China White

Personal reflections on my mom's addiction

Neither my brother nor I knew when it all began, the encroachment of white powder all over every surface of our home, the chalky residue of it, its strange presence everywhere we looked. I was only eleven and my brother was almost ten when we had to chase our dog around the living room. She had grabbed half a plastic straw from amid a pile of crushed pills on the coffee table, and that was the first time we really asked ourselves what all this stuff was. We’d seen our fair share of movies and tv shows that treated cocaine as a comic shorthand for the excesses of the 1970s and ‘80s. But surely this wasn’t anything so sensational. Our sad, ordinary townhouse—where I kept my stupid diary and the little faux-Aztec stone head that my grandmother bought for me at a flea market, the place where my brother had his comic books, where he cried in fear during thunderstorms, the place where we learned how to smack the busted TV to make it work, and to blow into our second-hand N64 cartridges when they froze up: no way was this a place where someone did Hollywood drugs.

As best I understand it, my mother was prescribed Oxycontin in 2002. She was in a bad car accident that same year, but my family is unsure if the injury to her shoulder was the occasion for her prescription or a result of her driving while intoxicated by it. For at least several months before her accident, she’d been seeing a strange new doctor in the Markham Chinatown, out in the suburbs of Toronto about a half-hour drive away from our home on the northern edge of the city. Dr. Chan had an in-house pharmacy and, we later learned, an established reputation for generously prescribing opioids. It took fifteen years ever since for a complaint that my grandfather placed with the provincial authorities, alongside others he met on Facebook, to have Dr. Chan’s license suspended. My brother and I wondered why our mom traded our dependable nearby family doctor for this much younger man who spoke poor English and worked in a strip mall miles away.

I’ve dwelt on my mother’s addiction for a long time, and it’s still a part of my life. It hung over my childhood, and I often worry that it made my little brother’s childhood far worse than mine. We went through so much together at mom’s house as to feel like agemates, with the dirty clothes we wore, the shared responsibility of trying but failing out of childish laziness to look after our neglected dog, our love of playing Mario Kart in the basement. We used to sleep side by side in my bedroom when it thundered outside, or when I was too scared by something I’d seen on tv or in a book on Egyptian mummies to sleep alone. But two years makes a difference when you’re eleven and nine, and—immature as I was (as if that’s an excuse)—I was usually not very kind to him or to his sensitivities. He needed a big brother, and I wasn’t always a good one.

More interesting to me as an adult, however, is the racial imaginary that shaped everything about my confused early perception of my mother’s drug habit, as well as the ways in which children in the 1990s were taught about drugs in the first place. The library at my elementary school offered a morbid kids’ picture book warning against illegal drugs (surely sponsored by D.A.R.E), complete with a full-page spread about heroin. As I learned from the book, heroin—or some especially potent strain of it—was sometimes called China White, giving it the air of something dangerously exotic. I was terrified of drugs as a little kid. I learned early on that anyone and everyone who tried “drugs” even once was playing Russian roulette. All of them are designed to kill you, of course, and all eventually will. At eight or nine years old, I had a cherished art set with a huge array of acrylic paint colors in little tubes. The only white one was called “China White Paint,” and I recall being too scared to ever use it. When you’re naïve enough to think your art kit contains exactly one tube of heroin (and not paint the color of porcelain), you avoid it; China White was a deadly substance. And yet somehow, a few years later, its whitish residue covered every hard surface of my home.

Nonetheless, when everything went wrong, neither my brother nor I had any frame of reference for what was happening in front of us. Before we knew it, our mother began to spend almost all her time in bed. Over time she stopped driving us to school (we took a public bus, which is not so bad in itself), she stopped greeting us at home when we returned at the end of the day (somewhat worse), she stopped walking the dog (even worse), and she stopped reliably cooking meals or even regularly stocking the fridge with food (much worse). The compromised normalcy of our dim, underfed family life—the dog messes that always waited to be stepped on, the bitter animosity between my brother and me, the low hum of deprivation—was punctuated occasionally by more dramatic experiences that my brother and I never disclosed to other adults. One day we walked to the bookstore, where my mom disappeared into the bathroom for a very long time and came out barely able to stand up (she sat on the floor nodding in and out of sleep for about an hour before we were able to leave; nobody seemed to notice). She got us into numerous minor car accidents and was somehow never pulled over or arrested. On rare occasions when she managed to take us out to restaurants, she would sometimes let her face descend into her plate.

I had forgotten about China White by the time I was eleven, and yet there was some vague Chineseness about my mom’s addiction that informed the unknowing, immature, and shapeless awareness of our situation in the way my brother and I talked about it. It informed the totally subconscious contempt we had for “Doctor Ching-Chong,” as we called him, even though we had Chinese friends, and even though we were friendly towards him in person. Our house rarely filled up with any kind of food, but those days were marked by strange things in the cupboard that seemed to evidence a serious change taking place: boxes of imported cookies with Chinese characters on them, exotic fruits and vegetables in cans, a bag of lychees here and there, the kind of stuff one gets in Markham on the budget of a welfare mom.

I had come to develop a seething hatred for the secret China of our mother’s private world, having reached a hazy intuition of the foreign place into which our home had transformed once she began to see that doctor. One night at age twelve, I entered my mother’s room to ask for something to eat. She wouldn’t wake up, and for some reason I just busied around with the trinkets cluttering her dresser. My mom loves perfume, and I’d always loved smelling the many bottles that she’d amassed over the years (her favorite at the time was Clinique’s Happy). I ended up knocking a small hand mirror off the surface, and it fell to the floor with a noise. Mom finally woke up in a panic. Dressed in her shabby bathrobe, she wailed and stooped over the mess of powder that she’d hidden under the mirror, now scattered on the hardwood. She tried to pick up her medicine with her hands, but she couldn’t do it, and she forced me out of her room. She emerged downstairs all teary-eyed and defeated and pulled a can of jackfruit out of the pantry—something she must have bought from the grocers in Dr. Chan’s plaza. “Have this,” she said, “I got it special just for you two.” The can was smeared with a light white dust from her fingertips. “It’s Chinese,” she bleated. We refused it.

The notion of opiates as a foreign threat to the Western constitution is a well-documented trope in the development of modern Anglophone culture. I was surely unaware of this in 6^th grade, but the Chinese-immigrant-run opium den is an emblem of Asiatic malice in quite a lot of 19^th-20^th-century literature and cinema. As many historians have argued, opium embodies Anglo-American anxieties surrounding an Eastern challenge to Western hegemony in several examples of writing and mass culture from that period and beyond, whether in The Picture of Dorian Gray or in local news reporting from the early 1900s on the drug-infested blight of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Two empires built on their supremacy in the trade of exotic goods finally meet their match in the Heroin Hot Shot, the Oriental product that kills everyone it touches—except, of course, for the conniving Chinese purveyor who only seems to let himself be exploited as he sits and waits for us all to die. Tik Tok, the product of a Chinese company, has been called “The New Opium.” No less established in the West is the trope of Chinese inscrutability, that China is not just a foreign country but the very quintessence of foreignness as such. Both Chinas converged on my family in the early 2000s, filling everything with the smoke-colored residue of opium and upending our lives in a language we couldn’t understand.

Everything I’ve said about my past demands a few qualifications. My young life was not one of unrelenting misery. Children have a stubborn ability to find joy even in the worst of circumstances. I had a father with evenly split custody over us, and he provided a stable home for half of every week from five years old through high school. Of course, that caused its own confusion, as my brother and I shuttled between mom’s squalor and dad’s pristine bungalow. There, we did our homework, ate well, wore clean clothes, and watched The Simpsons at night over small bowls of candy (we also wondered how much he knew or could have known, and why nobody intervened on our behalf until I was fourteen). My memories from middle school involve a lot more than mom’s addiction. They include things like playing Vice City at my friend’s apartment, walking the dog before we had to give her away, and laughing with my brother at the absurdity of the one year we spent at a heavily-subsidized Hasidic school, where we wore kippot and tzitzit and then returned home to our usual wishy-washy commitment to religious observance as a family that barely kept kosher. My mom also had her many moments of lucidity: she was and still is riotously funny, and when she put her mind to it, she could make delicious meals for us. Life always exceeds trauma, for better or worse.

Besides, I’m far too old to feel stuck like an addict in sixth grade. It’s been twenty-four years since I was eleven, though my mom still abuses opioids and she’s never recovered. I’ve seen her try and fail rehab, and I’ve seen her life unravel further and further with age (which will do that anyway). My brother and I, on the other hand, have grown into self-sustaining grownups. My brother joined the military and he has a son of his own; and because I’m too gay for both of those things, I moved to the USA to complete a PhD at the prestigious university where I met and married the man I love. With a little perspective, I wonder about the effects of stereotyping on how we related to Dr. Chan. In fact, he was totally unlike anyone I’ve ever met—a true parasite who built close relationships with his patients and encouraged them to treat him as a caregiver so dedicated, so necessary, that he was like a family member. We even attended his wedding service; it was the first time I had ever set foot in a church. Given the sheer extent of the opioid epidemic, I assume the vast majority of disgraced Toronto-area doctors are not Chinese at all.

Moreover, I see parallels between our attitude towards Dr. Chan—with our immature misrecognition of him as an icon of a diffuse ethnic malignancy rather than the individual crook he was—and historic attitudes towards my own people. It’s not uncommon for antisemites to view Jews as mendacious purveyors of poison. Oxycontin was the invention of a Jewish-owned American pharma firm, and my brother and I share a morbid joke that we would both be so much better off in life if only we could benefit from the billions of dollars shelled out by Purdue in class-action lawsuits (“my kid needs new shoes yet again,” my brother says constantly as the father of a six-year-old; “where’s my Sackler money??”). There is also a strain of current rightwing social media discourse that refers to examples of crass popular culture—bad tattoos, unhealthy fast food, viral AI videos, UFC, just about everything—as “goyslop,” as though the Jews as a whole have managed to sell mind poison to the gentile masses (the goyim) in order to manipulate the public into…well, in today’s case, a US-Israeli war with Iran. To be fair, Dr. Chan also traded in his own stereotypes about the Jews. One of my most prominent memories of him, other than the surreal experience of being at his wedding, was the day we went to the movies together to see the Tobey Maguire Spiderman. Dr. Chan bought our tickets and got huge buckets of popcorn for my brother and me. I stuffed my face throughout the entire movie while my mother slept in her seat. Dr. Chan teased me that “Jewish people are always eating,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

I love my community, but it must be said that I also felt acutely let down by them. Not all of Jewish Toronto is particularly affluent, but my parents’ friends and our extended family belonged to a comfortably middle-class niche of the city’s two hundred thousand, the niche we fell from. I can only assume that my mom’s addiction, the poverty that surrounded it, and my brother’s and my adolescent maladjustment were enough of a stigma to keep those who might have saved us out of the picture. I consider it a general shortcoming of the middle-class disposition—not something specifically Jewish—that other people’s suffering too often pushes one to stay away from them instead of facing the ugliness of their plight, especially when that plight centers on things as déclassé as drugs and neglect; isn’t avoiding that ugliness exactly why you bought your nice house in North York? But in my case, because we are Jewish, there’s a distinct and comically Jewish character to it all. I remember removing my gold initial ring (a standard gift for Bar Mitzvah boys) from my hand the day Jewish Family and Child Services showed up to our door with a food donation. I didn’t want them to see that we weren’t actually poor, even though I must have been wearing a crappy t-shirt flecked with bleach stains (I also remember hating the condescending little smile from the Nice Jewish Lady who handed over the boxes full of egg noodles and Streits-brand chicken bouillon powder; oh, you poor thing). On my Bar Mitzvah itself, held in an Orthodox synagogue, my mom struggled to stay awake in the women’s section of the small sanctuary, wearing a long and very red dress. “What’s her deal,” my dad’s friend apparently said to him, “she looks like a mailbox.”

I suppose I don’t know exactly how or when I let go of the racism that shaped my childhood hatred of the man who initiated the ongoing slow death of my mother. One possibility is that it was never truly there—that the cultural specificity of Chinatown Markham merely provided a convenient framing for the strangeness of our domestic condition, and that it never drove a true disdain for actual Chinese people. Toronto is a place where “diversity is our strength,” and where the racist jokes once (still?) commonplace among kids nonetheless belied a certain knowing respect for the ordinariness of the different types of people who shared our neighborhoods and schools. I assume that my emergence into moral and intellectual maturity was bound to happen with age, and I’ve had many important experiences that don’t involve my mother’s addiction. But I share with others affected by opioids an intimate familiarity with one of the most widespread evils of the early 21^st century. That evil was embodied, in my limited childhood experience, by one man who spoke with a thick Chinese accent and operated in an ethnic enclave far enough from home. What remains dizzying to me is that the evil of the opioid epidemic—of so many decisions made along the way to engineer, promote, and overprescribe a very obviously dangerous addictive drug—is the product of a system that far exceeds that one man, but that is nonetheless constituted entirely by individual human beings just as singular as he was.