Recovering Histories: Life and Labor After Heroin in Reform-Era China by Nicholas Bartlett

Author:Nicholas Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER 5

A Wedding and Its Afterlife

Ritual, Relationships, and Recovery

If you used drugs, you’ll always be a drug user. . . . When people bring up your name, if you haven’t died yet, if you are living in this world, people will always say that you are a drug user.

—A recovering heroin user in Gejiu

I want a normal person’s life.

—Su

WEDDING DAY JITTERS

On a cool, clear Sunday morning in early October, Su and Pan leisurely strolled along the path next to Golden Lake. Su was wearing a flowing white gown and matching corsage. Pan, her fiancé, sported a handsome tan suit. Both were in their early forties. Their wedding party, made up of two groomsmen and me, trailed a few steps behind, our digital cameras out and ready to document the occasion.

In front of us on the path, a group of women and their children were playing by the lake, their headdresses and colorful embroidered clothing markers of their status as members of the Hani minority group. Su decided spontaneously that we should pose with them for a wedding photo. One of the groomsmen quickly ran to a nearby stall to buy ice cream popsicles to help to convince the group to participate. After a brief negotiation, fifteen of us posed by the lake. In the photo, another friend and I are seated nearby with mothers and their children, popsicle sticks dangling in the hands of the small children. Su and Pan stand in the center of the group.

After the pre-wedding photo session, the couple set off for the methadone clinic for their daily dose of opioid substitution therapy. Su grumbled that walking around the city in her heavy dress was exhausting. The couple made the daily trip to this clinic for close to eighteen months, always together. They knew many of the other patients from their childhood and time in compulsory detoxification centers, as well as through the part-time, volunteer outreach work that they conducted for a local harm reduction NGO. Familiar faces congratulated them. One of the staff members asked Su after she finished her dose, “So this is your second wedding, right?”

The couple then stopped by their home to check in on Pan’s mother, who had suffered a stroke earlier that year and was partially paralyzed. His father was in even worse shape, confined to a nearby hospital bed, and would not attend the festivities that evening. Living in the guest bedroom of this aging couple’s home, Su and Pan had recently taken on much of the responsibility for their care.

A couple of hours later the wedding party reconvened in my living room. Sipping pu’er tea poured by one of the groomsmen, Pan and Su reminisced about their early courtship. The couple had met in a compulsory detoxification center in nearby Datun when both had been part of the “management,” an elite group selected from nearly a thousand “students” who received special privileges in exchange for their help in running the institution.1 Despite strict policies designed to prevent direct contact between men

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