Gather round, internet children. I am going to tell you a story. It’s a fantastic tale of drama and romance starring two Chinese lesbians, Meng Mei Qi and Wu Xuan Yi — who, as luck would have it, also happen to be billionaires. The pair, overcoming cultural adversity and national law, get married, become the world’s richest couple, and live happily ever after. The end. It’s a great story, right? It’s fiction.
Mei Qi and Xuan Yi are quite famous, just not for a wealth-record-breaking, same-sex marriage. Instead, the pair are part of a 13-member K-pop group known as Cosmic Girls. The group is also known as WJSN, with each letter corresponding to a different subgroup of Cosmic Girls, each with its own sappy name. Xuan Yi is part of J, the “joy” unit of WJSN, while Mei Qi hails from the “natural” unit. They are not, despite what many thousand retweets might have you believe, a married couple.
The original photo, cropped to exclude two men sitting beside the women on a couch, seems to have come from a photoset Xuan Yi posted to Weibo.(Weibo, if you’re not familiar, is a popular Chinese microblogging platform. It’s not quite Chinese Twitter, but that’s the closest, simplest comparison.) It appears to have been taken at a premiere at the Beijing Film Festival earlier this month, not at their wedding.
Farewell, lesbian-billionaire hoax. You were fun while you lasted.
