New York Evaluate Books, which printed this version, describes her e book as a semi-autobiographical novel, however Xi Xi (a pen identify that’s all the time given in full) would in all probability shrug. “Expensive reader, you’re welcome to categorize it nevertheless you’d like; this time, it’s as much as you,” she writes within the preface. She even tells us to simply learn whichever elements swimsuit our fancy: “Maybe it’s not value spending an excessive amount of time studying this e book — you’re higher off simply flipping by way of a number of chapters and selecting those that the majority curiosity you.”
Disregard Xi Xi’s humility. Whereas the chapters — every with curious titles comparable to “Thrice Strikin the White Bone Demon” and “Marvelous Tales of Fruits and Greens” — can stand alone, it’s value taking the time to learn the e book in its entirety and let your self turn out to be enveloped in her world.
We start within the ladies’s altering room of a public pool, the place Xi Xi, a self-professed avid however clumsy swimmer, stands beside different ladies, her ideas alternating between her personal mortality and the sensuousness round her. “The pitter-patter of falling water echoed in my ears, and it was as if I may hear the squelching of cleaning soap on ladies’s pores and skin. Supple flesh, water, the candy scent of cleaning soap. When may I am going swimming once more? I didn’t know. I had no means of guessing, understanding, exploring, or predicting my destiny.”
Within the chapters that observe, we accompany her into examination rooms and surgical wards, by way of a toilet renovation and on lengthy walks. On the day of her biopsy, she brings together with her 4 copies of “Madame Bovary,” in French, Chinese language and English, perusing every translation earlier than her physician interrupts. On one other day, she turns into a flaneuse, taking us by way of each the landmarks and lesser-known passageways of cosmopolitan Hong Kong. She pauses in an arcade, gazes into the shimmering home windows of a lingerie store and wonders, “Is there a lingerie store that sells bras for just one breast?” Not on this arcade, she decides.
“Mourning a Breast” resists the conventions of the breast most cancers memoir. Slightly than plotting a singular, heroic journey between biopsy and remission, punctuated by platitudes and metaphors of struggle, Xi Xi learns to hear.
“My physique started to talk an increasing number of regularly, protesting a bunch of injustices, as if a revolution had begun inside me,” she writes. She turns to her love of languages and literature, in addition to care from buddies and group, for assist. Alongside the best way, she learns one other language — that of the physique. “I used to be physique illiterate,” she admits.
Xi Xi’s writing is most affecting when she employs a stream-of-consciousness model, with vivid, dissociative fragments reflecting the illness’s confounding etiology and devastating results. The morning after her mastectomy, her breast, which she refers to as “my specimen,” is offered to her in a plastic bag at her bedside. Her sentences are jumbled and jarring as she tries to course of what she sees. She remembers “Unusual Tales From the Liaozhai Studio,” a compendium of brief tales from the seventeenth century, and the “Coronary heart Sutra” earlier than remembering a serial killer who lived in her neighborhood and saved his victims’ breasts preserved in jars. The paragraph turns into a whirlpool of ideas as she makes an attempt to reconcile her physique and thoughts.
Xi Xi’s mind and candor discover kinship within the most cancers narratives of Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, however her model most intently anticipates that of Anne Boyer, who reckoned with a very aggressive type of breast most cancers in “The Timeless,” which received a Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Like “Mourning a Breast,” Boyer’s e book consists of brief sections that push towards narrative conference. However the place Boyer’s phrases burn with righteous fury at most cancers’s manifold injustices and indignities, Xi Xi gives moments of lightness. In a brief chapter known as “Non-Tales,” she presents unrelated tidbits about most cancers drawn from the information. The final is a couple of chubby amphibian formed like a most cancers cell, main some to name it “most cancers cell frog.” “The identify is bizarre, however the frog itself seems fascinating and cute. It’s flat and spherical, like a pink bean paste pancake,” she observes with amusement.
Xi Xi is an endearing author. Her oeuvre, which incorporates brief tales, novels, poetry and essays, holds a outstanding place within the literature of Hong Kong. “Mourning a Breast” is critical as a result of it is likely one of the first most cancers narratives to be written from the angle of a girl within the Sinophere. “As a result of it isn’t appropriate to let others look, neither is it straightforward to speak about, it stays unnoticed,” she writes of the sickness. “It’s like a illness that solely has an implied that means however lacks any specific signifiers.” Her e book broke the silence at a time when Hong Kong had the very best charges of breast most cancers analysis in Asia.
Xi Xi was additionally writing throughout a pivotal second within the metropolis’s historical past. Residents have been grappling with the approaching handover of the territory from Britain to China in 1997, with many — together with Xi Xi’s household physician — getting ready to to migrate. Others expressed their anxiousness and grief concerning the metropolis’s political future by taking to the streets to assist Beijing’s pro-democracy pupil protesters in 1989. Xi Xi solely alludes to those transformative occasions, however towards this political backdrop, the invention of a malignant, international development in a single’s breast might be interpreted as a somatic metaphor for betrayal.
What, ultimately, are we to take from Xi Xi’s account? Maybe what’s so outstanding is the simplicity of her message: Take excellent care of your self and people round you. “What do I’ve in comparison with others on this world? Wealth, attractiveness, information, well being? I’ve none of these, however I do have buddies,” she writes. Xi Xi died peacefully of coronary heart failure in late 2022, at 85, surrounded by family members. Her voice lives on, reaching out to us as a good friend would possibly, beneficiant and type.
Mimi Cheng is a cultural historian and author. She is at work on her first e book.
Mourning a Breast
By Xi Xi, translated from Chinese language by Jennifer Feeley
New York Evaluate Books. 313 pp. $18.95
