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The Years of Rice and Salt,
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George
The sequence, in a sidenote of section 2, "The Remembering", of 'Book 6: Widow Kang", is:
"all the life stages": milk-teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.
It is in fact a Chinese expression. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford; 1997), p. 65, https://books.google.com/books?id=T--..., explains, "The tumultuous years of regular sexual relations, child-bearing, and child-rearing are glossed benignly in women's writings as the years of 'rice and salt'."
And Mann p. 67 confirms the proper attitude of wei wang ren, a 'person who has not yet died.'
"all the life stages": milk-teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.
It is in fact a Chinese expression. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford; 1997), p. 65, https://books.google.com/books?id=T--..., explains, "The tumultuous years of regular sexual relations, child-bearing, and child-rearing are glossed benignly in women's writings as the years of 'rice and salt'."
And Mann p. 67 confirms the proper attitude of wei wang ren, a 'person who has not yet died.'
Jay Eckard
This is made clear in the Widow Kang section -- it's a Chinese term (or Robinson coined it and gave the Chinese credit) for the years during a woman's life when she's chiefly busy running the household and raising children. Kang is surprised at the end of her life to find that part of it was her favourite.
I think the reason he titles the book that is that Robinson sees the time covered in writing as that same era for all of mankind, prepping the "real" life we'll have once we overcome economic scarcity.
I think the reason he titles the book that is that Robinson sees the time covered in writing as that same era for all of mankind, prepping the "real" life we'll have once we overcome economic scarcity.
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