Recovering Histories: 

Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China

Nicholas Bartlett

(University of California Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series, 2020)

Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas Bartlett is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese at Barnard College. Please visit the Weatherhead East Asian Institute website for the WEAI Author Q&A: Nicholas Bartlett’s Recovering Histories.

For additional information and to purchase, please visit University of California Press.

Check here for more detail and feel free to contact the MA program Director, Ye Yuan (yy2402@columbia.edu) if you have any questions.

Please help us support our very own Dorothy Ko for her role in the film The Last City. Tickets will go on sale to the general public on September 11, with early access opportunities for FLC members prior to this date. See details about ticket prices and passes here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to support the art and craft of cinema.

Read the synopsis of the film from the New York Film Festival website below:

The Last City
Heinz Emigholz, 2020, Germany, 100m

“Five distinct cities across the world become the backdrops for a series of spiraling tête-a-têtes in Heinz Emigholz’s ambitious and surprisingly funny film, which moves him ever further away from his documentary origins and into the realms of the uncanny. John Erdman and Jonathan Perel, who appeared in Emigholz’s magnum opus of psychoanalysis and architecture, Streetscapes [Dialogue], kick things off as an archaeologist and a weapons designer discussing war and depression in Israel’s industrial city Be’er Sheva. From there, Emigholz introduces an expansive roster of deadpan performers in dual roles (including Young Sun Han, Dorothy Ko, Susanne Sachsse), interacting in Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong, and São Paulo, and wrestling with issues such as war crimes, racism, family, religion, sex, and cosmology. As Erdman, Emigholz’s surrogate, says, it’s a film of “social taboos, the paradoxical logic of dreams, an infinite round dance.”