Ahmed’s phenomenological attention to orientation offers inspiration for approaching long-term heroin users’ recovery on a more intimate scale in attending to how bodies acquire shapes in relation to particular gatherings and objects. In thinking about how this perspective applies to my encounters with Pan, one day in particular comes to mind. In 2011 I accompanied a group of recovering drug users on a trip to a hot springs. Though three of my companions were experienced drivers, I ended up behind the wheel as the only person with a valid license. Never having mastered manual transmission, I was slightly apprehensive operating the “bread van” we had rented for the occasion. Pan volunteered to sit next to me. He deeply identified as a driver, which had been his professional vocation for a number of years when he was in his twenties and thirties. I learned on this trip that he was intimately familiar with the particular model we rented, as he had repaired and driven these vehicles during a stint when he worked as a mechanic. From helping secure the rental to coaching me on when to switch gears to sharing trivia about driving in the area, Pan seemed happy and at ease throughout the day, particularly when we were in the car.
After dropping off the other passengers, I drove with Pan and his wife, Su, to the outskirts of the city to return the vehicle. He asked me if he could take over driving. We pulled over, and he slipped into the driver’s seat. With Su growling from the back seat that he needed to be careful, he pulled onto the road. Though it had been close to a decade since he had been at the wheel, Pan effortlessly returned to the road, moving through the various gears. After a couple of minutes, Su began to chide him, saying that he shouldn’t be driving in the city center without a license. When we returned the car, Pan eagerly told the proprietor of the rental business that he expected to be back in the future. In subsequent weeks he energetically renewed his search for delivery positions that might help him reenter the workforce and spoke more frequently about hoping to take the test to have his license reinstated so he could work again as a driver.
One way of thinking about “return to society” is an attempt to find a new equilibrium after becoming “disoriented” (mimang), a term that my interlocutors used to describe both the effects of past heroin use and their early efforts to rejoin society. While some in this book questioned their acquired orientations and saw the need to deviate from previous lives, others hoped for a “return” to familiar lines. This book at times focuses on these attempts at reorienting—unearthing old skills such as playing table tennis or mahjong—or finding pleasure in gaining new competencies, ways of connecting, or bodily habits that made moving in unfamiliar spaces easier. Our day of driving was not a significant moment in Pan’s life. And yet, small actions like orchestrating a ride in a familiar car might become more substantial parts of recovering histories, opening individual future horizons and deepening visions of lives that were worth living. “Hope,” Sara Ahmed writes, “is an investment that the ‘lines’ that we follow will get us somewhere” (2006, 18).
CHAPTER BY CHAPTER
Attention to historicity in this account unsettles persistent assumptions that undergird popular understandings of recovery. Derek Summerfield, for example, writes that recovery is what “happens in people’s lives rather than in their psychologies. It is practical and unspectacular, and it is grounded in the resumption of the ordinary rhythms of everyday life—the familial, sociocultural, religious, and economic activities that make the world intelligible” (2002, 1105). While informed by a sensitivity to lived experience, Summerfield here fails to address a crucial recurring concern of my Gejiu-based interlocutors: What if the “activities” and “ordinary rhythms” that once “made the world intelligible” fail to correspond to opportunities available in contemporary social and economic life?18 This book describes diverging understandings of recovery that are inextricably imbricated with sensing and responding to a dynamically shifting historical present.
In chapter 1, I show how heroin use for Gejiu residents took on meaning within shared horizons of a young generational cohort’s early laboring experiences. Recounting events occurring more than two decades before my arrival in the region, the chapter documents how early encounters with the opioid were shaped by a tin mining boom that occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s, a time I call the Rush years. Three coming-of-age stories focus attention on the shared existential challenges of young people who came to believe that the ways of laboring and navigating the world associated with their parents were increasingly inadequate to the changing times. In attending to how these young workers shared ideas about the possibilities and challenges of rejecting local Maoist traditions, this chapter foregrounds the lasting impact of risk-taking on the experiences and outlook of a group I call the Heroin Generation.
Each of the remaining five chapters focuses on how individuals during my fieldwork defined and moved toward life after heroin. Chapter 2 begins by describing how Sam, a onetime mining boss, and his friends struggled to navigate a private sector economy that had changed dramatically since the 1980s. An account of my trip to the nearby mountains documents the radical reorganization of labor that had taken place since this group first came into contact with heroin. I then show how Sam came to understand his heroin habit as intimately connected to a broader crisis in his self-conception as a worker. Recovering from heroin for Sam required “adapting” to social realities of the new millennium by breaking habits accumulated in the Rush years and emulating later-arriving entrepreneurs who had replaced him.
Chapter 3 explores the struggles of a small group of long-term heroin users who, in contrast to others in this book, argued that the window when they might have returned to society had closed. Focusing on particular encounters when my interlocutors communicated severely diminished expectations concerning their own futures, I show how a particular mode of narrating and experiencing their lives as “sacrificial offerings of the Reform era” facilitated connection with their peers even as it contributed to individual suffering and shared, overwhelming feelings of obsolescence.
Drawing on conversations with regulars at Green Orchards, a drop-in center and harm reduction NGO, chapter 4 shows how idling long-term heroin users turned to the therapeutic potential of two distinct legacies of socialist laboring. Members of this group spoke about the care provided to employees by state-owned enterprises in the 1980s as well as the radical revolutionary power of collective “remolding through labor,” imagined to have existed in the first years of the People’s Republic, as potent examples of how the state could encourage—and even force—drug users to “merge into” society as productive workers. In questioning what constituted appropriate interventions into citizens’ lives, Green Orchards members drew on the country’s past to criticize contemporary state policies that they argued contributed to a condition of addiction that they saw as inseparable from their involuntary idling.
Chapter 5 starts with a detailed description of a wedding ceremony. The rituals associated with this event helped make visible a more general set of opportunities and risks that Su, the bride, faced in her attempts to return to society. Drawing on the concept of caring labor to foreground the importance of maintaining and renewing relationships with others, I show how Su’s efforts to improve her own life came to be entangled with attending to aging family members, restarting her career as a saleswoman in a multilevel marketing organization, expanding her family, and forging new connections with “normal people.” In these activities, Su confronted gendered expectations of where and how she should labor and negotiated relationships complicated by the specter of her history of heroin use.
Chapter 6 documents the career of Yan Jun, a controversial NGO leader and onetime colleague of Xun Wei. I explore two distinct ways that Yan came to narrate his civil society work: first as building a grassroots network and later as embodying the position of brave protector of the rights of people with drug use history, including his own. Observers who knew him questioned not only his motivations but also the very principles of civil society that he claimed to embody. My struggles in making sense of Yan Jun’s experiences prompt me to revisit the book’s phenomenological approach to recovering histories and briefly