Not siblings: Xiao Mei, 16, holds her 1-year-old son as they and her 2-year-old daughter pose for a picture. (Photo : Muyi Xiao Photography)
A framed photo hanging on a wall could have passed for two young kids posing for a souvenir picture during their prom, except that girls don’t go to prom on a wedding gown.
It is just as it appears to be: a wedding picture.
The couple depicted in the picture is actually even too young to attend a real prom.
Many teens--with girls as young as 12--in some rural villages in Yunnan Province enter into marriage, have babies, and raise a family like most adult lovers would eventually do, reported CNN.
Jie, 13, got married in 2014. She’s the one wearing a wedding gown in the picture beside her 16-year-old husband, Wen. They live in Tangzibian Village in Mengla County.
She said that she didn’t want to have a baby right away but knew nothing about birth control methods. She was 6-months-old pregnant by the time she was photographed.
Cai, a 16-year-old dropout and mother of a 2-month-old male infant, said that her friends would often not invite her to hang out with them thinking that her husband Ming might not like the idea.
Ming’s mother breastfeeds her own grandson.
“I didn’t see any forced marriage. The kids are happy, they say they fell in love,” said Muyi Xiao, the photographer who went to the southwestern part of the province and documented the lives of very young couples.
Xiao said that all the married girls she encountered wed before they reached 18 and did so because they thought it was just something “normal to do.”
“The lack of education and experience made them believe it is right to drop out of school and follow the tradition to marry as teens . . .” said Xiao on her website.
She called her photography documentary as “Teenage Bride,” and people at Magnum Foundation took notice of it.
Along with six other photographers from Haiti, Hong Kong, Palestine, South Africa, Syria and Ukraine, Magnum Foundation selected Xiao as a fellow of the 2015 Magnum Foundation/NYU Photography and Human Rights Fellowship Program, according to the foundation’s Tumblr account.
People at Magnum Foundation said on their website that they are “grant-makers, collaborators, and thought leaders who believe in the use of photography as a tool for global engagement and social change.”
A Wuhan native based in Beijing, Xiao currently lives in New York and studies New Media at the city’s International Center of Photography, according to her LinkedIn account.
