Book review: “Mourning a Breast” by Xi Xi

The New York Review Books, which published this edition, describes her book as a semi-autobiographical novel, but Xi Xi (a pseudonym always given in full) would probably shrug. “Dear reader, you are welcome to categorize it however you like; this time it’s up to you,” she writes in the foreword. She even tells us to just read the parts we like: “Perhaps it’s not worth spending too much time reading this book—you’d be better off just skimming through a few chapters and choosing the ones that interest you most.”

Ignore Xi Xi’s modesty. Although the chapters, each with odd titles like “Strike the White Bone Demon Three Times” and “Wonderful Stories of Fruits and Vegetables,” can stand alone, it is worth taking the time to read the book in in its entirety and let yourself be enveloped by its world.

We begin in the women’s locker room of a public swimming pool, where Xi Xi, a self-professed but inept swimmer, stands among other women, her mind vacillating between her own mortality and the sensuality around her. “The splash of falling water echoed in my ears, and it was as if I could hear the smacking of soap on women’s skin. Soft flesh, water, the sweet scent of soap. When would I be able to swim again? I didn’t know. I had no way of guessing, understanding, exploring, or predicting my fate.”

In the following chapters, we accompany her into examination rooms and operating theatres, as she renovates a bathroom and on long walks. On the day of her biopsy, she brings four copies of Madame Bovary, in French, Chinese and English, and reads through each translation before her doctor interrupts her. On another day, she becomes a flaneur, leading us through the landmarks and lesser-known alleys of cosmopolitan Hong Kong. She pauses in a passage, looks into the shimmering windows of a lingerie shop and asks herself: “Is there a lingerie shop that sells bras for just one breast?” Not in this passage, she decides.

Mourning a Breast defies the conventions of breast cancer memoirs. Rather than depicting a singular, heroic journey between biopsy and remission, punctuated by platitudes and war metaphors, Xi Xi learns to listen.

“My body started to speak more and more frequently, protesting against a multitude of injustices, as if a revolution had started inside me,” she admits. She seeks support from her love of languages ​​and literature, as well as from the care of friends and community. In doing so, she learns another language – that of the body. “I was physically uneducated,” she admits.

Xi Xi’s writing is at its most poignant when she uses a stream of consciousness style, with vivid, dissociative fragments that reflect the confusing etiology and devastating effects of the disease. The morning after her mastectomy, her breast, which she refers to as “my specimen,” is presented to her in a plastic bag beside her bed. Her sentences are jumbled and jarring as she tries to process what she sees. She recalls “Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio,” a 17th-century compendium of short stories, and the “Heart Sutra” before remembering a serial killer who lived in her neighborhood and kept his victims’ breasts in jars. The paragraph becomes a whirlwind of thoughts as she tries to reconcile her mind and body.

Xi Xi’s intellect and candor are akin to the cancer stories of Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, but her style most closely resembles that of Anne Boyer, who grappled with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer in “The Undying,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Like “Mourning a Breast,” Boyer’s book is made up of short paragraphs that buck narrative conventions. But where Boyer’s words burn with righteous anger at cancer’s multiple injustices and indignities, Xi Xi offers moments of levity. In a short chapter titled “Non-Stories,” she presents unrelated anecdotes about cancer from the news. The last one is about a chubby amphibian shaped like a cancer cell, which is why some people call it the “cancer cell frog.” “The name is weird, but the frog itself looks fascinating and cute. It’s flat and round, like a red bean paste pancake,” she notes, amused.

Xi Xi is a lovely writer. Her work, which includes short stories, novels, poems and essays, occupies a prominent place in Hong Kong literature. Mourning a Breast is significant because it is one of the first cancer narratives written from the perspective of a Sinophere woman. “Because it is not appropriate to let others look at it, and because it is not easy to talk about it either, it goes unnoticed,” she writes of the disease. “It is like a disease that has only implicit meanings but no explicit meanings.” Her book broke the silence at a time when Hong Kong had the highest breast cancer diagnosis rate in Asia.

Xi Xi also wrote at a crucial time in the city’s history. Residents were grappling with the impending handover of the territory from Britain to China in 1997, and many – including Xi Xi’s family doctor – were preparing to emigrate. Others expressed their fear and sadness about the city’s political future by taking to the streets in support of Beijing’s pro-democracy student protests in 1989. Xi Xi only alludes to these momentous events, but against this political backdrop, the discovery of a malignant, foreign tumor in the breast could be interpreted as a somatic metaphor for betrayal.

Ultimately, what should we take away from Xi Xi’s account? Perhaps it is the simplicity of her message that is so remarkable: take good care of yourself and those around you. “What do I have compared to others in this world? Wealth, good looks, knowledge, health? I have none of these, but I have friends,” she writes. Xi Xi died peacefully of heart failure in late 2022 at the age of 85, surrounded by her loved ones. Her voice lives on, reaching out to us as a friend would, generous and kind.

Mimi Cheng is a cultural historian and writer. She is working on her first book.

By Xi Xi, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley