Mourning a Breast
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
By Xi Xi, part of the first generation of writers raised in Hong Kong, a wise and amiably written book of autobiographical fiction on the author’s experience with breast cancer—from diagnosis to treatment to recovery—and her passage from a life lived through the mind into a life lived through the body.
In 1989, the acclaimed Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast is a disarmingly honest and inventive account of the author’s experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her putting away a bathing suit. As the routine pleasure of swimming is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi’s mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she describes what she is going through; finds consolation in art, literature, and cinema; and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as one of the first Chinese-language books to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. It is a radical novel about creating in the midst of mourning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superb work of autofiction from Xi (1937–2022), which was originally published in 1992, melds an account of the author's breast cancer with a reflection on the subjective nature of translation. While showering one day, Xi discovers a lump in her breast, which she initially takes to be a hive, though she's soon diagnosed with breast cancer. She checks into the hospital for a mastectomy, and while awaiting the procedure, she compares three translations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary—two in English and one in Chinese—and is struck by their varying interpretations of the novel. In Xi's hands, the act of translation becomes a metaphor for the work of doctors and vice versa, as she considers that even though doctors are experts at interpreting the body's signals, they don't always reach the same conclusions as to diagnoses or treatments ("Dare I say that it is impossible to have a single, absolute translation, whether now or in the future?"). These insights inform Xi's own misreading of her body and her consideration of the different types of treatment available—she compares the "benevolent" plant-based Chinese medicine to the "slaughterhouse" of Western surgeries, the latter of which she embraces as her best hope for survival. Xi's matter-of-fact prose and in-depth analysis are deeply satisfying. This is a must.
