The Wife of Hardship

CORE DEFINITION

The phrase zaokang zhi qi, the wife who ate chaff and husks with you, comes from a classical ideal holding that a man must not cast off the wife who endured poverty with him once he becomes prosperous, and the Han emperor Guangwu praised a minister who declined to do so. The core proposition is that relationships and partnerships carry obligations that predate success, and that how an organization treats its earliest contributors is a public test of its stated values. The key qualification is that the obligation is reciprocal and relational rather than a blanket rule of tenure, so it protects commitment and history without requiring that every early participant keep a role they can no longer fill.