Drawing on observations from a trip to Gejiu made a decade after my first visit to the city, the epilogue offers a brief meditation on how recent changes in this community impacted collective ways of experiencing the future. The book finishes with Xun Wei and me taking a trip to the nearby mountains to visit his former mining site a decade after my first visit to the city.
The structure of the book aims to pluralize understandings of addiction as each chapter explores how historicity—the complex interweaving of personal and collective experiences of time—impacts recovery. Some focus on narratives of life events and diagnosis of contemporary society, while others work to examine how nonverbal ways of relating to the past and future, impact individual and collective outlooks. All draw attention to the importance of labor in thinking about possibilities for living in the fourth decade of the country’s reform and opening.
Most of the figures appearing in this book are men. This is in part due to my own difficulties in forging close relationships with women recovering heroin users in Gejiu. But it is also a reflection of the fact that men made up the great majority of heroin users throughout the country: 85 percent according to national public security registers (National Narcotics Control Commission 2009). In this particular corner of the country, heroin had initially spread most quickly among entrepreneurs connected to the male-dominated mining industry at a time when such ventures were a “sign of risk, glory, and masculine strength” (Rofel 1999, 54). Chapters 1 and 4 in particular explore how historically particular gendered division of labor impacted the lives of my interlocutors.
LOCATING ADDICTION
This book joins a body of scholarship that has pushed against waves of medicalization that depicted addiction as a pathological personality disorder or, more recently, a relapsing disease of the brain (Lindesmith 1938; Acker 2002).19 Anthropologists have contributed to broader conversations about addiction by showing how patterns of structural violence perpetuated through race, gender, and class differences shape the distribution of illicit drugs as well as harms associated with use (Bergmann 2008; Bourgois 2003; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Knight 2016). Occasionally in some of this important scholarship, ethnographers have argued substance abuse is an “epiphenomenal expression” (Bourgois 2003, 319) of underlying societal inequalities, as marginalized subjects “self-medicate the hidden injuries of oppression” (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2004, 169). In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu depicts drug addicts as individuals who, due to “the smooth functioning of habitus,” remain largely unaware of their “hidden” suffering and the broader social conditions that fuel their misery (Eagleton and Bourdieu 1992, 121). The sage social scientist in these accounts helps users to “make their situation explicit” through rigorous socioanalysis—including historicizing the roots of drug-related suffering (Eagleton and Bourdieu 1992, 121). My discomfort with the move to understand problem drug use as primarily an unconscious or “hidden” expression of suffering is that it risks homogenizing how people with drug use history come to inhabit the historical present and potentially overlooks the critical role that analyzing, reflecting up, intuiting, and feeling shared historical time has for long-term heroin users in how they understand and respond to their condition.20
Angela Garcia’s attention to temporality and history in The Pastoral Clinic (2010) has influenced my approach. She describes the Hispano heroin users in her account as “melancholic subjects,” figures for whom the use of opioids is connected to intergenerational experiences of dispossession and “endless” suffering. Garcia argues that experiences of loss come to be inflected by a Hispano tradition of mourning that “commemorates the singularity of death while insisting on the inevitable repetition of it” (2010, 73).21 Throughout her account, she shows how the pain and relief of heroin use mingles with the psychic legacies of events occurring months, years, or even centuries in the past. If, as a local saying puts it, “history is a wound,” Garcia’s phenomenologically oriented study of the heroin epidemic in Espanola Valley documents the deep, collective scars created through familiar cycles of painful loss and attention to collective ways of reckoning with this past (97).
My exploration of historicity in Gejiu draws attention to a markedly different temporal dynamic. Though residents in this tin mining community, too, reckoned with individual and collective pasts as part of the recovery process, my interlocutors often understood themselves as grappling with a pernicious form of obsolescence. Many members of this generational cohort of predominantly Han urban residents saw themselves as having once played a central role in implementing the early marketization policies touted by Deng Xiaoping at a time when engaging private sector activity was deeply stigmatized; they thus were haunted by missed possibilities associated with unpredictable ruptures, openings, and fault lines in the country’s ongoing development rather than living through a perceived “endlessness” of exclusions and loss.
I also want to underscore that this is an ethnographic study of recovery rather than of drug use. During my fieldwork, I was rarely in the presence of the drug. Some might argue that a phenomenologically oriented account of people whose lives had been deeply affected by their consumption of this potent drug needs to give extended attention to direct experiences of heroin use.22 My response is that my relationships with many of the people in the book emerged in part because I became deeply invested in their attempts to start new lives. In following their struggles to break from painful parts of their pasts, aspects of my interlocutors’ lives became central to this research, while others were either inaccessible to me or failed to find their way into this account. I came to believe that this group’s efforts to “return to society”—and by extension to diagnose, explore, and move through a rapidly shifting social world—offer important perspectives on broader experiences of labor and life in contemporary China and beyond.
BACK ON THE MOUNTAIN?
On a spring day in 2015, Xun took me to visit his office. Funding that had been available in previous years had become difficult to come by, and the spacious two-bedroom apartment that had formerly served as the organization’s headquarters had been replaced by two tiny, separate rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building. As director, Xun sat at a single desk in a closet-sized space at the front of the building, while peer educators and the group’s financial officer crammed into a room across the hall. After closing the door to leave for dinner, he cursed softly when he realized he had left his keys inside his office.
Now in his late forties, Xun appeared both thinner and frailer than when I had first met him. After a nasty motor scooter accident, a metal bar had been inserted along the right side of his collarbone. This bar had subsequently broken, and the pieces visibly protruded from underneath his skin. For years after the accident, he struggled to carry even light packages with his injured hand. Xun was acutely aware of his own appearance. Once, while telling me a story about his youth, he actually apolo-gized for his diminished physique, as if the discrepancy between his earlier actions on the mountain and his present appearance strained his credibility.
Looking in through a window protected by an iron grating, we could see his keys were on the far side of his desk, several feet away from us. I suggested that we call the locksmith to open the door. Xun replied that he had another idea. He plucked a bamboo rod from a nearby flowerpot and unwound a metal wire that was holding up a nearby window plant. Fashioning this metal into a hook that he attached to the rod, Xun began slipping this quickly constructed fishing device through a slit in the open window.
A young man in his early twenties, wandering to his parked car across the street, stopped to watch. “You really think you can get it?” he asked incredulously. Xun ignored him.
Although his initial attempts fell far short of his target, Xun adjusted his grip and extended the makeshift pole. By flexing his arm to allow the rod to move a few more inches inside the office, he bumped the hook up against the keys. “It won’t take long now,” he noted. Sure enough, with a few more flicks of his wrist, he managed to catch his keyring on the metal hook and carefully retracted the pole until his keys had reached the windowsill. He then pulled them through the metal bars, placed them in his pocket, smiled briefly, and turned to walk home.
Though it lasted