If you go to the Wexner Center to watch this documentary about the Chinese clothing factories that provide the West with jeans, be careful what you wear to the screening.
If you’re wearing jeans or denim while you’re sitting there watching the story of Little Jasmine unspool, you’ll probably start to feel uncomfortable about ten minutes into it.
By the time the credits roll and the lights come on, you may feel more comfortable walking out of the theater in your underwear than in jeans that so many Chinese women suffered to put into your wardrobe.
Director Micha X. Peled, whose last work of muckraking filmmaking was 2001’s Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, and a film crew infiltrated a factory in Shaxi, China, where they spent time interviewing the workers at every level of the factory.
Their stars are 16-year-old Jasmine, 19-year-old Orchid, and other girls as young as 14, yet they also spend a great deal of time with the boss and factory owner, Mr. Lam, whose cheerful cluelessness occasionally makes the proceedings feel like a surreal Chinese version of The Office. Clearly some kind of subterfuge was going on between Peled and Lam, as the latter grants the former plenty of access and gives several rather revealing interviews.
As a former police chief, he has few worries of ever being busted for violating China’s rather lax labor laws—unions and strikes are illegal, for example—and though he treats his employees rather poorly, it’s made clear that he gets screwed over by his buyers (as we see in a meeting), and that he has to treat his workers like livestock if he is to compete in the industry. He doesn’t come across as a monster so much as one part of a monstrous system.
As a labor activist explains, in China work inspections are an elaborate game, one the factory workers, owners, the Chinese government and the Western industries who visit the factories all willingly participate in. No one wants to see workers abused or mistreated, so they all avoid for the sake of plausible deniability.
And oh how they’re abused and mistreated.
There are no paydays; workers get paid when the bosses can afford it. There is no minimum wage, no hourly rate, no overtime pay and few days off (they work seven days a week for months at a time). The workers live in a factory dorm, eat at a factory cafeteria, and are forbidden to leave the factory without leave; quitting isn’t an option.
As for the pay, not only is it not very much—one girl makes about six cents an hour—but the cost of their housing and meals is subtracted from it, as are disciplinary fines for things like sneaking out to go into the city.
It’s no real earth-shattering news that the people in the Third World who assemble products for First World consumption get royally screwed and have a horrible standard of living, but it is striking to see the specifics affecting real people on a bigger-than-life movie screen.
Most of the girls come from dirt-poor farms in rural China—we follow Jasmine from hers to the factory, and travel with Orchid and her boyfriend home to hers on the New Year’s break—and begin their careers excited about the possibility of earning money for their families, but it takes a crushing toll on them.
Jasmine stays up late at night writing a diary filled with stories about a kung fu heroine with magic powers who saves her family, and her diary and voiceovers provide most of the thrust of the story. Near the end, she writes a letter to a person who will someday wear the jeans she and her friends will make.
It’s pretty heart-breaking stuff, and perhaps it’s a little overwrought for the otherwise serious documentary—the picture is so bleak on its own, Peled need not have resorted to any kind of emotional manipulation.
It’s always difficult recommending these sorts of feel-bad movies, the cinematic equivalent of spinach on a finicky child’s plate—you might not enjoy it, but it is good for you.
China Blue screens Thursday and Friday, March 15 and 16, at 7 p.m. the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Theater. For more info, click to wexarts.org.
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Disclosure: Donewaiting.com site owner Robert Duffy is also an employee of the Wexner Center.