Mourning a Breast – Xi Xi

[New York Review Books; 2024]

Tr. from the traditional Chinese by Jennifer Feeley

In the autumn of 1989 in Hong Kong, you’re showering in the public swimming pool’s changing room when you discover a “peanut-sized” lump in your breast. When the tumor’s cancerous malignancy becomes clear, a mastectomy deprives you of your right breast—a cherished part of yourself, perhaps your most vital, depending on your gender identification and degree of self-possession. How can your psyche heal from this physical wound? How can you mourn your breast?

Over thirty chapters of disparate lengths and forms, Xi Xi 西西’s Mourning a Breast (哀悼乳房) sifts through our narrator’s experience with breast cancer. Didactically, a significant section of this digressive, textual dance spans the time between our narrator’s discovery of her cancer to her “optimal recuperation.” It encompasses her radiation treatment in a public hospital basement as well as her tai chi practice in an “athletic field by the sea,” “lingering among trees and flowers.” “If after reading this book,” Xi Xi writes in the playful preface, “you begin taking better care of your health and paying attention to the various signals your body emits, then it won’t have been written in vain.”

Yet other chapters in this work—to avoid calling it autofiction, a memoir, or a novel—embroider impish, scintillating divergences into the narrative. Xi Xi incorporates references to a personal canon from Latin America to imperial China, including Gabriel García Márquez, Simone de Beauvoir, Akira Kurosawa, and Lin Daiyu, a character from Dream of the Red Chamber. Her narrator ponders analyses of translations of Madame Bovary, traces the artistic evolution of representations of the breast (with images!), and relates freestyle, tagless dialogues between the narrator and her friends and doctors:

How may I help you?

Oh, there’s a lump in my breast.

I found it three days ago.

Maybe it’s hormones.

It’ll probably dissipate in a few days.

All right then, come back in two weeks.

Two weeks won’t make a difference.

The ironic implacability of those “two weeks,” lost to the medical system and underpinned by Xi Xi’s sense of human fatality, is a minor call to mourning in a majorly lively work.

Mourning depends on a change in the status of things: the loss or disappearance of a thing, into the past, into an untouchable space. Where does your breast go when it’s outside of you? Xi Xi alienates her narrator’s amputation as if in suspended animation: “Inside a plastic bag, there was a floating mass that resembled a cluster of shredded cotton wadding: my breast.” Published in 1992, the cover of the original Chinese edition of Mourning a Breast features an image of the Venus of Milo, single-breasted, with a transverse scar “spanning several ribs” of the same length as a “zipper” that our speaker had once “added . . . to a skirt.” The fracture between our narrator’s breast and her body, sewed into her very being through the “twenty-five stitches” of her mastectomy scar, is only one cypher of change.

Another change is that of her relationship to routines, the particular tablings of time and space and other people that contribute to constituting a self. B.C., before cancer: frequent swims, meetings with friends, cooking for her mother, and endless reading. After diagnosis: daily visits to the hospital, “two or three hours roundtrip” by bus; tai chi three times a week; and slow, relentless recovery from radiation. Mourning is a recognition of change, and a processual reckoning with nostalgia; in Mourning a Breast, Xi Xi testifies to the tectonic labor of grieving, learning, renewing, reviving.

Yet Xi Xi is the narrative self—the empathetic, sweeping “I”—and her experience of breast cancer is historically real. As a retired schoolteacher, she has sufficient time to ponder the disjunction of her self before and after her cancer diagnosis, navigating between newly necessary knowledge and old interests, all equally relevant to Mourning a Breast’s textual fabric. When she writes of Gustave Flaubert that “the most profound function of [his] use of italics [in Madame Bovary] is to stealthily shift the narrator’s role . . . to indicate explicitly a change in speaker,” she forewarns the reader of shifts in the narrative. Though the speaker doesn’t appear to change, Xi Xi moves from the cancer testimonial to delightfully intertextual musings on translation, Chinese medicine, the male gaze, and all kinds of discussions under the sun.

In a single striking section, “Butcher Ding,” she weaves her narrative with cues from Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, a slaughterhouse in Hung Hom, the sword techniques of tai chi, and Taoist philosophy. Yet she doubts herself: “In [the surgeon’s] mind, was I a person, or was I just a tumor?” If Xi Xi is “just a tumor,” then Mourning a Breast is “just” an autofictional novel and not a spliced, stitched, superimposed narrative of change, a human map of emotion and art threaded onto the lived continuum of experiencing cancer.

The pleasure of reading Mourning a Breast depends on the relation between Xi Xi’s experience and the expression of her language, writing to poeticize and play. The inviting compassion of her voice clarifies this from the outset: “It’s just that the life of the modern person is so hectic, and work is demanding. In your free time, take a walk in the country or by the sea. . . .  Perhaps it’s not worth spending too much time reading this book.” While precious about her craft, she isn’t precious about perceptions of herself. The narrative’s freewheeling structure invites the reader to “choose their own adventure,” and one of her prompts to the reader reads as follows: “The next chapter describes a foolish person doing arithmetic . . . If you’re not in a good mood, don’t bother reading and just skip over it.”

When Mourning A Breast devolves into fabulation, or away from factual exposition by any means, it is the author’s love for language and invention that impels it, not a formal need to fabricate fiction. For instance, Xi Xi dedicates an entire chapter, “Flipping Through the Dictionary,” to punning on the “mal-”: “A malamute is a large dog breed. It is not a malady that renders one unable to speak. Malacology is a branch of zoology that studies mollusks, not maladies  . . . The word ‘recovery’ is entirely unrelated to any malady.”

In the prism of Xi Xi’s love for languages—not only as a writer, but a translator into Chinese—recovery is an act of translation, a careful listening to “the body’s language.” Before her experience with cancer, writes Xi Xi, “I was body illiterate,” yet “understanding others” and our own bodies “also helps us to know ourselves.” Mourning a Breast is a guide: to breast cancer, to grief and joy, to myths and stories; to Hong Kong, to Xi Xi, and to yourself, through the mirror of her life. It’s certainly far richer than the “semi-autobiographical novel” that the New York Review Books markets it as.

Jennifer Feeley’s skill in conveying Xi Xi’s substantive and linguistic raptures is incredible. The sequence on “mal-” is evidence enough, though Feeley’s insightful endnotes—unintrusive, generously knowledgeable —add context to Mourning a Breast’s digressive texture. In an extensive paragraph, Xi Xi expounds upon the etymology of certain Chinese ideograms related to sickness, demanding Feeley to describe the intricacies of written Chinese for the English reader. “From a pictographic viewpoint, the Chinese character for cancer [癌] literally evokes the spine-chilling image of white bones piled on mountains and hills.” It would take a translator as magnanimous as Jennifer Feeley to translate a writer as complex and open-hearted as Xi Xi; Feeley also translated Xi Xi’s wonderful poetry, Not Written Words, in 2016. From Hong Kong Chinese into English, Feeley’s translations telescope Xi Xi’s awe for life and language across prose and poetry, fact and fiction.

This awe for life mirrors Audre Lorde’s in her autobiographical, non-fiction Cancer Journals, published in 1980. Both Lorde and Xi Xi discovered a cancerous tumor in their right breast; Lorde in 1978 and Xi in 1989. Both, in New York City and Hong Kong, were wheeled into sterile operating rooms for biopsies and mastectomies, transforming their chests into an “empty plate” (Xi Xi) or a “strange flat plain” (Lorde). Both wrote their testimonies in an act of honesty, to educate and engage readers in the discourses of stigma, grief, pain, and prostheses. In The Cancer Journals, Lorde is radiantly clear: “May these words serve as encouragement for other women to speak and to act out of our experiences with cancer and with other threats of death.” While Xi Xi’s take is less specific, less activistic, the same aim animates her writing: “Clinging to ignorance is also an incurable disease  . . . The term ‘mourning’ actually suggests that while we can’t undo the past, we can focus on the future and hope for rebirth.”

Much in the same way that Lorde superhumanly honed Black feminist and lesbian writing, Xi Xi is a canonical craftswoman of Hong Kong literature. Over her lifetime, from 1937 to 2022, she published nine full-length novels; poetry, essay, and short story collections; and a dazzling number of newspaper columns. Where The Cancer Journals and Mourning a Breast diverge is in their tones, moods, and political aims. Unlike the former, the latter never discusses the dynamics of activism in the language of reclaiming power; Xi Xi’s activism is quieter, subtly inscribed in Mourning a Breast’s formal substance. (In a discussion of architecture: “With so many glass ceilings, I’m afraid there are a lot of barriers to break.”)  Despite this sensitivity, Xi Xi’s acute awareness of her local and transnational cultural contexts, in then-British Hong Kong, underpins her entire corpus:

So many major events had happened in the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen: Rostropovich played the cello at the foot of the wall, girls gave flowers to the soldiers at the fallen wall, people took home bricks as souvenirs, and Bernstein conducted orchestras from East and West Germany that played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” What an inspiring event this was—the wall dividing Berlin into Eastern and Western Depots had fallen! However, the Gulf War erupted in the Middle East, resembling another Crusade . . .  The Israeli-Palestine conflict remained an inextricable knot. Israel had long been a nation reborn, but where was Palestine’s land?

Suddenly, the Soviet Union had disappeared. Watching TV every day, one moment I felt joy, the next, sorrow. I didn’t know if the many Eastern Depots in the world were dying out, or if they were starting anew.

Derived from the name of the “notorious Ming dynasty secret police,” active between 1420 and 1644, the “Eastern Depot” is Xi Xi’s appellation for any kind of oppression. Cancer, its recurrences, the conditions of old age, authoritarian governance, and even carnivory (“Placing a living creature into cold water set to boil, so that at first they feel the warmth, and then begin to scald, writhing and struggling . . .”): Xi Xi’s “Eastern Depot” entails all these individual and collective modes of entrapment, and comes to metaphorize a kind of prison for the human soul, a suppression of life’s creative potentials. Incidentally, about two-and-a-half months before Xi Xi’s fateful shower in the public swimming pool, another instance of the “Eastern Depot” culminated in the 1989 June Fourth massacre in Beijing, where a military crackdown murdered hundreds of peaceful pro-democracy student activists.

Since before 1989, this “Eastern Depot” directly to the north has arguably placed Hong Kong “into cold water set to boil.” (To refrain from naming this Eastern Depot is to avoid centering it once again in a narrative where it does not belong.) Hong Kong’s residents and citizens—of which Xi Xi was one, from the age of twelve to her death at eighty-five—“at first felt the warmth” of the Depot’s anti-democratic initiatives, “then began to scald” as the water bubbled into the National Security Laws of June 2020 and March 2024, silencing any critical discourse and open dialogue. Some of the most brilliant recent fiction translations from Hong Kong—Dorothy Tse’s Owlish, translated by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo, 2023) and Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless, also translated by Jennifer Feeley (Feminist Press, 2024)—have directly examined this process of boiling, in magical,  psychological, and dystopian modes of subversion. But reading Mourning a Breast against the current of Hong Kong’s political headlines is a comfort for the reader who’d like to lift Hong Kong’s pot off the stove.

In that sense, Feeley’s version of Mourning a Breast, published thirty-two years after the original text, is as much a translation through time as it is through language and culture. For Hongkongers from the post-1997 generation, Mourning a Breast reads as a historical document. The city Xi Xi knew now belongs to the past, subject to radically different conditions of life that no longer obtain under its current public structures. Yet Mourning a Breast’s new existence in English testifies to the history and wealth of Hong Kong’s literary culture, to the diversity of its lived experiences, for those within and beyond the city. In the wake of bone-deep authoritarian trauma, it demystifies and de-others life in the city, and enacts the possibilities of living joyfully despite the silencing of the boil.      

Of the public pool where she initially detects her breast tumor, Xi Xi writes, “I had often wondered who designed the pool changing room. A good structure is never as simple as an attractive exterior. What matters is the interior space, the feelings of those moving around inside: Are they safe, comfortable, at ease?” Through Feeley’s delightful translation, Xi Xi invites you into the “interior space” of her experience with cancer. In the place where there had once been a “peach tree,” now a “sunken valley,” yes, you are safe, comfortable, at ease. In the text of her breast, you can “live life to the fullest . . . doing something good for the community, no matter how small.” That is, perhaps, what mourning means to Xi Xi. In writing her cancer, her community, and her city through the multiple languages of her self, she hones in on a future imaginary, a renewed hope for rebirth, stronger than any amputation.

Michelle Chan Schmidt is an assistant editor for fiction at Asymptote and a 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop. Her creative and critical writing has been published in La Piccioletta Barca, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and Asymptote. She updates on her writing and editorial work here.