In the fall of 2014, a website affiliated with the city government in Kunming, capital of the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan, ran a story about a 13-year-old girl and her 18-year-old husband in Jinping county in the southern part of the province. According to the article, “early marriage” was a common phenomenon in the area and the government found it difficult to control because the parents of the young husbands and wives preferred their children to marry before migrating to the cities to work. China’s legal age for marriage is 20 for women and 22 for men. I was intrigued that the practice of under-age marriage seemed to be flourishing in this particular county, so I decided to travel there with my camera.

I flew to Kunming from Beijing and then traveled 420 kilometers by bus, van, and motorbike to the villages the story had mentioned. I stayed in and around Jinping for 18 days and visited 10 villages in all. In almost every village I visited, I found a number of young girls carrying their children. I asked their ages. The youngest was 13.

In some of the villages I visited, all of the young people had left to find work elsewhere. In other villages, like Yangxi village of Zhemi township, almost everyone was still at home. Young couples get married early, build a house, and give birth to the next generation as soon as possible, preferring, many told me, to stick close to their farms and live much as their parents and grandparents lived. Interestingly, whether or not young people migrated or not seemed like an all or nothing proposition in most of the villages I visited; either everyone left or everyone stayed put.

There is relatively little research on the phenomenon of early marriage, but some scholars believe that in areas where the practice is common, people marry early in hopes of increasing their families’ labor pools and easing the way to early retirement. According to the China Statistical Yearbook, between 2007 and 2013 the rate of childbearing among Chinese women between the ages of 15 and 19 climbed from 3.8 percent to 7.8 percent, and from 2008 to 2011 the childbearing rate among rural women of the same age cohort rose from 7.3 percent to 9.6 percent. “The whole area has long had a tradition of getting married early, so for the teenagers and their families, there’s no social condemnation involved in doing so,” says Liu Neng, a professor of sociology at Peking University. “China is an aging society and birth rates are relatively low even in rural areas, so people are enthusiastic about procreating, especially when it can increase a village’s population of adults and stem the hollowing out that takes place when young adults leave home to seek work in the cities. The end of the one-child policy also signals the dawn of a new era of encouraging childbirth. To a certain degree, the decline in marriage age is a reflection of national policy changes, not something to be blamed on culture.”

An old man I met in Guangdong village in Mengla township recalled that both in his parents’ and his children’s generations, people generally got married at 18 or 19 years old, but his grandsons mostly married at 13 and 14. The man had recently been given a great-grandchild, and the baby’s mother is only 16 years old.

A 17-year-old who calls himself Little Ming lay on his bed reading a novel on his mobile phone. “When we fell in love,” he said of his 16-year-old wife, Little Cai, “I wanted to marry her… But my single friends stopped calling me after I got married, and my life got boring.”

Most of the young husbands and wives I spoke to had similar complaints. They watch cartoons and have pictures of animated characters on the walls of their rooms. They gaze longingly at other young people who ride motorcycles past their front doors. They still poke fun at each other like teenagers, but they shoulder adult burdens, from housework and farm-work to raising children of their own.

Cai dropped out of school after fifth grade because her family couldn’t afford it anymore. She met Ming when she was 15 years old. At the time, Ming had just returned from Guangdong province, where he had been working as a migrant laborer. They dated for three months before getting married. A year later, tending to a newborn, the novelty of living as adults has worn off and they feel both bored and trapped. Ming misses his life outside the village. Now he farms every day. Cai does not leave home, but yearns to. They plan to leave for a big city to work as migrant workers after their child is weaned, but now must contemplate how they will afford to raise the child in a distant city.