Lucydad asked this question about The Years of Rice and Salt:
I am wondering just exactly "rice and salt" refer to? Metaphor or symbols for what? Various religions and cultures use rice and salt for symbols. Rice thrown at weddings for example. Or "salt of the earth". KSR repeatedly has characters mention rice and salt. Thoughts please?
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, …more
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.'(less)
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