What do you think?
Rate this book
盐镇
这是一本让读者时刻都会感到触目惊心的书。
在四川南部的古老盐业小镇，女人们过着看似波澜不惊实则惊心动魄的生活。早早辍学在小镇叱咤风云的的00后幺妹，经济独立却惧怕离婚的女强人，面临家暴威胁却选择复婚的媒婆，历经四嫁开猫儿店的九十老妪，她们在21世纪仍旧重复着古老时代的人生轮回，在婚姻和贫困的夹缝里，挣扎求生。
中国有四万多个乡镇，却只有一个北京、上海、深圳。易小荷回到故乡，选择了一个再普通不过的小镇，又在这里选取了12个再普通不过的女人，持续探寻她们对国家、社会、家庭、婚姻的理解，跟随她们再一次经历被“放咸”的人生。她想知道，在这样一个被遗忘的小镇，那些默默无闻的女人们，在新旧交替的时代里，会活出怎样的人生？
历时一年的田野调查，易小荷记录下不被看见、不被听见的她们的生命。在这个如盐一般凝固在时光里的小镇，我们将看到一个不一样的城乡中国。
在四川南部的古老盐业小镇，女人们过着看似波澜不惊实则惊心动魄的生活。早早辍学在小镇叱咤风云的的00后幺妹，经济独立却惧怕离婚的女强人，面临家暴威胁却选择复婚的媒婆，历经四嫁开猫儿店的九十老妪，她们在21世纪仍旧重复着古老时代的人生轮回，在婚姻和贫困的夹缝里，挣扎求生。
中国有四万多个乡镇，却只有一个北京、上海、深圳。易小荷回到故乡，选择了一个再普通不过的小镇，又在这里选取了12个再普通不过的女人，持续探寻她们对国家、社会、家庭、婚姻的理解，跟随她们再一次经历被“放咸”的人生。她想知道，在这样一个被遗忘的小镇，那些默默无闻的女人们，在新旧交替的时代里，会活出怎样的人生？
历时一年的田野调查，易小荷记录下不被看见、不被听见的她们的生命。在这个如盐一般凝固在时光里的小镇，我们将看到一个不一样的城乡中国。
384 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 4, 2023
通过非虚构写作记录一个四川乡下古镇里女性的生存状态。她们普遍的没有受过很好的教育，早早结婚，生了孩子，成为家暴受害者，独身一人努力打工，养活孩子老公。因为自身观念及受环境影响，她们常常不能跳出婚姻的桎梏。有的人一辈子被家暴，有的人一直为贫穷而苦。小镇上的女性也不乏能干的“女强人”，比如开酒店的钟传英，在美甲店的梁晓清，以及去上海打工的詹小群。但她们走上经济独立的道路，相比生长于城市里的都市女性，是何其不易，而其背后的动力常是认识到男人是靠不住的。作者回到故乡在古镇上居住一年，和镇里的女人们交上朋友，记录她们的故事。家长里短，鸡皮蒜毛，的确是鲜活的生活素材，不过作者有时在清官都难断的家务事上倾注笔墨过多，有种在看早年天涯热贴的感觉。。
April 8, 2023
题材很好，文笔和深度欠佳
July 26, 2024
方言和脏话奇多的小镇女性生活纪实。对小镇女性来说凶悍是必须的生存之道！内心也需足够强大到抵御七大姑八大姨的唾沫星子。
无论是否赚到了钱，女性总是勤恳辛劳，而男性家暴赌博酗酒、重男轻女、好吃懒做、毫无责任心。男性没脸没皮，女性却为名声所累，困在暗无天日的婚姻里。“能干”仿佛就是紧箍咒，承受疼痛也不能“成佛”。
对小镇女孩来说教育几乎是唯一的出路，这样也被轻易剥夺。“乖巧”“懂事”让她们或被动，或“主动”地放弃受教育的机会，从此被困在小镇。还有被所谓的“爱情”骗"下海"的，和日本女性被牛郎拉下水如出一辙的单纯少女们。
在这样的环境下活着已不容易，更别提能闯出来一片天的女性了。
无论是否赚到了钱，女性总是勤恳辛劳，而男性家暴赌博酗酒、重男轻女、好吃懒做、毫无责任心。男性没脸没皮，女性却为名声所累，困在暗无天日的婚姻里。“能干”仿佛就是紧箍咒，承受疼痛也不能“成佛”。
对小镇女孩来说教育几乎是唯一的出路，这样也被轻易剥夺。“乖巧”“懂事”让她们或被动，或“主动”地放弃受教育的机会，从此被困在小镇。还有被所谓的“爱情”骗"下海"的，和日本女性被牛郎拉下水如出一辙的单纯少女们。
在这样的环境下活着已不容易，更别提能闯出来一片天的女性了。
June 16, 2023
盐镇 - 易小荷
花了几周耐着性子慢慢读完的一部非虚构精品，很耐人寻味。
作者花了一年时间回到故乡自贡下面仙市古镇扎下根亲身探访了100多位当地女性后最终以年龄为脉络从大到小12位女性的亲身经历。
有国家，社会，家庭，婚姻，女性各个角度的侧写。读间，一度有点猎奇又一度有点唏嘘，我们看见身边大城市高喊女权女性主义的时候，几小时飞机路程外又有这样的女性真实的过着这样的生活。
文笔极好，希望更多人看见。
花了几周耐着性子慢慢读完的一部非虚构精品，很耐人寻味。
作者花了一年时间回到故乡自贡下面仙市古镇扎下根亲身探访了100多位当地女性后最终以年龄为脉络从大到小12位女性的亲身经历。
有国家，社会，家庭，婚姻，女性各个角度的侧写。读间，一度有点猎奇又一度有点唏嘘，我们看见身边大城市高喊女权女性主义的时候，几小时飞机路程外又有这样的女性真实的过着这样的生活。
文笔极好，希望更多人看见。
July 19, 2026
In a small town in southern Sichuan — Xianshi, known for its critical position in imperial China’s salt trade — most women still live in the oppression of poverty and patriarchy. They don’t know if there is an alternative. Waves of China’s economic liberalization since the 1980s have invigorated many cities and towns from the coast to the hinterland seem to have skipped this place, forgetting that it once was a prosperous place of commerce. The passionate debates of women’s rights among the highly educated in Shanghai and Beijing hardly reach the remote, impoverished towns and villages like Xianshi, nor can such debate point to an alternative ecosystem of livelihood without completely uprooting the women from their hometown network on which their whole lives depend. Awareness of self-protection is scant among these women. Even where awareness emerges, it appears in the humble desire for a life without imminent hunger, beating, and the worry of the return to poverty should illness come knock on the door.
The seven miles between the “salt town” and the “salt city,” Zigong, of 2.5 million residents, form a seemingly impassable abyss between “ancient” and “modern,” mobility and immobility, hope and despair. From the 90-year-olds to teenagers, women in this “salt town” do everything possible in the field, the market, and at home to keep themselves and their children alive while the men — fathers, brothers, and husbands — play mahjong, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, beat their wives, swindle one another, and spend every last penny on gambling. Like a curse that cannot be lifted, divorce is unthinkable. And the inability to bear (male) descendants invites hostility and hate from the in-laws, even if it was repeated forced abortion during the One Child Policy decades. Young women fantasizing quick money and romance are lured by their boyfriends and boyfriends’ friends into sex work. Orphans are left uncared for and dream of their dead parents. Talented students give up their studies to support families; occasionally their high grades are stolen by officials to send their own children to better schools, breaking the last straw of hope. Adult women drown each other in the gossip of their fortune and speculated affairs. With the nationwide criminalization of sex work, an elderly woman gets jailed after a long life in extreme poverty and hard work for running a cheap brothel, which plugged her sole income to provide for herself and the poor women who offered service. Working women find themselves circling between impasses and insecurity and trapped in loveless marriages that bring more blows and kicks than comfort and stability. Still few escaped such fates.
How does one write about these women’s lives without depriving them of their native context, another deprivation they didn’t ask for? What becomes of the writer through writing such lives and their hostile environments?
These are fundamental anthropological and educational questions. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us, in the light broader than discipline, anthropology is essentially educational, and education, likewise, is essentially anthropological. Both are ultimately about being human and “human becoming” through communication. In writing about the Xianshi women, Yi Xiaohe, a Zigong native, exemplifies this “anthropology as education” philosophy. Leaving Shanghai after the pandemic lockdown, Yi spent over a year in Xianshi, living with and interviewing the women there, many of whom repeated the life cycles of their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and all the women generations back. She was moved by their genuineness, their open doors, as much as their insecurity that had swept the town like an epidemic since time immemorial. Not trusting others, let alone a well-educated outsider whose profession didn’t make much sense to them, was coded in their DNA. It was a way of self-preservation, but still far from a talisman that could shut harm out of the door. The women shrank from being documented, remembered, and heard by people they would never know and in cities that they would never visit.
In return, rather than a database built out of ethnographic research, these women’s voluntary and forced closure became live and palpable to Yi, pulling her into their worlds. Letting herself open up to those worlds, Yi nurtured an awareness of the seven miles between her native city and Xianshi that could not be flattened into a deficiency or development theory — even the judgment of the presence and absence of “feminist” consciousness falls into such binary and linear logic of the enlightened and the savage. What came out of the year-long research, which Yi literally enacted in the Ingold manner as “search and search again and again,” was not “scientific findings” that supplied for the disciplinary territoriality of either anthropology or education, but rather a “correspondence,” an existential togetherness that is radical without turning political, between herself and the spatial and temporal folds of Xianshi. Life carries on even though grace is absent, and so, thankfully, does this generous and generative correspondence that has invited many readers into the undercommons of the salt town.
The seven miles between the “salt town” and the “salt city,” Zigong, of 2.5 million residents, form a seemingly impassable abyss between “ancient” and “modern,” mobility and immobility, hope and despair. From the 90-year-olds to teenagers, women in this “salt town” do everything possible in the field, the market, and at home to keep themselves and their children alive while the men — fathers, brothers, and husbands — play mahjong, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, beat their wives, swindle one another, and spend every last penny on gambling. Like a curse that cannot be lifted, divorce is unthinkable. And the inability to bear (male) descendants invites hostility and hate from the in-laws, even if it was repeated forced abortion during the One Child Policy decades. Young women fantasizing quick money and romance are lured by their boyfriends and boyfriends’ friends into sex work. Orphans are left uncared for and dream of their dead parents. Talented students give up their studies to support families; occasionally their high grades are stolen by officials to send their own children to better schools, breaking the last straw of hope. Adult women drown each other in the gossip of their fortune and speculated affairs. With the nationwide criminalization of sex work, an elderly woman gets jailed after a long life in extreme poverty and hard work for running a cheap brothel, which plugged her sole income to provide for herself and the poor women who offered service. Working women find themselves circling between impasses and insecurity and trapped in loveless marriages that bring more blows and kicks than comfort and stability. Still few escaped such fates.
How does one write about these women’s lives without depriving them of their native context, another deprivation they didn’t ask for? What becomes of the writer through writing such lives and their hostile environments?
These are fundamental anthropological and educational questions. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us, in the light broader than discipline, anthropology is essentially educational, and education, likewise, is essentially anthropological. Both are ultimately about being human and “human becoming” through communication. In writing about the Xianshi women, Yi Xiaohe, a Zigong native, exemplifies this “anthropology as education” philosophy. Leaving Shanghai after the pandemic lockdown, Yi spent over a year in Xianshi, living with and interviewing the women there, many of whom repeated the life cycles of their mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and all the women generations back. She was moved by their genuineness, their open doors, as much as their insecurity that had swept the town like an epidemic since time immemorial. Not trusting others, let alone a well-educated outsider whose profession didn’t make much sense to them, was coded in their DNA. It was a way of self-preservation, but still far from a talisman that could shut harm out of the door. The women shrank from being documented, remembered, and heard by people they would never know and in cities that they would never visit.
In return, rather than a database built out of ethnographic research, these women’s voluntary and forced closure became live and palpable to Yi, pulling her into their worlds. Letting herself open up to those worlds, Yi nurtured an awareness of the seven miles between her native city and Xianshi that could not be flattened into a deficiency or development theory — even the judgment of the presence and absence of “feminist” consciousness falls into such binary and linear logic of the enlightened and the savage. What came out of the year-long research, which Yi literally enacted in the Ingold manner as “search and search again and again,” was not “scientific findings” that supplied for the disciplinary territoriality of either anthropology or education, but rather a “correspondence,” an existential togetherness that is radical without turning political, between herself and the spatial and temporal folds of Xianshi. Life carries on even though grace is absent, and so, thankfully, does this generous and generative correspondence that has invited many readers into the undercommons of the salt town.
March 31, 2025
A place where time stands still, and domestic abuse is a norm.
This is a bleak yet powerful portrayal of endurance, resistance, and the harsh realities many women face in a deeply patriarchal society.
A shared thread among these women is the pursuit of independence—both financial and emotional. In an environment shaped by control and oppression, financial independence becomes not just empowering but essential. So does the ability to fiercely protect oneself.
This is a bleak yet powerful portrayal of endurance, resistance, and the harsh realities many women face in a deeply patriarchal society.
A shared thread among these women is the pursuit of independence—both financial and emotional. In an environment shaped by control and oppression, financial independence becomes not just empowering but essential. So does the ability to fiercely protect oneself.
May 4, 2025
How women in small town China gain small independences even through oppressive lives — current and past. Thought it was really insightful and enjoyed reading a book about non-tier 1/2/3 city women’s lives.
Dialect was SUPER heavy for me so I def missed some nuances but I love when authors write in the dialect instead of standard !
Great ethnographic piece.
Dialect was SUPER heavy for me so I def missed some nuances but I love when authors write in the dialect instead of standard !
Great ethnographic piece.
June 1, 2023
有些重复，但或许也是作者的用意。女性/底层的无休止的苦痛轮回，地狱就在人间……
The article contains some repetitions, but perhaps it is also intentional on the part of the author. The endless cycle of suffering for women and the marginalized, the hell within our world...
The article contains some repetitions, but perhaps it is also intentional on the part of the author. The endless cycle of suffering for women and the marginalized, the hell within our world...
June 20, 2023
作者来到四川自贡一个古老的盐业小镇，采访了两年，写下了十二个女人的故事。贫穷、愚昧和封建的父权、夫权给女性带来的痛苦沉重又惊悚。在一个吃人的社会里，最弱势的妇女和小孩是没有办法逆天改命的，只能在层层枷锁下努力的营造一点空间。
九十岁的老妪开猫儿店供妓女使用，十几岁的青少女竟然还在做幺妹儿出台赚钱。左边男人因为生不出儿子家暴打老婆打到全村都知道，右边男人出轨成性，女人为了防止被戳脊梁骨不敢离婚。时代好像进步了很多，但在盐镇这种封闭的村子里女人却还是困在无尽的贫穷和别人的口舌之中。
总结起来还是那四个字，男人不行。
九十岁的老妪开猫儿店供妓女使用，十几岁的青少女竟然还在做幺妹儿出台赚钱。左边男人因为生不出儿子家暴打老婆打到全村都知道，右边男人出轨成性，女人为了防止被戳脊梁骨不敢离婚。时代好像进步了很多，但在盐镇这种封闭的村子里女人却还是困在无尽的贫穷和别人的口舌之中。
总结起来还是那四个字，男人不行。
November 18, 2023
虽然是不同的小地方但是那种熟悉的感觉是一模一样的……好久好久没看到那么接地气的非虚构了，真正是站在大地上的，不是口号/扣一颗星在章节之间衔接略有点生硬（但很喜欢首尾章的安排，女人的厄运还在被继续）/“要救自己，如鹿脱离猎户的手，如鸟脱离捕鸟人的手”
以上是我五月份读完的感受，但在前几天一个类似读书分享会的地方，一位说自己爱读书的女性，说出这些我们接触不到的底层女性那个时刻，心里涌上奇怪的感觉，无法描述。
以上是我五月份读完的感受，但在前几天一个类似读书分享会的地方，一位说自己爱读书的女性，说出这些我们接触不到的底层女性那个时刻，心里涌上奇怪的感觉，无法描述。
April 30, 2023
以女性的视角讲述了西南小镇的现代发展，但“现代”这个词在这里纯粹是时间上的概念，从思想、观念和所处家庭环境的发展来看似乎很难去辨别属于哪一个时代。书中的语言描述比较“淡“和平白，但同样成长于乡下，还是很能感同深受的。在对人物年龄的降序叙述中，似乎也能看到新千年下的一些改变，也算是一种”向好“的演进吧。
May 29, 2023
看不见的女性四川小城版。看别的国家的作者写的书有时候不会有那么强烈的共鸣。因为中国的普通看不见的女性实在是太惨了。
July 10, 2023
很久没看过这么震撼的书了。里面有一段描述那个女人引产的时候孩子拿出来还是活的，让我对计划生育有了新的认识
August 27, 2023
“这就是中国最普通的世道—有人情的淳朴，也会有底层的黑暗。”易小荷用了两年的时间，观察、采访、写下这十个女人的故事，为我展现了我不知道的世界的残酷。读的时候，我非常感恩我的母亲和家人，将我保护得这么好，从不让我接触这底层的黑暗。
November 25, 2023
开头很不错，但读到最后感觉各个人的凄苦故事全部缠绕在了一起，题是好题，但写的太碎了。这种人物群像非虚构，各个人物之间选角至少要有一些鲜明的不同吧
Did Not Finish
November 26, 2023描写小镇上的女性生活：为了生存出卖肉体、被家暴、被出轨、被强制引产...很喜欢前两个故事，第三个故事开始就感到开始重复，而且文笔属于那种媒体深度报告的风格，跟人物的距离感比较远。决定在麻木之前dnf
November 30, 2023
非常值得一读 有些时候觉得生活很好 社会在进步 但可能只是因为没看到边缘化群体罢了
February 7, 2024
底层的生活非常相似，读了两篇后后面就觉得很重复的感觉。也没有什么剖析。
November 4, 2024
“盐镇的生活是一道道细碎的裂口，女人拼命止血，而男人们在撒盐” 十篇故事读到中间的时候有些累，就是被那种从小到大的生活的苦压倒的感觉，每个女人都在挣扎活下去却总是无法逃离命运。
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews