This week Lens is featuring photographers from around the world who have been chosen to attend the fourth annual New York portfolio review.  Love and marriage can be complicated for young women in urban China.  After decades of China’s recently relaxed one-child policy and sex-selective abortions, teenage boys outnumber girls. Educated women often have difficulty finding suitable husbands and are stigmatized as “leftover women” if they fail to marry by the age of 27. And despite the societal pressure to get married, dating is often frowned upon.  At Muyi Xiao’s high school in the crowded city of Wuhan, teachers criticized any girl who had a boyfriend. So when Ms. Xiao, 24, read a story about a 16-year-old couple who had wed in a small village in south eastern China, she was compelled to find out more. The next day she hopped on a plane and flew four hours to photograph and write about them for the Chinese website Tencent.  Traveling to small cities and towns by bus, and eventually by motorcycle taxi, Ms. Xiao found the practice of teenage marriage to be widespread in the area. Some of the girls were marrying as young as 14 years old.  But this was not a tale of arranged marriages to older men.  “None of the girls that I met were forced to get married,” Ms. Xiao said. “Usually, they got together from love, or in some cases, the girl got pregnant first. Some of the teenage married couples have dated since primary school.”  In some villages in this economically depressed area, many of the teenage couples’ parents had left to find work in nearby cities and the teenagers had been raised by grandparents. While teenage marriage and pregnancy are acceptable in some places in southwestern China, Ms. Xiao says it may create economic and educational obstacles, particularly for the girls. Among the 10 teenage couples she photographed and interviewed, all of the girls became pregnant as teenagers and did not finish high school. Most of the boys also failed to finish school.  Ms. Xiao was a Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow in 2015 and is currently studying in the New Media Narratives program at the International Center of Photography in New York. Afterward, she plans to return to China to work as a photographer.  Still, her parents, whom she described as “fairly modern and understanding,” are concerned about her marital prospects.  “They talk about it all the time,” she said. “They’re worried that a life as a journalist and artist will not allow me the stability to get married before I’m 30.”  Yet for Ms. Xiao, marriage will have to wait until and if she meets the right person, she said. There is no deadline.  “I don’t feel pressure from myself.”  Follow Muyi Xiao on Instagram. Follow @jamesestrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.
In some parts of China, teenage couples willingly marry and have children, despite the educational and economic obstacles.