ABSTRACT
Shortly before he died, Wu Fengping reached under his hospital mattress and pulled out a stack of photos for me to view. The stack had been tucked near Wu’s right shoulder. Often examined and discussed, the photos were reminders for Wu, his spouse Tang Mei, and various visitors of a time before disease devastated his life. Most of the photos feature Wu at holiday events together with family and friends. When I met them in late 2003 at the Yunnan Provincial Tumor Hospital, Wu was 32 years old, Tang Mei 27. The two had spent nearly all their lives in Chuxiong prefecture, 250 kilometers west of Kunming city. In July 2003, chest pain prompted Wu, a county-government electrician, to seek out health care. Initially, Tang Mei and Wu spent eight days in a Chuxiong clinic and then departed for Kunming and the province’s most touted cancer treatment center. By then diagnosis was unequivocal: small cell undifferentiated carcinoma of the lung. As is often the case with lung cancer throughout the world, the slow appearance of symptoms had meant that Wu’s diagnosis had arrived too late for treatment to be of much use. Surgery was ruled out. Numerous rounds of expensive chemotherapy were tried and proved ineffective. Wu was completing what would be his final series of chemotherapy infusions when we met. He was a shadow of his former self, ashen and weighing about half his earlier weight. He wore an oxygen mask much of the time and was receiving heavy doses of the narcotic analgesic, Dolantin. In early February 2004, when treatment had obviously failed, in accordance with his parents’ request, hospital staff arranged an ambulance to deliver Wu home. Several of his personal items were positioned in the ambulance alongside his gurney. Included among these was a simple red nylon satchel. On its side, the satchel sported the copyrighted logo of a Yunnan-based enterprise. In distinctive calligraphy, the logo stated Red River ( ), the name of one of the more prominent cigarette companies in contemporary China and Wu’s favorite brand during most of his decade and a half as a smoker. Since its founding in the early 1990s
by regional government officials, the Red River Tobacco Factory has packaged its locally grown tobacco in Marlboro-like red-topped, white-bodied boxes, and marketed its cigarettes, rolled by newly purchased European and US machines, through familiar tropes of hyper-masculinity. The most common advertising copy for Red River cigarettes in recent years features either a group of oversized bulls galloping across a valley or a vermillion Formula-One racecar surging directly at the viewer. Five days after I watched his ambulance slowly make its way out of the crowded grounds of the Yunnan Provincial Tumor Hospital, Wu Fengping died. Wu’s story is more than that of a “death narrative.” It is also a story of mobilization and immobilization. Daily for 15 years, Wu spent time and money on cigarettes. When he fell ill, large sums of his and his family’s energy and savings were devoted to his treatment. Left behind by his death and deeply bereft are a number of people, most immediately his elderly parents, elementary-schooleducated wife, and Ruirui, his now-six-year-old son. In the years to come, this family can expect growing hardship as it tries eking out subsistence in the countryside without its former hardy male wage earner. Despite their tragedy, neither Wu, his wife, nor his parents have ever articulated clear feelings of victimhood to me, whether before or after his death. Nor have they expressed noticeable anger about his demise. Months after the death, Wu’s parents told me that they felt disappointed that even the province’s vaunted and expensive cancer center could not cure their son; and Wu’s wife expressed deep fears about what the future held for her and Ruirui. All three adults also noted the irony that it was the cigarettes Wu so enjoyed that doctors had indicated caused his cancer. Still, none of them entertained any feelings that they or Wu had been tangibly wronged, not even by the producers of Red River cigarettes. A blaming of the industrial and governmental sources of Wu’s poisoning has been immobilized. This Yunnan family speaks to troubling phenomena oft present in the PRC today. From young adulthood, people, mostly men, spend substantial slices of their families’ incomes to support nicotine dependencies. Then, book-ended by an all-too-brief period when diagnosis signifies outbreak of a dire tobacco-induced disease and when death eventually strikes, many of these people and their families pay out large proportions of household savings for frequently fruitless medical treatment. Yet, imperceptible among them is blame making directed at institutions responsible for producing the very cigarettes precipitating the disease. In this chapter I explore these troubling phenomena in terms of a specific set of Chinese citizens whom I have been interviewing recently, men like Wu and their families, people who have been struggling in China with perhaps the most notorious of tobacco-related diseases, lung cancer.1 Tapping and extending social theory on mass death, I argue that three socio-historical forces have been especially pivotal in producing and depoliticizing everyday experiences with this disease. First, like people elsewhere in the world, residents of the PRC have come to encounter a paradoxical situation: government authorities that are, on the one hand, reliant on a politics of protecting the nation’s health and, on the other, profiteering off a commodity, the cigarette, which is highly addictive, modestly priced, and acutely
toxic. Second, owing to subtle historical processes that have come to fuse cigarette smoking, life enhancement, and male sociality, men have felt a deep need to consume tobacco. Third, after lung cancer diagnosis occurs, the eligibility2 of hostility toward tobacco producers is muddled by memory making, particularly regarding the sick man’s past years exchanging cigarettes with other men.
