The New York Review Books, which published this edition, describes her book as a semi-autobiographical novel, but Xi Xi (a pen name that is always given in full) would probably shrug. “Dear reader, you’re welcome to categorize it however you’d like; this time, it’s up to you,” she writes in the preface. She even tells us to just read whichever parts suit our fancy: “Perhaps it’s not worth spending too much time reading this book — you’re better off just flipping through a few chapters and choosing the ones that most interest you.”
Disregard Xi Xi’s humility. While the chapters, each with curious titles such as “Thrice Strikin the White Bone Demon” and “Marvelous Tales of Fruits and Vegetables,” can stand alone, it’s worth taking the time to read the book in its entirety and let yourself become enveloped in her world.
We begin in the women’s changing room of a public pool, where Xi Xi, a self-professed avid but clumsy swimmer, stands beside other women, her thoughts alternating between her own mortality and the sensuousness around her. “The pitter-patter of falling water echoed in my ears, and it was as though I could hear the squelching of soap on women’s skin. Supple flesh, water, the sweet scent of soap. When could I go swimming again? I didn’t know. I had no way of guessing, understanding, exploring, or predicting my fate.”
In the chapters that follow, we accompany her into exam rooms and surgical wards, through a bathroom renovation and on long walks. On the day of her biopsy, she brings with her four copies of “Madame Bovary,” in French, Chinese and English, perusing each translation before her doctor interrupts. On another day, she becomes a flaneuse, taking us through both the landmarks and lesser-known passageways of cosmopolitan Hong Kong. She pauses in an arcade, gazes into the shimmering windows of a lingerie shop and wonders, “Is there a lingerie shop that sells bras for only one breast?” Not in this arcade, she decides.
“Mourning a Breast” resists the conventions of the breast cancer memoir. Rather than plotting a singular, heroic journey between biopsy and remission, punctuated by platitudes and metaphors of war, Xi Xi learns to listen.
“My body began to speak more and more frequently, protesting a host of injustices, as though a revolution had begun inside me,” she concedes. She turns to her love of languages and literature, as well as care from friends and community, for support. Along the way, she learns another language — that of the body. “I was body illiterate,” she admits.
Xi Xi’s writing is most affecting when she employs a stream-of-consciousness style, with vivid, dissociative fragments reflecting the disease’s confounding etiology and devastating effects. The morning after her mastectomy, her breast, which she refers to as “my specimen,” is presented to her in a plastic bag at her bedside. Her sentences are jumbled and jarring as she tries to process what she sees. She recalls “Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio,” a compendium of short stories from the 17th century, and the “Heart Sutra” before remembering a serial killer who lived in her neighborhood and kept his victims’ breasts preserved in jars. The paragraph becomes a whirlpool of thoughts as she attempts to reconcile her body and mind.
Xi Xi’s intellect and candor find kinship in the cancer narratives of Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, but her style most closely anticipates that of Anne Boyer, who reckoned with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer in “The Undying,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Like “Mourning a Breast,” Boyer’s book is composed of short sections that push against narrative convention. But where Boyer’s words burn with righteous fury at cancer’s manifold injustices and indignities, Xi Xi offers moments of lightness. In a short chapter called “Non-Stories,” she presents unrelated tidbits about cancer drawn from the news. The last is about a chubby amphibian shaped like a cancer cell, leading some to call it “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 observes with bemusement.
Xi Xi is an endearing writer. Her oeuvre, which contains short stories, novels, poetry and essays, holds a prominent place in the literature of Hong Kong. “Mourning a Breast” is significant because it is one of the first cancer narratives to be written from the perspective of a woman in the Sinophere. “Because it isn’t suitable to let others look, nor is it easy to talk about, it remains unnoticed,” she writes of the illness. “It’s like a disease that only has an implied meaning but lacks any explicit signifiers.” Her book broke the silence at a time when Hong Kong had the highest rates of breast cancer diagnosis in Asia.
Xi Xi was also writing during a pivotal moment in the city’s history. Residents were grappling with the impending handover of the territory from Britain to China in 1997, with many — including Xi Xi’s family doctor — preparing to emigrate. Others expressed their anxiety and grief toward the city’s political future by taking to the streets to support Beijing’s pro-democracy student protesters in 1989. Xi Xi only alludes to these transformative events, but against this political backdrop, the discovery of a malignant, foreign growth in one’s breast could be interpreted as a somatic metaphor for betrayal.
What, in the end, are we to take from Xi Xi’s account? Perhaps what is so remarkable is the simplicity of her message: 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 those, but I do have friends,” she writes. Xi Xi died peacefully of heart failure in late 2022, at 85, surrounded by loved ones. Her voice lives on, reaching out to us as a friend might, generous and kind.
Mimi Cheng is a cultural historian and writer. She is at work on her first book.
Mourning a Breast
By Xi Xi, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley
