The name of a publication doesn’t make a story, self-driven journalists do. I learned this after reading “Where the Boys Are,” a Marie Claire article by Abigail Haworth that explores China’s gender imbalance.

Built around the staggering fact that holds unmarried men will outnumber unmarried woman by an estimated 40 million in the next decade, the story analyzes the unprecedented effect the 1980 one-child policy is having on Chinese society today.

Demographic changes take toll on the way people perceive daughters. In China, having a girl translates to being out of luck. Tradition holds girls are “spilt water,” a waste that does not preserve a family’s ancestry line.

Yet, how did Haworth make readers care about this phenomenon? When did runaway bribes and bachelor’s villages become so important?

Haworth does this by looking up faces to enhance the importance of statistics. Following the case of Yiguo Jin, a 33-year-old poor farmer who earns less than 50 cents a day, readers get introduced to the problem in a greater scale. Uncontrolled economic growth, poverty and the one-child policy have created bachelor’s villages where men can’t find wives — and probably will never find them.

Either the dirt-poor farmers living in those villages travel somewhere else to find a wife or they buy one.

The problem is most Chinese farmers living in regions similar to the Hunan Mountains don’t have the acquisitive power to settle somewhere else. They live as peasants, working for ridiculously low salaries, barely getting by with $150 a year. Economic structures define who marries who, where and why.

As the text further describes:

The scarcity of women means they can choose to marry men from the towns, where life is much modern and comfortable.

Families negotiate to sell their daughters. In order to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, a man in China must pay a “bride price” to the bride’s family. Others opt to buy a kidnapped wife from a criminal organization. Trafficked or non-trafficked, humans become products in rural and urban apparels, awaiting their destination.

Yes, in the 21st century, you can still buy another human being.

The story’s sourcing is worth noting because Haworth was able to get important sources related to kidnapping on the record, such as Xuncheng Lei or Daling Huang. The author debunks social myths that suggest women in China are often pressured into having sons by their husbands.

As Hvistendahl describes about coercion in Chinese society,

…often women are just as keen, if not keener, to have boys than their husbands.

Throughout the article there is cohesion between the beginning and end. Despite using more than eight human sources and records, Haworth never lost track or focus. She provided multiple sides of the story without privileging the afflicted over the comfortable.

Ultimately, even though some teachers, activists and government figures try to set the societal record straight, the underlying message remains the same: In China, having a girl is seen as a sign of doom, even though women are the fountain and foundation of life.

Illustration from: http://danmeth.com/