An underprivileged teenage girl coping with an unexpected pregnancy — it would be a dire situation in any circumstance, but particularly so in China circa 2009, where the societal and financial penalties for an unwed, unwanted mother are severe. Such is the backdrop for Jennie Liu's Girls on the Line, a simple, potent tale of young outcasts struggling to survive amid an unforgiving landscape of industrial and rural squalor.
Luli is an orphan girl far past adoption age, and she has left the familiar confines of her orphanage for the industrial town of Gujiao in Shanxi province, where fellow orphan Yun has already established herself as a line worker at a local factory. While Luli is shy and uncertain, Yun is brash, fun-loving and ambitious, already enjoying the benefits of a steady salary and a steady boyfriend named Yong. All seems well at first as Luli joins her friend on the factory line, but she soon learns that Yong might be a kidnapper and human trafficker who sells off young women and babies to the highest bidder. When Yun becomes unexpectedly pregnant, both mother and unborn child fall into jeopardy, and it's left up to the innocent Luli to find her friend and discover hidden reserves of strength within herself to protect them both.
Girls on the Line moves with a propulsive pace, with each chapter alternating between Luli and Yun's perspectives. The book may be aimed at teens, but Liu pulls no punches in depicting the realities of life in China's gritty industrial towns and isolated rural villages. Hard-hitting and suspenseful, the story maintains focus on its likeable, vulnerable heroines even as plot complications mount. As the title suggests, these are lives on the line as well as on the factory line. Liu's evocations of smoggy, grubby Gujiao and the countryside where Yun flees are vivid, and even if her narrative voice sometimes seems a bit too sophisticated for the more naïve points of view of her heroines, it remains elegant and gripping throughout.
While Yong is the ostensible villain of the story, all the major characters are outsiders and victims, at the mercy of bureaucratic institutions, corrupt local police, and a society that reduces human lives to commodities, sources of money, or waste. Liu is sympathetic even to minor characters such as Yong's mother, who sees Yun's child as a blessing even as she fails to consider the impossibility of the child being legally sanctioned and afforded a normal life. The irony of Yun's lowly status isn't lost when she must seek refuge at an orphanage by pretending to be insane, or when she gives birth while hiding out at Luli's workplace, the baby entering life right next to a factory line.
Liu's afterword provides perspective on China's "one child" policy, which was done away with in 2015, but the themes that enrich Girls on the Line are just as relevant today as they are in its 2009 setting: the marginalization and exploitation of the poor, even as China strides boldly forward in its commercial and industrial vigor. As Yun and Luli take their first faltering steps towards a new variation on the standard nuclear family, Girls on the Line finds glimmers of hope among the chaos of their troubles. While it provides no easy answers to its heroines' challenges, it is a compelling celebration of their resilience and courage.