I am a documentary photographer from Kunming. I joined the Out of Eden Walk project in the western hills of my home province of Yunnan and passed through many villages and met many people during 350 miles of walking in the region.
But two white-haired old women in Guanyin, a small grain-farming village near the shores of Er’yuan Lake, caught my attention. Dressed in the lumpy jackets and baggy trousers favored by older farmers everywhere in rural China, they didn’t stand out that much at first from millions of other such nǎinai, or grannies.
Elders in Guanyin gather every morning to soak up sun and gossip and...
Zhang Hongyi
They showed up every morning, along with other retirees, at the marketplace. They sat on low stools and sunned themselves. They caught up on local gossip. And after a few hours, each made her way, slowly, back to her respective home.
Yet something about these two women’s gestures, suggesting the deep intimacy of a lifelong friendship, convinced me to linger in Guanyin for almost a week to photograph their daily lives.
Li Huaiyin and Li Xiangzhen have known each other for more than 50 years. Their biographies, I soon discovered, captured at a personal level the much larger sweep of modern history in China. Their stories, often tinged with hardship and sadness, also revealed how men—husbands and lovers, living or dead—have often defined the fates of entire generations of women in my country.
Li Huaiyin, 78, is shy and melancholic.
Li Huaiyin's divorce haunts her. She still harbors bitterness and regret.
Zhang Hongyi
She was divorced 43 years ago. Incredibly, this long-ago abandonment by her husband still marked her as a social outcast in her conservative village, where the status of single women is devalued after their child-bearing years.
During the lean years of the Cultural Revolution, the mental stress of survival led Li Huaiyin to give up a promising folk dancing career. A single mother, she then toiled to feed her three children as a subsistence farmer.
During the lean years of the Cultural Revolution, Li Huaiyin gave up a folk dancing career and raised her three children by subsistence farming.
Zhang Hongyi
But despite this life of heroic triumph over adversity, she is steeped with bitterness and regret. Her divorce haunts her even into her autumn years.
Even worse, her ex-husband, who had left her for a younger woman, has reappeared suddenly in the village after an absence of years. Jilted by his own younger partner, he was now scheming to seize back ownership of his and Li Huaiyin’s once shared house.
"He never helped after our divorce,” Li Huaiyin said, angrily. “Why does he show up only now? When our grandson is already two years old?”
Old music CDs, recorded when she was still dancing with a local folk troupe, sit in a box under Li Huaiyin’s bed. She occasionally pulls them out to dust them off with a rag.
Her lifelong friend, 80-year-old Li Xiangzhen, is more outgoing and cheerful.
Li Xiangzhen is a close friend of Li Huaiyin's. She keeps the writings of her deceased husband, a schoolteacher, although she herself wasn't educated and can't read.
Zhang Hongyi
Though a widow, she is admired by other women in Guanyin. Why? Because her long-deceased husband was an educated man—a schoolteacher and a pillar of respectability. Even so, Li Xiangzhen’s union wasn’t a love match: It was a practical response to the hard times of the post-liberation period in the late 1950s.
“I chose to marry someone who was more than 10 years older than me”—Li Xiangzhen said—”in order to have a full stomach.” Today, she collects her deceased husband’s small pension. She also keeps his notebooks, filled with handwritten local history, though she can’t read them because she never attended school.
“My husband had a good heart,” Li Xiangzhen says. Hers was a marriage of practicality, to avoid famine.
Zhang Hongyi
“I am satisfied with my life,” Li Xiangzhen said. “My husband had a good heart.”
Li Xiangzhen holds a position of respect in the village because of her marriage to a schoolteacher.
Zhang Hongyi
What struck me, as a cosmopolitan single woman from a modern Chinese city, was the differences in choices available to my generation from those of these elderly Chinese women.
I can choose my own career. I have studied abroad in Canada. I have traveled, alone, to photograph several foreign countries. But the life stories of the two village women, their hardships and struggles, shook me.
It made me wonder: How genuinely liberated am I in a still patriarchal world? How much do my relationships with the men in my life continue to shape my success? My opportunities? My worth in society?
Zhang Hongyi is a photographer and traveler based in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province.
Li Xiangzhen holds a position of respect in the village because of her marriage to a schoolteacher.
Zhang Hongyi
What struck me, as a cosmopolitan single woman from a modern Chinese city, was the differences in choices available to my generation from those of these elderly Chinese women.
I can choose my own career. I have studied abroad in Canada. I have traveled, alone, to photograph several foreign countries. But the life stories of the two village women, their hardships and struggles, shook me.
It made me wonder: How genuinely liberated am I in a still patriarchal world? How much do my relationships with the men in my life continue to shape my success? My opportunities? My worth in society?
Zhang Hongyi is a photographer and traveler based in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province.
