Motivation

Reading a book for class this morning entitled Factory Girls/From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang. It's a work describing the world of migrant workers moving from their family villages in the countryside to factory cities such as Dongguan. The working conditions are rigorous, and wages are very low compared to work in America (something like $72 a month is about the average salary). Workers live in dormitories attached to the factory, and work hours according to the seasonal demands of their product. The months leading up to the Christmas holiday are apparently the worst.

It really is an incredible world though. But something in particular struck me, and that was a powerful tendency for some people to work ceaslessly to improve themselves so as to escape the factory life and become a respected and dignified member of society. The tendency seems particularly powerful among certain individuals highlighted in the book, but the presence of hundreds of schools and self-help classes in factory cities suggest a wide-spread nature to the phenomenon.

The section I read this morning talked about a white-collar class in which 200 factory girls signed up to learn how to think and act like so-called white-collar workers.  Everything from attitudes to clothing is laid out in prescriptive terms, with rules governing even the most mundane of tasks, such as dialing the telephone. Ms. Chang described the class in saying:

 "It was the strangest jumble of ideas I had ever encountered, combining the primacy of the individual with rules that were at once New Age and rigid: Purple represents mystery. The message was modern--express yourself, be confident--but it came with traditional assumptions: You will lift up your whole family. And history was not so much missing from the Dongguan classroom as wildly irrelevant. How was a seventeen-year-old factory girl suppose to learn from Chiang Kai-Shek, who flooded the Japanese army and drowned several hundred thousand of his own countrymen" (Chang, 180)?

What really got me about this chapter, among a few others earlier in the book, was the powerful ethic of self-inprovement among so many workers in China. So many people working so hard to learn how to use a computer, or to speak English, or some other valued skill. People go to class after working 10 hour shifts in a factory. One girl slept less than 6 hours a night for years while working 12-14 hours shifts in a factory so she could study more, and improve her position. The desire to get out of poverty exercises a powerful motivational ethic with these people.

The same seems true for many runners in East Africa, where in one corner of Kenya thousands of young men and women flock to training camps to train and attract the attention of an agent. Agents take their runners overseas to big races, and if their runner is fast and lucky both members of the partnership will make money. In both cases, the desire to get out of poverty drives people to work very, very hard. The work is brutal, but the results produced are often great.

We should reflect on these examples, because the desire to raise one's self out of poverty is producing today some of the fastest runners in the world, as well as one of the fasting growing economy in the world. Many people are working very hard in these places, and they are winning. There is no doubt a great cost to all this, but one can hardly deny that Kenyan distance running and Chinese economic growth are both world-class successes in our own time.

Does it take poverty to motivate people to the highest level? Perhaps not. But something might be learned, both positive and negative, from those who give much to improve their station.