Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood…I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other acknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows un-heard of songs.⁵¹

It is perhaps female drug literature in particular, with its “desires” and “haunting secrecy” within the extremities of addiction, that connects with Cixous’s “feminine writing.” Palmer and Horowitz’s anthology “overflows” with the multiple voices of women who epitomize the subversive and volcanic feminine discourse Cixous called for.

Perhaps one of the most strikingly subversive accounts in Palmer and Horowitz’s anthology is that of Emily Hahn. Hahn gave an account of her “approach” to opium smoking while she was living in Shanghai in her memoir, No Hurry to Get Home; the chapter “The Big Smoke” was first published in 1950 in the New Yorker:

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium ambition dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too—the greatest expert on ghosts, the world’s best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

She ended her memoir by saying:

Before I became an addict, I used to think that a confirmed smoker would be frantically afraid of the idea of breaking off. Actually, it isn’t like that—or wasn’t with me. At a certain stage, a smoker is cheerfully ready to accept almost any suggestion, including the one of breaking off. Stop smoking? Why, of course, he will say—what a good idea! Let’s start tomorrow.⁵²