A Hong Kong anthropologist spent months at a mainland electronics plant to
IT is a scream she will never forget. It happened one night, more than five months into Pun Ngai's stay in a Shenzhen electronics factory. She was asleep, alongside tens of other young women - her fellow workers - on makeshift wooden beds in a closet-like place the owners called 'living quarters'. Piercing the dead of the night, the high-pitched shriek woke almost everyone in the room.
At the heart of the commotion was Ah Yan, a girl from Hunan, who was having a nightmare. She awoke, caught her breath and fell asleep again. The others, exhausted after another 15-hour working day, followed suit.
But not Pun Ngai. Instead of returning to her dreams, she lay awake for a little while then sat up and pulled out a notepad and a pencil to take notes.
Quirky behaviour for a factory worker but this was no ordinary labourer: she might have been sharing the same routine as her roommates, but that was all. Instead of being one of the dagongmei - Putonghua for 'working girls' - she was an anthropologist, undertaking field research for her doctoral thesis on the plight of this social underclass.
Many local academics spend their time in libraries. Sociologists and anthropologists, in their field work, may glean information from sporadic interviews in slums or rural hamlets. In Hong Kong, Dr Pun's approach is nothing short of radical: she spent six months living the life of a dagongmei, tightening screws in computer hardware in an electronics factory in Shenzhen during the day and sleeping in cagehouse-style lodgings at night.
'I've never wanted to stick with policy and all that talk - what matters are the flesh-and-blood individuals who are actually living it,' says Dr Pun, now assistant research professor at Hong Kong University's Centre of Asian studies.
'What I want to know is how these workers face and react to the pressures shaped by the demands from the country, the capitalists and also by the traditional patriarchical culture ingrained in Chinese culture.
