Obscuring the American Dream

The film American Factory is almost too neatly summed up in its Netflix log line: “In this documentary, hopes soar when a Chinese company reopens a shuttered factory in Ohio. But a culture clash threatens to shatter an American dream.” 

Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground Films, the film won the 2020 Oscar for Best Documentary. The plotline is simple: the multinational car glass manufacturer Fuyao Glass (“FGA”) opens its first American branch in a former GM plant near Dayton, Ohio. In an otherwise desolate town, this new injection of jobs presents local American workers with a sense of hope. 

Over the course of the documentary, hope fades into anger, largely directed towards the Chinese, and finally culminates in a failed campaign to unionize. Thus, what begins as a story about cultural difference shifts subtly into a story about labor and class.

The ease with which the story is able to make that transition calls into question the ways in which we commonly talk about Chinese labor in America and the wider Western world. American Factory willingly repeats a classic characterization of Chineseness–one that reduces an ethnicity to a tireless, utterly selfless work ethic. 

Pictured: Shot from documentary showing Chinese workers having dinner at their shared apartment, away from their families.

BOSS

This Ohio factory marks the official beginning of what Fuyao leadership envisions as an American company in its own right, staffed by American workers and led by American management. 

Just as American factories have all seemed to drain away to China, this Chinese factory comes to America, and people are thrilled by the prospect of new jobs. From the start, this all seems too good to be true. The white American vice president of FGA, Dave, calls the factory a “historic project” that will give a future to the children of Dayton, just as the GM plant once did. We see the town replace a street sign with one that bears Fuyao’s name. 

Pictured: Shot from documentary showing the Fuyao flag, USA flag and Ohio flag, left to right. 

This is all made possible by one Chinese boss and his deep pockets. 

Fuyao is led by an older man whom everyone calls “Chairman Cao.” He shares exaggerated statements with the workers: “I have a secret to share, from the bottom of my heart – I love Ohio,” he says to the crowd, through his translator. He seems dishonest – maybe because he is speaking through a translator, maybe because this feels so obviously like a show. 

Chairman Cao doesn’t seem like a real person. Though if his persona is a false front, it’s unclear what his ulterior motives are. 

But perhaps he’s just strange because he’s foreign. Or perhaps, as the boss, his main aim is profit. Every nicety, every glittering generality about this new place is an effort to ingratiate himself and create a false sense of community–all for the sake of his bottom line. 

These moments of discomfort highlight something larger at play. What that phenomenon is – whether it’s cultural difference or a class structure – is not so clear.

But Chairman Cao is not much of a concern at first. When Fuyao comes to town, most of the new workers are just grateful to have jobs. Many had been struggling since the shuttering of the GM plant several years prior. 

One woman foreclosed on her house and moved in with her sister, sharing with the camera that she was “struggling to get back to middle class.” A man describes the feeling of coming home again when he returns to the factory where he had already spent much of his working life.

A third worker is filmed outside as she takes a smoke break. She tells us exactly how much money she made at GM, and how much money she makes now with Fuyao. At GM, it was 29 dollars and some change per hour; at Fuyao, it’s just under 13. FGA simply does not offer the kind of job that can sustain a person or family in the middle class. 

Chairman Cao’s facade of community crumbles in the face of these individual stories, and the exploitative nature of his business is laid bare. 

WORKERS

Fuyao’s significant investment also comes with a new wave of Chinese personnel. The company brings employees from their home factory in Fujian Province, China. These workers are on two year contracts to start up the new factory. Many of them barely speak English, and they live in shared apartments with their coworkers, having left their families behind in China. 

Pictured: A shot from the documentary showing Chinese workers during their (unpaid) lunch break.

Each new American employee is paired with a Chinese worker. As most of the Americans have never made glass before, their Chinese counterparts are in charge of showing them the ropes. Some make friends with their American coworkers, sharing Thanksgiving dinners and learning how to shoot guns. Their cultural difference falls to the wayside in these moments, though such moments only seem able to occur outside of the workplace.

On the factory floor, the American workers and their Chinese counterparts struggle to communicate. In one scene, they type into their phones and speak to their American coworkers, sentence by sentence, through Google translate. Production lags, and the Chinese are walled off from the Americans. Everyone is upset and blames someone else. The job is difficult as it is, and communication is tough. FGA is expected to start turning a profit quickly, but they are nowhere close.

Amidst the factory’s growing pains, several windshields explode. The documentary captures one woman’s reaction: She holds both hands up in front of her face, saying, “You have the Chinese who want numbers on this side, you have Quality who wants customer satisfaction on this side, and”— she slaps her hands together — “we’re in the middle.”

Pictured: Shot from the documentary of the American woman quoted above. 

The Chinese workers start to seem more like managers, allied with their boss because of their Chineseness. But more than their foreignness, and the language barrier, it is their work ethic that separates the Chinese workers from the American ones.

One American employee remarks that “the Chinese” are in the factory “all the time.” I don’t take what this woman says as false; this is what she sees. But what do the Chinese workers see?

The structure of American Factory relies heavily on short anecdotes that delve into the individual lives of the characters of the film. One such story is Wong’s. He misses his family, and Fuyao has been the only company he’s worked for since he left school. He, like many of the other Chinese workers, have been sent here alone, and they have left their spouses, children, and parents behind. Their only source of stability in the United States is their job.

WORK ETHIC

Mid-way into the film, several Americans are sent to China to observe company practices and take them back to the Ohio factory. In the tours around the Fujian province factory, we quickly see that the Chinese laborers work harder, quicker, and longer than any of the Americans.

This Chinese tour acts as further evidence for the argument that is building in the chaos of the Ohio factory: that the Chinese, with their inhuman work ethic, are fundamentally alienated from any struggle for the right to a living wage, the right to rest and time off, and the right to a safe workplace. 

The film shows us a montage of Chinese workers on the floor. The Americans watch on, commenting on the efficiency and productivity of the line. This editorial choice takes the isolated parts of an assembly line, stitching them together into a whole that we, the audience, can easily watch on our screens. 

We also hear from the workers in small interviews, just like in the Dayton factory – though we never get to know the Chinese workers’ names the way we do the names of the Americans. We learn that Fuyao employees work almost every day of the week, with only one or two days off per month – and are not happy about it. We hear from the workers who come from small rural towns to earn money in the city and leave their small children and their parents behind. 

These stories, all under a minute by far, are merely sound bytes. If the montage of workers on the floor impresses upon the viewer the efficiency of this Chinese factory, these stories give texture to a larger narrative about an innate Chinese work ethic. We don’t hear any of the larger stories behind these clips.

As a documentary, American Factory purports to show reality as is, and stops short of provoking further questions about the complex nature of what we are seeing. What are the conditions that force them to work nearly every single day of the year? And why exactly do they have to leave their families and lives behind in their villages to earn a decent living?

Pictured: Shot from documentary showing Chinese workers picking up glass. Americans comment: “Holy shit. They don’t have safety goggles on, nothing. Unbelievable. Those aren’t even cut-resistant gloves.” 

The scenes in Fujian are microscopic windows into the lives of the Chinese workers. In the film, these people recede into mere evidence points, further alienating Chinese workers and portraying them as fundamentally different from the American working class. The stories of these Chinese workers serve one purpose, and that is to highlight the main argument of the documentary: that as one foreign boss strives to increase his profit, American workers are pushed further into poverty and desolation. 

UNIONIZATION

At last, unionization efforts take off in Ohio as factory profit lags and pressure on the workers rises. By this point, references to “the Chinese” abound: not “the boss”, not “the president” or “the management,” just “the Chinese.” It is against this common enemy that the unionization fight truly comes to life – this chimera of culture, race, and class that becomes the film’s concept of Chineseness.

Pictured: Shot from documentary showing American workers with pro-union signs. 

American Factory shows us a real unionization effort, one that aims to bring important protections to the workers of Fuyao. But the documentary also evokes a romanticized picture of the heyday of American unions–most likely because unionization in this documentary is not just a fight for worker’s rights, but it is also a story about the triumph of Americanness. 

This nostalgic sentiment is evident from the beginning, when we see the last car that passes through the old GM factory. This scene evokes the bittersweet end of an era–the good old postwar days are coming to a close. What is in store is an uncertain, globalized future. 

But the nostalgia for the postwar period comes forth most strongly in the union fight, because the unionization effort is the ultimate way in which the Americans assert their identity against “the Chinese.” While the film discusses unionization in terms of fair wages and working conditions for workers, it also spends time evoking the union as an American institution, further advancing the conflation of Chineseness with an inexplicable affinity for terrible working conditions.  

In the UAW town hall, Representative Fred Strahorn brings the crowd to life in a speech that asserts that “these battles” were fought 70 years ago, a time when we figured out how to make companies profit and still keep workers happy. This claim is strange to hear in the wake of the recent UAW strikes, which fought to re-establish for this generation the fair wages that built the postwar middle class. Rather than uplifting the union as a necessary tool for workers in the past, present, and future, the film portrays the union as a historical relic of an American golden age. 

In the leadup to the final vote, the film highlights the Chinese workers who are against joining the UAW because they are allied with the company. The documentary also presents the stories of American workers who vote against. Some just don’t believe in the union, some just want to keep doing their jobs, and many are afraid of retribution from the company. Fuyao hired an American union avoidance consulting firm to speak to the workers, and the company fired several of their most active pro-union employees in the runup to the vote. 

Ultimately, the workers fail to unionize, but the Fuyao factory lives on and steadily begins to turn a profit.

Pictured: Shot from documentary showing Chairman Cao reflecting on the ethics of his business career. He later says, “The point of living is to work.” 

This film is primarily a story about loss for the American Fuyao workers. And I think it also positions the (primarily American) audience as victims in the processes of globalization. However, this documentary’s narrative obscures the parallel losses experienced by the Chinese workers, who are entrapped in the same system that disadvantages the American Fuyao employees.

Ultimately, if a story about class strife can only become a story that is about culture clash, there is nowhere else to go. There is no way to rectify the exploitation of workers besides to cast out the “other” – so there is no path to justice for anyone.  

In the 19th century, a similar thoughtless conflation of Chineseness with a certain attitude towards work was essential to the construction of the transcontinental railroad, offering all too easy moral justification for the horrible working conditions to which Chinese workers were subjected. 

And for the children who have grown up in the U.S. post-1965, the same logic is fundamental to the model minority myth. Chinese people are identified with an extra-productive work ethic and held up as an aspirational “model,” which flattens their own experiences and pits them against other racial minorities. 

The story of Fuyao Glass America is an interesting one precisely because it is full of the most salient contradictions of our day: cultural and racial tensions, class issues, globalization and geopolitics. I can only imagine the other possible documentaries that could be made out of this historical event. What would a film look like that is truly about fighting for labor rights across a diverse group of workers – one that doesn’t simply pass the buck onto so-called “culture,” contrasting it against a limited notion of an “American” dream? Rather than a subtle submission to xenophobia, perhaps that film would be more of a call for change, or at least pose more questions than it claims to answer.

Today, amidst rising tensions between China and the United States, how do the stories we choose to tell, and the ways we tell them, remake and perpetuate the same myths? How do they obscure the realities of labor, of the lives of Chinese workers, and at last, of a truly American dream?

Opinions expressed are solely the author’s own and do not reflect the views of their employer.