The Years of Rice and Salt by Robinson Kim Stanley

Author:Robinson, Kim Stanley [Robinson, Kim Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780553897609
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK 6

WIDOW KANG

1

A Case of Soul Theft

The Widow Kang was extremely punctilious about the ceremonial aspects of her widowhood. She referred to herself always as wei-wang-ren, “the person who has not yet died.” When her sons wanted to celebrate her fortieth birthday she demurred, saying “This is not appropriate for one who has not yet died.” Widowed at the age of thirty-five, just after the birth of her third son, she had been cast into the depths of despair; she had loved her husband Kung Xin very much. She had dismissed the idea of suicide, however, as a Ming affectation. A truer interpretation of Confucian duty made it clear that to commit suicide was to abandon one’s responsibilities to one’s children and parents-in-law, which was obviously out of the question. Widow Kang Tongbi was instead determined to remain celibate past the age of fifty, writing poetry and studying the classics and running the family compound. At fifty she would be eligible for certification as a chaste widow, and would receive a commendation in the Qianlong Emperor’s elegant calligraphy, which she planned to frame and place in the entrance to her home. Her three sons might even build a stone arch in her honor.

Her two older sons moved around the country in the service of the imperial bureaucracy, and she raised the youngest while continuing to run the family household left in Hangzhou, now reduced in number to her son Shih, and the servants left behind by her older sons. She oversaw the sericulture that was the principal support for the household, as her older sons were not yet in a position to send much money home, and the whole process of silk production, filature, and embroidery was under her command. No house under a district magistrate was ruled with any more iron hand. This too honored Han learning, as women’s work in the better households, usually hemp and silk manufacture, was considered a virtue long before Qing policies revived official support for it.

Widow Kang lived in the women’s quarters of the small compound, which was located near the banks of the Chu River. The outer walls were stuccoed, the inner walls wood shingle, and the women’s quarters, in the innermost reach of the property, were contained in a beautiful white square building with a tile roof, filled with light and flowers. In that building, and the workshops adjacent to it, Widow Kang and her women would weave and embroider for at least a few hours every day, and often several more, if the light was good. Here too Widow Kang had her youngest son recite the parts of the classics he had memorized at her command. She would work at the loom, flicking the shuttle back and forth, or in the evening simply spin thread, or work at the larger patterns of embroidery, all the while running Shih through the “Analects,” or Mencius, insisting on perfect memorization, just as the examiners would when the time came. Little Shih was not

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