“We are hoping it’s a boy” is a phrase I heard again and again. In Fujian, where I grew up, this expectation surfaced in birth announcements, urgings to have children, blessings, rituals, warning inscriptions in villages, and conversations among neighbors. For countless families, it was a simple hope, yet it could also become a curse whose weight was difficult to put into words.
This project grew out of the hardships my mother and family experienced within a social order that privileged men over women, and of the ways those experiences shaped my own upbringing. In long-standing understandings of family in Fujian, gender inequality runs deep, and women have been regarded as dependent on their families and on men. From the abandonment of baby girls to the duty imposed on women to bear sons, their feelings have received little consideration. Many voices and tragedies have been buried in silence.
Over the past several years, I have drawn on interviews with people who lived through these conditions, collecting personal memories, local archival records, and historical photographs. I have studied written accounts of infant abandonment and rescue, as well as local beliefs concerning the protection of mothers and infants. I have also photographed ancestral halls, rivers, temples, and ritual objects still in use. By bringing these materials into my images, I place scattered testimonies and material evidence in dialogue. Through them, I seek to convey women’s experiences of gendered oppression and to trace the imbalance underlying life in this place: how a phrase that sounds so ordinary can change the way a girl is welcomed, raised, and remembered.
- We are hoping it's a boy
- 我们想要一个男孩
