Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

looked up at me sharply. Then she started scolding Heh-ven. I hadn’t learned any of the Shanghai dialect—it was Mandarin I was studying—but the spirit of her speech was clear enough.

“Pei-yu says you are an addict and it’s my fault,” interpreted Heh-ven cheerfully.

I felt rather flattered, but my feelings about Heh-ven’s lack of performance on the press made me sound surly as I replied, “Why should she say that?” I lay down in the accustomed place as I spoke, and reached for the pipe.
“Because your eyes and nose are running.”⁵⁵

Hahn’s account portrays a woman/writer who, fitting of Cixous’s medusa, “approaches” rather than “observes.”⁵⁶ Indeed, Hahn’s experiences and writing encapsulate the “wonderful expansion” of Cixous’s feminine writing:

Through the same opening that is her danger, she comes out of herself to go to the other, a traveller in unexplored places; she does not refuse, she approaches, not to do away with the space between, but to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she can be.⁵⁷

In this account, Hahn “endeavors” to become an addict and is “flattered” when finally she is. She criss-crosses the borderline between virtue and vice with a sneeze and a smile and still actively runs her publishing venture. She stopped her addiction in the same way she seized it. In the following passage, she speaks with her opium-addicted friend who visits her in the hospital where she is recovering:

“How are you?” [Heh-ven asked.]

“I’m all right,” I said, “but Cocteau was telling the truth—you know, about the boredom. Still, I’m glad I did it.” I was warming up, though Heh-ven still sounded and looked like a stranger.