Nearing a cluster of trees, Xun heard the rattling of a mountain rat inside a metal cage. He carefully picked up the device by the handle, then walked to another spot nearby, then another. Within a few minutes he had retrieved all six of his traps, five of which held large, squirming rodents. He walked back down into the city center. The rats struggled furiously, and the cages occasionally bumped against his legs. Once back at his apartment, Xun carefully released this group into a holding pen in his living room, where they joined others he had captured in previous days.
“You should have seen all those rats!” Xun Wei paused in his retelling for dramatic effect. His narrow, angular face was framed by closely shaven hair, chunky black eyeglasses, and a pronounced Adam’s apple. A T-shirt tucked into acid-washed jeans accentuated his skinny frame. His voice was raspy, some might say grating. Like many residents in a prefecture famous for its tobacco, he constantly smoked cheap Red River cigarettes. As we sat in his apartment in early 2010, he took a puff, cleared his throat, and continued his story.
Twice a week Xun delivered his cargo to the disease prevention station (fangyizhan), where he collected a prearranged payment of 10 yuan per live rodent. He never learned the rats’ fate. Xun excelled at this job; in total, he secured close to 2,000 yuan in that first month, a sum equivalent to the salary of a midlevel government cadre or manager of a respectable local business. But the venture did not last for long. Overexploitation of the mountain’s rodents—several dozen other rat catchers competed with him for the government payouts—resulted in a decreased supply and smarter rats. His fiancée, unhappy sharing their apartment with such houseguests and worried about the gashes on his legs left by their teeth and the metal bumping against his skin, eventually convinced Xun that this business was best abandoned.
When talking about the role of the mountains in Gejiu life, local residents during my time in the region taught me an old Chinese slogan: “Mountain dwellers kao the mountains, shore dwellers kao the sea,” with kao translatable as “rely on,” “make use of,” or “exploit.” I initially imagined that this phrase referred to the stable rhythms that had emerged between this mountainside community and the natural resources that surrounded it. What became clear to me from my time in Gejiu was that in recent decades the possible futures nurtured by the extraction of natural resources in this region had been rapidly shifting. The mountains, of course, were always there, but the careers and rhythms of living they supported were in a state of flux.
People with a history of heroin use faced particular challenges adapting to the changes that had swept the region. Xun’s career is exemplary in this sense. A child during the last years of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, he scavenged steep nearby slopes for wild vegetables when state-rationed food did not provide enough calories for his large family. In his teenage years, during Deng Xiaoping’s tenure, Xun submitted to the rigid schedule of state-affiliated mining enterprises before striking out on his own to become a wealthy private-sector mining boss. Following a stint in a compulsory labor center, he returned to the nearby mountains in the mid-1990s to start a trucking venture that helped connect sellers in regional open-air markets.2 In the early 2000s, after he gave up rat catching, Xun opted to stay in the city, taking on a series of temporary, low-paying jobs that included helping his in-laws sell lottery tickets. But the mountains—and dreams of other futures—were never far from his thoughts. For Xun, like others I met in Gejiu, recovery from heroin use merged with striving to find a way to kao the mountains and achieve a “normal person’s life” (zhengchangren de shenghuo) in changing times.
At the time of our conversation in 2010, Xun was serving as director of a grassroots nongovernmental organization (NGO), managing three part-time outreach workers and a financial accountant. Living in an apartment he and his wife had bought at a reduced rate from his father’s state employer, Xun was one of a relatively small group of people I knew with heroin use history in the region who had found desirable, full-time work. The mountains provided him with a venue for periodic team-building and outreach activities. Peer educators from competing nonprofit organizations prowled mountain mining outposts searching for heroin-using miners, to whom they could provide HIV testing and referral services.
Xun finished his cigarette in silence. Despite his recent successes, he was unsure about how long he could successfully find donors to support his organization. We could hear the clanging of construction outside; another high rise was being built next to the lake, part of a seemingly endless expansion upward from the narrow valley floor. Partially visible through the window, Old Yin Mountain silently loomed above us.
OUT OF TIME? AN EPIDEMIC OF THE RECENT PAST
Drug users—and in particular those consuming heroin—have often been depicted as lacking an awareness of history. William Burroughs describes the heroin user as living in “junk time,” in which his “body is his clock, and junk runs through him like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need” ([1953] 1977, 180).3 Caught up in the self-contained thoughts and actions born of physiological craving, drug seeking, and withdrawal, addicts, in this Beat writer’s account, are radically disconnected from a broader social world and, by extension, shared historical time. Focusing on experiences of those attempting to rebuild lives after extended periods of heroin use, Recovering Histories argues that the men and women I encountered in Gejiu were especially attuned to what we might call the fraught historical times of the nation. Achieving recovery for this group was inextricably linked to responding to the challenges of the historical moment, a struggle not only to find a position within society but also to become oriented to shifting experiences of social time.
A brief history of my own relationship to this topic and place may help introduce the reader to what follows. I first heard about Gejiu city in 2002 while working as an assistant programs officer in the Beijing office of a social marketing organization operating under the umbrella of the China-UK HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care project. Public health experts at the time warned of a looming “titanic peril” and potential “fault line” that could threaten national development (UNAIDS 2002; Wolf et al. 2003). Located fewer than two hundred kilometers from the Vietnamese border, Gejiu was identified in early epidemiological surveys as a priority area for HIV programming because of a concentration of heroin use and sex work in the region.4 Buoyed by a post-SARS commitment to effective public health and supported by deep-pocketed international donors (cf. Mason 2016; on surveillance see Fearnley 2020), Gejiu officials in the mid-2000s spearheaded dozens of projects targeting “high-risk” populations. International news media soon lauded the city as a “model” for China’s HIV prevention efforts (Yardley 2005). Service providers offered local drug users access to methadone maintenance therapy, needle exchange, targeted medical care, and expanded social support. Peter Piot, at that time the director of UNAIDS, and a handful of international public health luminaries made brief visits to Gejiu to inspect what was billed as an innovative and progressive local response to the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
In 2008, when I was working part time for the International Harm Reduction Development Program (IHRD) at Open Society Institute (now Foundations), I visited the city for the first time to meet with a number of recovering drug users who had formed a regional network dedicated to improving the lives of their community. IHRD provided the group with a start-up grant to fund work in five cities across the prefecture. As a result of my initial connections with members of this network and my growing interest in the dynamics of drug use in the region, I moved to Gejiu in August 2009 to begin my dissertation research, a project that I believed would focus on a widespread and visible heroin epidemic.5
Hyper-alert for drug references and struggling with the local dialect, my ears during my first weeks living in the city would prick up every time I heard the city’s nickname; “tin capital” shares the same phonetic pronunciation as “using drugs” (xidu). I quickly found that my initial assumptions formed through reading reports about the local crisis were mistaken. Following a pattern of “drug generations” identified in many parts of the world (Golub, Johnson, and Dunlap 2005), consumption of heroin in Gejiu had in fact been confined primarily to a single historical cohort. Born during the second half of the 1960s or in the 1970s, most local users first encountered the drug in the late 1980s or early 1990s. At the start of the new millenium, as many