Eight of the sisters pictured with their 22-year-old baby brother, Gao Haozhen, and his bride
China continues to be a nation that worships boys, always preferring them to girls. The people perhaps conveniently forget that it is females who give birth to boys.
This obsession was recently demonstrated when a family sacrificed the education of eleven Chinese sisters for the sake of their only brother. The eleven ladies afterwards then also pooled their resources to pay for his wedding.
The sisters paid for their brother's marriage by pooling £36,000, which also covered a down payment for an apartment for him and his bride.
Gao Haigui, a coal miner, and his wife, Yan, kept trying for a boy until they succeeded. By then the couple from the northern province of Shanxi had 11 girls.
The brother was the only one of the Gao family to graduate from high school; one sister started there but dropped out and others were working by the time they were 15.
It would be interesting to know how the sisters are coping with the emotional and psychological shackles of second-class citizenship.
No comments:
Post a Comment