Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

Hahn’s approach to and account of her addiction, which is only one of twenty-five chapters of her memoir, shatters the stereotypes of the passive female addict. Hahn’s entire autobiography, a collection of articles she wrote for The New Yorker magazine over sixty-seven years, describes an unconventional life: She was the first woman to hold a degree in engineering (which she did just to spite the professors who said she could not or should not), traveled through the Belgian Congo by foot in the 1930s when even local experts hesitated to do so, lived in wartime Hong Kong and China, and refused a granted passage home to the United States so that she could assist those who were imprisoned in Hong Kong. Hahn’s writing, which unabashedly and frankly describes such events, resonates with Cixous’s empowered woman/medusa: experience and writing that transgresses the societal expectations and constraints of women. However, it is the chapter “The Big Smoke” and its description of Hahn’s purposeful entrance into opium addiction, her enjoyment of the addiction, and her decisive break from the addiction that more implicitly renders Cixous’s medusa of “spacious singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation.”⁵³ After living in Shanghai for some time, Hahn had her first encounter with opium, stating: “Truth lit up my mind.”⁵⁴ She talked of her eagerness not just to try opium but to be a fully fledged addict. In the following passage, she describes with pride the moment when her addiction is realized:

To make a surprisingly long story short, a year of earnest endeavor went by. It’s impossible now to pinpoint the moment in time when I could honestly claim to be an addict, but I do remember the evening when Heh-ven’s wife, Pei-yu, said I was…I was in a tearing rage with Heh-ven. By this time, I was publishing a Chinese-English magazine at a press he owned in the Chinese city—or, rather, I was trying to publish it, and Heh-ven was maddeningly unbusinesslike about the printing. That day, I’d waited at home in vain for hours because he had faithfully promised that some proofs would be delivered before three o’clock. When I marched in on the peaceful scene in the smoking room, only a fit of sneezing prevented my delivering him a stinging scolding. At the sound of the sneezes, Pei-yu