I am particularly appreciative of the manuscript readers whose comments dramatically improved this book. Jennifer Hirsch, Kim Hopper, and Lesley Sharp generously organized a workshop through the Columbia Population Research Center that gave me valuable feedback on a nearly completed draft. The Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia sponsored a book workshop later that year. Myron Cohen, Dorothy Ko, Rachel McDermott, and Max Moerman provided enormously constructive and insightful comments. Special thanks to my outside readers: Ann Anagnost’s detailed feedback inspired additional attention to the legacies of the 1980s and unexpectedly enhanced my teaching; Bob Desjarlais’s perceptive comments and ongoing discussions in lunch meetups have enriched my understanding of the possibilities of fieldwork and sharpened the phenomenological focus of this book; and Angela Garcia’s suggestions and encouragement, alongside her inspiring work on addiction, have influenced this project for many years.
Sara Appel, Chris Bartlett, Lyle Fearnley, Emily Ng, Yang Jie, and Bharat Venkat made constructive suggestions on sections of the manuscript at various points. Discussions with Yukiko Koga, Jeremy Soh, and Allen Tran in recent years have been helpful. Two reviewers from UC Press, subsequently revealed to be Josh Burraway and Zhang Li, provided generous, careful, and perceptive comments that significantly improved this text. The book also benefited from comments at talks given over the years at UCSF, the Mind Medicine and Culture seminar at UCLA, Bucknell University, the Boas seminar and Modern China Seminar at Columbia, and numerous AAA, AES, and SPA panels.
Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Mara Green deserve special thanks. In our regular meetings, Mara and Naor have been the kindest and most provocative of interlocutors, energetic readers, and generous friends who on many occasions helped me to remember the joys of collaboration.
At the University of California Press, I owe thanks to Reed Malcolm, who patiently guided this project over several years, and to Archna Patel, who served as an expert and careful guide in ushering it into its final form. Thanks as well to Sharon Langworthy for superb, eagle-eyed copy edits, and to Heather Altfield for creating the index and additional attention to the text. Many thanks as well to Ariana King and Ross Yelsey at Weatherhead Books, Josh Jacobs for photograph-related coaching, Jennifer Schontz for help with the appendix table, former WEAI visiting fellow Zhang Fuyu and Wang Chengzhi for help in securing permissions, Jenny Zhan for interview transcriptions, and Mary Missari and Jessica Xu for departmental assistance.
I feel a special debt of gratitude to the residents of Gejiu. My initial intention was only to stay for a few months. However, I quickly found this was a special place, with many people whom I felt deeply connected to. Thank you for your generosity, hospitality, patience, and friendship. And a special thanks to the individuals whose experiences make up this text. To you I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. I wish you health, happiness, and a respite from the past to pursue futures of hope and possibility.
I have been able to conduct this research thanks to generous support from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research (DDRA) Abroad Fellowship, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Improvement Fellowship, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships, a UCSF Graduate Dean’s Health Science Fellowship and Presidents’ Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and the UC Humanities Graduate Dissertation Fellowship Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Early research in China and recent costs related to publication were supported by the Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Institute. The Freeman Foundation deserves special thanks for funding a post-college table tennis project that provided me with my first opportunity to live in China.
Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 4 have been published elsewhere as “The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China” (positions: asia critique 26, no. 3 [2018]: 423–49) and “Idling in Mao’s Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring” (Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 42, no. 1 [2018]: 49–68).
I would like to finish by expressing my profound gratitude to family and friends who have sustained me over these many years. Adam deserves special recognition, not just for a lifelong friendship, but also for his role in helping to instigate my first trips to China and, later, pursuing a career in anthropology. Dave, Joe, and Mike deliver annual doses of sanity, twenty years and counting. Long live Team Oak! Thanks to Greg and Lee, Julie, Jeff, Zane and Sebastian, Cynthia, Josh, Abram and Dalya, Valerie, Anjali, Jon, Kate, and Phil, Kiran, Erica, Josh, Nazia, Najam, Seth, and Rachel for being there.
Thank you to my caring and wonderful mother-in-law Liz, as well as new family members Kristin and Omid. Liz, thanks for being your ebullient, hilarious, fun-loving self since before you became Cool Aunt Liz. Andrew, thank you for being such a caring, sensitive, and generous presence in my life from our first games of catch. Mom and Dad, your unconditional love and encouragement, and the inspirational example you show in how you live, have made everything else possible.
The arrival of Naomi and Lucian has been a source of joy and a welcome escape during the writing of this book. Naomi, your kindness, curiosity, and ability to connect to others astounds me. And Lucian, your sense of fun, restless spirit, and love of cooking bring me great joy. It is an honor to be your dad. I look forward to many future adventures with you both, including enjoying rice noodles followed by a climb to the top of Old Yin Mountain.
And finally, a last and most crucial thank you to Diana. You have been there for me through all the frustrations and small victories that have accompanied turning this project into a book. Your literary sensibility and intuitive understanding of this project dramatically improved my attempts to tell these stories. Much more important, your companionship over the last years has brought joy, security, and contentment to my life in ways I could never have imagined. Watching you flourish in your new profession and laughing while making sense of the world together have given me great pleasure. You are the most supportive and thoughtful partner a person could wish for.
Introduction
Toward a Phenomenology of Recovery
BACK ON THE MOUNTAIN
On a crisp spring morning in 2004, just before dawn, Xun Wei left his apartment. Most of his neighbors in Gejiu, a city of 310,000 residents crowded into a narrow valley floor in a mountainous area in southern Yunnan, had not yet awakened.1 Xun entered Huawei Park, a wooded area to the east of the city center. Old Yin Mountain loomed above him. Its peak was accessible by mounting a winding staircase of more than twenty-five hundred carved steps.
He set forth for the mountain that morning, like many other times in his life, in pursuit of a work opportunity. Xun had once been a wealthy tin mining boss, enjoying a lavish lifestyle while overseeing more than two dozen employees at a nearby mountainside site. That was many years earlier, before his heroin habit contributed to his losing his mining tunnel to competitors. In recent months he had enrolled in a newly opened government clinic that provided him with daily doses of methadone to stave off his heroin cravings. Determined to heal his body and stay busy, Xun filled his days with walks around the lake and badminton games with his fiancée. When he saw signs posted by local government officials offering cash rewards for harvesting rodents in the nearby hills, Xun eagerly pursued the opportunity to reenter the legal workforce.
As he trudged up the steep slope, Xun passed a group of residents hiking to the top of the mountain. Approximately four hundred people, many of them unemployed or furloughed state workers, made the trip every day, with a thousand or more regularly summiting on the weekends. Veering off this busier paved path, Xun passed over a defunct railway line that had once transported tin from tunnels on Old Yin to the city center (see figure 1). The minerals in these mountains had attracted human settlers for more than three thousand years. Remnants of infrastructure from various eras of mineral extraction were still visible on the mountainside and throughout the city center. In the new millennium, mining outfits drilled ever more deeply into the earth—now as far as two kilometers underground—to find unclaimed, high-grade ore.
FIGURE