I approach historicity broadly through attention to individual and social experiences of time. Following Paul Ricoeur’s (1990) creative engagement with aporias in human time and Victoria Browne’s (2014) multilayered approach to lived historical time in feminist conversations, the chapters in this book adopt diverging approaches and temporal scales. I attend to verbal and nonverbal experience, cognitive thought and embodied feeling, rhythms produced through everyday embodied routines, and the politics of negotiating personal and collective pasts in the present. Some chapters, for example, foreground the existential challenges of reckoning with difficult pasts, while others look at how recovering heroin users participated in public conversations about Gejiu’s future. I also explore how contemporaneity—the intimate relationships that develop between long-term heroin users—functions as “a mediating structure between the private time of individual fate and the public time of history” (Ricoeur 1990, 113). The next three sections show how the three approaches outlined here—historicity as critique of the historical present, historicity as exploration of the legacies of historicism, and historicity as ethnographic attention to experience in concrete encounters—help to elucidate the dynamics of the recovering histories featured in this book.
ADDICTION AS A HISTORICAL PROBLEM: LABORING, IDLING, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE
The complicated temporal politics of recovery became clear to me in the tension that emerged between two common Chinese phrases: “quitting drugs” (jiedu) and “returning to society” (huigui shehui).11 Though each could be translated under the English umbrella term “recovery,” these two phrases register important divergences in how efforts to build a life after heroin in China came to be conceptualized and lived. The most widely used term, jiedu or “quitting drugs,” referred to breaking physiological addiction to the substance—a potential synonym for “detoxification” (tuodu), though it also encompassed longer-term efforts to live an abstinent life. Focused on preventing relapse, private hospital doctors, “folk” minority practitioners, employees at the national methadone maintenance clinics, and other service providers tended to speak about recovery as jiedu. They did not, as a rule, address broader questions their patients faced in building a life and finding work after drugs.12
The phrase “return to society” appeared frequently in government documents, on posters, on banners, and in everyday conversations during my time in China. Government propaganda campaigns encouraged a variety of “marginalized groups” (bianyuan renqun), including orphans, street children, government officials convicted of corruption, and former Falungong members to “return to society.” The Chinese characters for “return” (huigui) are the same ones used to describe the process by which Hong Kong “came back to” Chinese rule in 1997 after more than 130 years under British control, an event commonly known in English as “the Handover.” To return thus connotes a reintegration into a previously existing set of relationships, the taking back of a position that one has left in the past. If “quitting drugs” tended to emphasize the accumulation of quantitative, linear “drug-free time,” the temporality of this state-sponsored call to “return to society” drew attention to heroin users’ relative position in relation to the contested historical time of the nation.
The importance of distinguishing between “return to society” and “quitting drugs” became clear to me through a blunder I made during one of my early visits to the Green Orchards drop-in center. I had learned that Old Kaiyuan, a frequent attendee at the center identifiable by his bald head and slight limp, had abstained from opioids for more than three years. Curious how others viewed this figure, I asked a small group of regular attendees if Old Kaiyuan might be a candidate for having successfully “returned to society.” Li, his frequent companion at the center, responded to my question with incredulity. Barking at me in a frustrated tone, he protested, “Someone like Old Kaiyuan? How could you think that he has ‘returned to society?’ ” Li noted that this aging, penniless idler was estranged from his family and came to the center in part because slightly better-off friends would buy him snacks and alcohol. That I would attempt to nominate this socially marginalized and unemployed—albeit opioid-free—middle-aged man as someone who had “returned” struck Li as a cruel joke.
The encounter underscored the centrality of laboring to ideas of recovery in China. With close to 80 percent of registered drug users across the country reporting that they were jobless (National Narcotics Control Commission 2009), many people with heroin use history whom I met spoke of persisting unemployment—referred to by my interlocutors as “idling” (xianzhe)—as the primary barrier they faced in their attempts to “return.”13
While having a job was a crucial part of any return, my interlocutors held diverging understandings about which forms of labor were healing, what living conditions and career ambitions they might aspire to, and perhaps most important, who was responsible for ensuring that they worked.
A closer exploration of how the “society” was conceptualized by heroin users helps to explain these diverging attitudes toward labor. Shehui is a relatively recent addition to the Chinese language, appearing as a translation of the European term by way of a Japanese loanword at the end of the nineteenth century (Vogelsang 2012). Two coexisting meanings in the English etymology of the word are relevant to how shehui came to be used by my interlocutors in Gejiu: society conceptualized in a Durkheimian sense as a national modern collective, and society understood as an exclusive group or club. Future chapters explore the attitude that my interlocutors held toward shifting national regimes of labor in China during and after Mao’s reign.14 People with heroin use history in Gejiu also spoke about their past involvement in “society” best understood as a club or special group. The great majority had grown up “inside the state system” (tizhili de ren) as members of the exclusive “small society” (xiao shehui) that Yunnan Tin and its partners created for their workers under Mao. In addition, chapter 1 documents the importance of “mixing in Society” (hun shehui) early in their careers, a usage I distinguish through capitalization to refer to a group of pioneering private sector workers who had great influence in the city in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The multivalence of this group’s understanding of shehui combined with the ambiguous temporal politics of huigui converged in their frequent discussions about how recovering addicts might be expected to labor. Maoist, Deng, and post-Deng state regimes espoused different ideas about collective life, state employment, and the therapeutic value of laboring for individual addicts (see the appendix). Echoing the rhetoric of laid-off state employees in Beijing and the Bolivian and Tswana miners who traced their own struggles to broader market forces (Yang 2015; Nash 1979; Comaroff and Comaroff 1987), my interlocutors offered critical analysis of the harms of market-oriented policies guiding the state’s contemporary approach to governing. In debating how they might reenter the workforce, Old Kaiyuan, Li, and other idlers with heroin use history sometimes drew on Maoist imaginaries, or what Michael Dutton refers to as “the ever-present specter of another type of politics” (2008, 110) to imagine alternate ways of participating in collective laboring.
BEHIND THE TIMES? THE FRAUGHT TEMPORAL POLITICS OF CATCHING UP
Historicist assumptions, numerous observers have argued, thrived in recent decades in China (e.g., Sahlins 1990; Ferguson 2006). Interactions over the years in China exposed me to the concrete ways that assumptions about development and historical movement appeared in everyday conversations. Acquaintances, including people with heroin use history, on occasion asked me to quantify in years how far the Middle Kingdom was behind the United States. References by Gejiu residents to how Laos or North Korea existed