Rural children have a snapshot to treasure

Photographer Li Wei, better known as Dameng, has taken and distributed thousands of photos of children in rural areas, yet he doesn't have a single photo of himself from his childhood.

Born in 1994 in a remote village in Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture, Yunnan province, Li was a typical "left-behind" child, with his parents leaving for work in the city when he was just 2 years old.

He recalls that a photographer once arrived in his village and the cost of a photo shoot was 6 yuan ($0.86). Because it was too costly for his family, this rare opportunity slipped by.

The realization of not having a childhood photo came to him only after he had entered university and joined its branch of the Chinese Young Volunteers Association.

"Because my own tuition was sponsored by a company, after attending university, I have always felt that I should do what I can to help other people," Li says.

He also took several odd jobs in his spare time and saved money for his first single-lens reflex camera. After a year of honing his photography skills, he joined an educational aid trip to a primary school in Qinglong county, Guizhou province, as the team photographer in 2015.

"We went on home visits every day after school. I saw a lot of kids looking at my camera with curiosity and longing, so I asked them if they had seen a camera before or had their pictures taken, and the answer was almost always no," Li says.

"It was at that time that I realized I have no photo of myself at that age. It's a pity that our society has progressed so much, yet the children in rural areas were facing a similar situation. So I started to take photos for them."

The pseudonym Dameng, meng meaning "lovely", also came from the young students who were expressing their affinity for him.

"After I returned from the trip, I received a phone call from one of the kids, saying that he put the photo I took of him and his parents at the bottom of a chest, and he would take it out every time he missed his parents," he says.

"At that moment, I realized that I must keep on doing this, so I kept the name, hoping that whenever it is mentioned, it would remind me why I started on this path in the first place."

Throughout his university years, he traveled to most rural areas of China, voluntarily taking photos for children and the elderly with an instant camera, which he later upgraded to a digital camera and portable photo printer.

Li says that most of his photos capture the children smiling or laughing, to both challenge the stereotype that rural children are living a hard life and present the children in an unaltered, natural way.

After graduation, he took a gap year and hitchhiked from Sichuan province through Southeast Asia, visiting Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, among others, and gave children living in poverty their photos as gifts.

Apart from saving money by hitchhiking, couch surfing and participating in volunteer programs, he also supported his travels by posting a journal documenting his trip online, which was then published as two books.

Readers of the books have been impressed by his actions.

Wang Yuanyuan, a reader of Li's latest book, says: "It is really important to choose something you love and to persevere. Dameng has inspired me to be more brave, to work harder and to stick to the path I have chosen."

Before he settled back in his home province of Yunnan in 2020, he had given out approximately 15,000 photos to the children and elderly people in rural areas.

At the time, a friend told him about Menglian Dai, Lahu and Va autonomous county, a border county in southwestern Yunnan marked by its ethnic diversity and agricultural products.

Along with his friends, he rented a farm of 200 mu (13 hectares), growing products including avocado, coffee and passion fruit, with the hope of helping the locals in a more substantial way than just gifting them with photos.

Apart from hiring local people to help on the farm, his team offers free technical support to farmers and purchases their produce.

He also invited the local children to paint the images that appear on the coffee packaging, and for each package sold, 2 yuan is saved to offer courses to the children.

With this fund, the team designed a course called "imagination beyond coffee", which has been offered to children from four neighboring villages in the past year.

"I feel that these children can be quite unaware of the things around them. They have seen many agricultural products, but they might not know what they are or what they can be made into," Li says.

This creative course is an attempt to broaden the minds of rural children as well as to bridge the gap between them and children growing up in the cities. Li says that, hopefully in the future, the team can organize events for urban and rural children to exchange with one another.

He has continued to take photos, particularly documenting the everyday life of ethnic groups living in Menglian.

"The style of my photos is very clear and consistent. They are realistic accounts of rural life and its people, with an air of warmth. I always wanted to record the unique lifestyles of China's ethnic groups," Li says.

A latest portrait series of his, "spring in the ears", comes from a trip he took to neighboring villages this past springtime, during which he noticed the old women of the Va ethnic group picking a bunch of flowers and wearing them in their earlobes.

"Their huge earlobes are a cultural element passed down in this region," Li says. "The flowers add a sense of life to the photos. Nowadays, the local young people rarely have big earlobes, so I'll continue to record these old ladies and the traditional practice that is dying out."

He recalls that the elderly were thrilled to hear of his offer, rushing home to change their outfits and get ready for the photo shoot.

"These ladies are so beautiful," a top comment on social media platform Xiaohongshu says. "They are one with the earth, with the flowers, with labor and harvest."