Qing Tong loves poetry. “For me, there is magic in words,” she says. Qing studied literature in school and can still think of few pleasures greater than losing herself in a volume of poems from the Tang dynasty. And yet the most magical piece of writing to her right now is China's labour law, which helped her challenge her bosses at a factory where she worked long hours for low pay. Illegally low pay and illegally long hours, as she found out.
Qing, 28 years old, is a migrant worker. And like millions of others of her generation who power the factories that churn out most of the world's toys, cars, computers and furniture, she wants to be more than a tiny wheel in a giant machine. So, after almost a decade of work at various electronics plants, she decided to give voice to all those like her – young people toiling on the production lines every day, often underpaid and overworked and without a shred of recognition from society.
She did it by writing about her experiences. Her book, From The Wolf's Burrow into The Tiger's Den, is highly personal, an account of her attempt to find meaning in her life, to craft an existence for herself away from her original rural home. Qing was employed at an electronics plant and then, later, at Foxconn, where a spate of suicides this spring prompted national soul-searching about working conditions. The book became an immediate bestseller in China when it was published last month, and it echoes the message conveyed by a multiplying number of strikes and workers' protests in southern China.