Hopes And Expectation: The Journey of a Fake Girlfriend
During Lunar New Year in 2017, I followed Zhao Yuqing and Wang Quanming –– a recent law graduate and a website operator who pretended to be girlfriend and boyfriend –– to Wang’s home village. I photographed their journey as Wang rented Zhao to act as his girlfriend so his mother would stop pressuring him to find a partner and get married. The anxiety of Wang’s mother didn’t appear out of nowhere: 35 years of one-child policy led to an immense gender imbalance, with men significantly outnumbering women.
Forget Me Not
February 2014, my grandma passed away after having Alzheimer’s for four years. In her last year, she could not recognize me. One year later, I met Roz in New York City, who was a caregiver to Suzy –– her 84-year-old cousin with Alzheimer’s. Getting to know them allowed me to explore and reflect on the nature of relationship and memory: when one side of the equation loses the memory of the other one, what does it mean to their relationship? I invited with my mother, who was the caregiver to my grandma, to experiment with me on the project. The efforts my mother made to keep her mother in her memory almost let me forget how lonely it is to be forgotten.
Married Young
In the fall of 2014, a website affiliated with the city government in Kunming, capital of the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan, ran a story about a 13-year-old girl and her 18-year-old husband in Jinping county in the southern part of the province. According to the article, “early marriage” was a common phenomenon in the area and the government found it difficult to control because the parents of the young husbands and wives preferred their children to marry before migrating to the cities to work. China’s legal age for marriage is 20 for women and 22 for men. I was intrigued that the practice of under-age marriage seemed to be flourishing in this particular county, so I decided to travel there with my camera.
Li’s Gamble
Li Mingjin, a 38-year-old coal miner, worked hard and was the sole breadwinner for his family. For 19 years, he toiled deep in the belly of the earth beneath Shanxi province. But in November 2014, by the time he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was too sick to continue working. His wife, Ning Xianfang, was left to care for him and their two daughters, six-year-old Siyao and four-year-old Mengmeng. Without his employment or any form of health insurance (they had opted not to buy insurance from the government), the family’s economic situation quickly became dire. While working as a staff photographer for Tencent, I spent four days with Mingjin and his family and worried for what was in store for them, and we continued to be in touch thereafter.