Recovering Histories. Nicholas Bartlett
reckoning supplemented by embodied sensations of movement and its absence also appeared in my interlocutors’ descriptions of addiction and recovery.
Meng’s views on his own recovery introduce these themes. I first met Meng just after he had been released from a two-year stint in a compulsory labor center at the office of a grassroots NGO that was part of the Honghe Prefecture drug-user network in a nearby city. His parents had recently passed away, and unusually for someone born before 1980, he had no siblings. With nowhere else to go, the thirty-six-year-old temporarily slept on a couch in the NGO office while working as a volunteer.
In our early encounters, Meng had intense anxiety about his own position in contemporary society, which came to be expressed in frequent comments about how he lagged behind his contemporaries. For example, he told me one day that he liked to watch tennis and named a few of his favorite players. I teased him that he must not have been a very committed fan, as those he mentioned had all retired in previous years. He looked at me seriously. “It’s not that I don’t like tennis. It’s that I’ve been using drugs and in labor camps for much of the past twenty years!” Shuttling between periods of heroin use and stints in state detention, Meng argued, had removed him from historical time and led to deficits in his ability to navigate city life.
In another of our early meetings, Meng complained to me that until very recently he had not known how to operate a smartphone, use the internet, or withdraw money using a bank card. He asked me rhetorically how this could be possible in 2009. When I pointed out that I had been in a bank the previous week when a worker from a nearby farming community—likely in the city for seasonal employment—had struggled to operate an automated teller, Meng sighed and noted with frustration that he had been born and raised in one of Honghe’s biggest cities; his own expectations about the trajectory of his life should not be compared to that of a peasant (for an exploration of the category of peasant in China, see Cohen 1993). Meng felt that the combination of periods of heroin use and bouts in state detention had kept members of this cohort from responding to the needs of the national trajectory: “While others are moving with the development of society (genzhe shehui de fazhan), we [long-term heroin users] are still stuck in (tingliu) the ’80s or ’90s!”
Other middle-aged, long-term heroin users I came to know in Gejiu also saw addiction as an affliction that impeded workers from keeping up with the historical present. For some, recent feelings of obsolescence tied to their own repetition of behaviors associated with the past contrasted sharply with their early careers, when they “moved with the waves of society” (genzhe shehui de langchao zou) and “caught the latest fashion” (ganshimao) by taking advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in their youth.15 Bodily symptoms including complaints of remaining stationary or being stuck in a previous era functioned as socially recognized symbols communicating shared pressures of responding to a rapidly changing local economy (cf. Geertz 1968).
Attention to state discourses on development help to explain how experiences of addiction came to be linked to a presumed historical movement of the country. China scholars have shown that assumptions of historicism have undergirded nationalist rhetoric in China for over a century and across differing political projects.16 In recent years, government directives in a range of fields, including real estate regulations, mental health guidelines, statistics bureau operations, and national and regional labor policies, evoked the necessity of national development to frame their programs (Greenhalgh 2003; Zhang 2006; Liu 2009; Hoffman 2010). Workers negatively impacted by shifting policies and emerging regimes of labor in the post-Deng economy complained of feeling “pushed backward, toward the socialist past . . . and obsolescence” (Solinger 2013, 60).
Building observations of the prevalence of this language into an expanded criticism of contemporary Chinese society, Yan Hairong argues that keywords promoted by the Chinese government “coded the social landscapes” beginning in post-1980s China. Migrant workers were taught that they “lack a consciousness of development that the post-Mao Chinese state has been striving to foster through reform and opening” (Yan 2008, 114). They came to understand their own movement to the city to work as a pursuit of “self-development” that mirrored the country’s purported work of “catching up to,” “advancing,” and “getting on track with” wealthier nations in the global market economy (2, 115, 189; see also Yan 2003; Pun 2005). In moving from observing the prevalence of this developmentalist discourse to critiquing its effects, Yan argues that state messages about the inevitability of following particular historical trajectories served to distort and mask a new “subterranean” reality (2008, 24, 249): the exploitation of a massive rural workforce for the benefit of “new masters” in China’s reform and opening.
While recognizing the power of Yan’s account, this book eschews embracing overarching arguments to focus on the situated ways that individuals and groups debated and internalized their positioning within a broadly shared “cultural anxiety about temporality” (Zhang 2000, 94).17 For long-term heroin users, questions of who was exploiting whom under what conditions were contested. Moreover, these conversations were always linked to immediate existential and practical challenges of attempting to forge new lives in changing, uncertain times.
Meng adopted a pragmatic attitude toward an understanding of recovery that he conceived of as “catching up” to the demands of the contemporary economy. He saw the need of immediately addressing the “huge” gap that he sensed existed between his own “psychological development” and an imagined urban dweller who was “a similar age and background to my own.” In the first months after his release from the compulsory laboring center, he prioritized learning how to operate computers, type, Microsoft Office programs, and participate in various online communities. He also argued that people with drug use history needed to learn to be content with and embrace an “ordinary” (pingpingdandan), frugal lifestyle—typical urban residents in the new millennium could enjoy basic comforts, but not the pursuit of gratuitous pleasures that he had embraced as a teenager in an earlier moment of market opening. A few months after we first met, Meng obtained an entry-level job at a private security firm and was quickly promoted to a management position. The quiet, stable life he enjoyed in the later stages of my fieldwork for Meng validated his self-diagnosis and response.
DISORIENTATION: MOVING IN THE HISTORICAL PRESENT
Interactions I had with Pan, a long-term heroin user who appears in chapter 5, provide an opportunity to explore how historicity impacted recovery from addiction on a more intimate scale. Sitting on his living room couch one afternoon, Pan complained that he felt his heroin use history continued to cast a shadow over his future plans. At the time of our conversation, he noted that he had managed to “keep his integrity” (baochi caoshou—i.e., abstain from heroin use) for more than two years. He said he believed he had “walked half the road” (zoulebanlu) out of addiction. When I asked him what remained for him to do to “return to society,” he grew apprehensive and again brought up the question of time. “One, two, three, four years. Who’s to say I won’t be good by then? That’s my thought, but I’m not able to make sense of this question. In the end, where is the place that [a return] exists?” (wo gaobudong zhege wenti, [huigui] daodi cunzai zai shenme difang?).
Pan’s interest in locating a “place where return exists” drew attention to his anxiety about the type of future he should strive for, a crucial question confronting every figure appearing in this book. Pan’s musing also drew attention to how recovering drug users might assess if they were moving closer to a “return” in a given moment, and what facilitated a shift in these feelings shift over time.
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed speaks of the concept of orientation as crucial to how we both “find our way” and come to “feel at home” as we extend our bodies into space (2006, 7). Ahmed’s critical acumen foregrounds queer, critical race, and feminist mediations; she rereads foundational texts in the phenomenological tradition, challenging their white European male creators’ heteronormative presumptions and expanding on possibilities for queer life. Her focus on the power of disorientation in embodied everyday experience deeply resonates with how the recovering addicts at the center of this book perceived their failure to fully inhabit the current historical moment. “Collective direction,” as