭故事的纽带，”编辑提醒我。“没有你，这两部分就是貌合神离的！”结结实实地改了两稿我才把自己融入了自己的书中。


能出现个人观点的地方，新闻里往往都是绝对的权威口气登场。这种处理方法不仅危险——容易出错——而且它会悄无声息地影响一个人的写作风格。观点都以言简意赅的真理形式体现。句子都遵循着相同的、重复的结构，还得不停点题。段落的写作又时常被掐头去尾——就像Power Point的演示文稿，一段一个事实，直到将读者引向最终的结论。


新闻化的语调会扼杀想象力。编辑一句“这个你怎么知道的？”就问得你再难有空间让人物或地方栩栩如生了。下面是书中我描写16岁的农民工陆青敏的段落：


她个儿矮，长得结实，顶着一头卷发，一双机灵的黑眼睛似乎能洞察一切。像许多来自农村的中国年轻人一样，她看上去比实际年龄小。她就像只有15岁、14岁，甚至12岁——蹬工装裤运动鞋的假小子，不耐烦地要长大。她长着一张娃娃脸。它浑圆、面对着世界，有着儿童时常出现的耐心期待的表情。


在《华尔街日报》的文章中，我用一个句子给她定了调：“敏圆脸，长着一头卷发、一双大眼睛。”当时并未意识到这种描述的缺陷，因为我正忙于抗争报纸的写作风格规矩。我不想以“陆女士”称呼十几岁的敏，那样听上去正式得刺耳；我也反对按新闻的传统给每一个细节注明出处。这些辩论都以我胜利告终，不过也有我妥协或甚至没有坚持自己想法的地方。像我说的，假想编辑的话总萦绕耳边。


新闻工作的最大缺点就是让人不耐心。一想到竞争者也在报道，编辑们便希望自家的故事能更快见报，于是记者也将这种紧迫感内化，急匆匆地出入新闻现场。这条路不仅丢了细节，更有可能连新闻本身也错过了。2004年2月我初见敏时，她刚刚在一家电子厂干满一年，那里条件差、薪水低，工作日一天上班13个小时。之后三年间，她跳槽六次，逐渐从在流水线上工作、到人力资源办公室坐班，再到供职一家工厂的采购部。曾经，她想过要抛弃一切跟着男友去北京，说不定他去了能当个保安；曾经，住在一家便宜旅馆时，她给人偷去了手机和900元现金。如果一位记者在以上任何一个时间点出现，他或许已经带着个沮丧的故事离开了。因为和敏在一起三年，我见证了她外出打工生活的所有起落、机遇和成功。


耐心观察后的发现并不一定来自于你报道的主人公本身。大多数中国人的生活已经在过去的20年中发生了翻天覆地的变化，很少有人能深思熟虑地讨论这种转型。拒绝内省的本能根深蒂固，人们往往困于现实没有观点。我认识的在东莞工作的女孩，没人聊过打离家以来自己有何收获；也许她们担心一旦回头就没了冲劲。关于敏的第一篇文章在《华尔街日报》发表后，我送了一份翻译版给她。她像在看披露真相的报道一般——仿佛这是别人的故事。“我看到了曾经的自己”，后来她写电子邮件给我，“我感到自己真的改变了。”


*


我并不后悔自己曾当过记者。它让我学会了如何采集信息，如何不断提问、理解事实，如何将各个途径的零碎消息迅速揉合，就像没有内幕来源那样——其实从来就没有。尤其在中国这样一个瞬息万变、数据难详的地方进行报道，坚信一定能找到真相是很重要的。比如，在书中我想知道东莞市庞大的女民工人数，但当地政府并没有这个官方的统计数据；他们的本地户籍人数对我又没意义。于是我将在《华尔街日报》的心得学以致用：问自己遇到的每个人，“他们”觉得这个数是多少。最后，我把市场主管、政府官员、工厂老板和当地报纸的调查综合到一起，估计东莞的人口构成中70%是女性。这么做的缺陷以及别人的谨慎并不能阻止你得到结论——这是作为记者，我学到的。


刚开始当记者时，有位文字编辑把我报道中的一句话改得不那么优雅，我和他吵了起来。“我们现在不是要充艾米莉•迪金森”他厉声道——这根刺儿多年埋于我心中。现在回想，如果自己当初知道之前已经有多少人曾为此争纠过就好了。年轻的马克•吐温被他《San Francisco Call 》的编辑说成“文字上无药可医”，特别的写作风格最后害得他被炒。《多伦多星报》的记者欧内斯特•海明威曾抱怨“报纸这该死的玩意儿要把我给毁了。”以上两位不仅成了伟大的小说家，而且是纪实文学的先驱，他们用主观感受和小说技法写活了人生经历。做了很长时间记者，能看到他们曾经作为记者和后来成为作家之间的联系，我觉得很安慰。


张彤禾，作为《华尔街日报》的记者在华工作十年。她的书《工厂女孩》由Doubleday 出版集团的Spiegel & Grau于2008年10月出版

英语原文


《工厂女孩》创作手记
Writing Factory Girls
By Leslie T. Chang

I started writing my book on a March morning in 2006. About fifteen minutes into it, panic hit: I am no longer earning a salary just sitting here at my desk. By mid-morning, another realization had set in: I can’t go back to being a newspaper reporter.

The book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, opens inside the world of the young women working on assembly lines in the south China factory city of Dongguan:

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. “What year are you?” you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars. “How much a month? Including room and board? How much for overtime?” Then you might ask what province she was from. You never asked her name.

To have a true friend inside the factory was not easy. Girls slept twelve to a room, and in the tight confines of the dorm it was better to keep your secrets. Some girls joined the factory with borrowed ID cards and never told anyone their real names. Some spoke only to those from their home provinces, but that had risks: Gossip traveled quickly from factory to village, and when you went home every auntie and granny would know how much you made and how much you saved and whether you went out with boys.

Almost everything is wrong with that opening, from a newspaper editor’s point of view. Who is speaking here? What is this story about? How do you know this? From the opening inside the factory, I move on to introduce a sixteen-year-old migrant worker named Lu Qingmin, tracing her arrival in Dongguan, her early job-hopping, and the overwhelming sense of isolation that is what most migrants remember from their first days in the city. Only ten pages into the book do I give some background: Today China has 130 million migrant workers…Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who immigrated to America from Europe over a century. But I have faith that the reader will stick with me—to be absorbed in the details of the factory world and a single young woman’s story before I stop to explain the broader context. Newspapers have no such faith: An editor would insist that these facts be up high. The reader must be told right away that this is a Very Important Story.

I hear the voice of this imaginary editor in my head all the time—I suspect that every newspaper reporter does. It is the voice that reminds you of all the rules you must follow in order to write an airtight story based on attributable facts. Journalism is a self-congratulatory profession; it likes to celebrate its courage in speaking truth to power and breaking taboos. What is almost never acknowledged is how rigid are its conventions when it comes to itself.

*

After graduating from college, I did a reporting internship at the Miami Herald and then worked at an expatriate newspaper in Prague. I joined the Wall Street Journal in 1993, first in Hong Kong, later moving to Taiwan and then China. I thought that newspapers offered the most writing opportunities to a young person. Only gradually did I realize that journalism is not writing, that its value lay elsewhere—particularly in explaining a place as complex and misunderstood as China. The Wall Street Journal, with its emphasis on long features that upset the conventional wisdom, suited me. Not every newspaper would run a series presenting grinding factory work as a path to upward mobility—as my bureau chief put it, “the happy face of exploitative capitalism.” I liked and respected my fellow reporters, and my editors as well. My quarrel has never been with them, but with the inflexible rules of the trade that they were called upon to enforce.

As I began writing my book, I realized I would have to unlearn a lot of what I had learned as a journalist. The biggest limitation in newspaper writing is its lack of a distinctive voice; use of the first person is frowned upon, perhaps because it detracts from the ideal of the neutral observer. When a journalist occasionally runs into himself in a story, the result is comically awkward: The subject of an article spoke to “a reporter” or “a foreign visitor” or perhaps “a correspondent for this newspaper”—any contortion to avoid the forbidden “I.” A journalist learns to write as if she does not exist.

Figuring out how to write about myself was the biggest challenge of the book. Along with following the lives of several young migrant women, my book also traces my own family’s migrations within China and to the West. That was my plan from the start, but carrying it out was painful. “You seem almost a frozen observer,” commented a friend after reading a first draft. “You are the connection between the stories of the girls and the family stories,” my editor reminded me. “Without you, the two parts don’t hold together!” It took two substantial revisions to write myself into my own book.

In place of the personal voice, journalism substitutes the voice of absolute authority. This posture is not only dangerous—it’s easy to be wrong—but it infects one’s writing style in subtle ways. Ideas are rendered in short, clipped statements of truth. Sentences follow an identical and repetitive structure, the better to hammer home a point. Paragraphs are frequently truncated—this is writing as PowerPoint presentation, one fact per paragraph, leading the reader to the inevitable conclusion.

The journalistic voice strangles the imagination. The editor’s eternal question—How do you know this?—leaves almost no room to bring a person or a place to life. In my book, this is how I describe Lu Qingmin, the sixteen-year-old migrant worker:

She was short and sturdily built, with curly hair and keen dark eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Like many young people from the Chinese countryside, she looked even younger than she was. She could have been fifteen, or fourteen, or even twelve—a tomboy in cargo pants and running shoes, waiting impatiently to grow up. She had a child’s face. It was round and open to the world, with the look of patient expectation that children’s faces sometimes wear.

In the Wall Street Journal story, I nailed her in one sentence: Min has a round face, curly hair and big eyes. I didn’t realize at the time the inadequacy of that description, because I was too busy fighting other battles against the newspaper’s rules of style. I didn’t want to refer to the teenage Min as “Ms. Lu,” which seemed jarringly formal; I argued against having to attribute every detail to a source, as is journalistic convention. I won those battles, but there were others I lost, and still others I didn’t even fight. As I said, the voice of the imaginary editor is always in my head.

The primary flaw of journalism is impatience. Ever mindful of the competition, editors always want the story sooner, and reporters internalize this urgency in their tendency to move in and out of places quickly. But this approach not only misses the nuances, it risks missing the story altogether. When I first met Min in February 2004, she had just finished a year at an electronics factory marked by bad conditions, low pay, and thirteen-hour workdays. Over three years, she jumped jobs six times, working her way up from the assembly line to a clerical position to human resources and finally a factory’s powerful purchasing department. At one point, she considered throwing it all away to follow her boyfriend to Beijing where he would work as a security guard; another time, she was robbed of her mobile phone and nine hundred yuan in cash as she slept in a cheap hostel. If a reporter had met her at any of those points, he would have come away with a grim story. Because I was able to follow Min for three years, I could see that migration, for all its ups and downs, had brought her opportunity and success.

The discoveries that come from patient observation are not necessarily things that your subjects will share with you. The lives of most Chinese have changed beyond recognition in the past two decades, yet it is rare to hear someone speak thoughtfully about this transformation. The instinct against introspection runs deep, and people are so caught up in the present that they often lack perspective. None of the factory girls I knew in Dongguan ever talked about what they had achieved since coming out from home; maybe they worried they would lose momentum if they looked backward. After my first article about Min was published in the Journal, I gave her a translated copy. She read the piece like a revelation—almost as if it were the story of someone else. Seeing the self I used to be, she wrote me in an e-mail afterward, I realize that I have really changed.

*

I don’t regret my years as a journalist. I learned how to get information, how to keep asking questions until I understood something, how to cobble together bits and pieces from multiple sources if there was no one Deep Throat—as there almost never is. Especially when reporting in a place as rapidly changing and statistically blurry as China, it is important to have faith that the truth can be found. For example, in my book I wanted to draw attention to the heavily female migrant population of Dongguan, but the city government did not have an official statistic; its figure, which counted only locally registered residents, was useless to me. So I did what I had been taught at the Journal: I began asking everyone I met what they thought the figure was. Eventually I combined the findings of a talent market executive, city officials, factory bosses, and a local newspaper survey to estimate that the city’s population was 70 percent female. The shortcomings and cautiousness of others should not keep you from making conclusions—this is one lesson you learn as a journalist.

Early in my newspaper career, I argued with a copyeditor who had changed a sentence in my story to something less graceful. “We’re not trying to be Emily Dickinson here,” he snapped—a remark whose sting lingered for years. I wish I had known then how many others had fought this fight before me. The young Mark Twain was regarded by his editors at the San Francisco Call as “incurably literary,” and his idiosyncratic writing style eventually got him fired. Ernest Hemingway, correspondent for the Toronto Star, complained, “this goddam newspaper stuff is gradually ruining me.” Both men became not only great novelists but also pioneers of literary nonfiction, using subjective impressions and the techniques of fiction to bring true experiences to life. As a longtime journalist, I feel some consolation to see the connections between the reporters they were and the writers they became.

.

306372384

据我所知，这本书还没有中文版

gentlee

不好意思，暂时找不到中文版。