Mourning a Breast - Xi Xi

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.

“As a patient, she will read—and share with her readers—factual accounts of the disease she is afflicted with. As an artist, she will develop intellectual pathways between treatment, recovery, and culture, creatively processing, or pausing from, what is happening to her body.” — Marsha McDonald, Cha Journal

“Mourning a Breast engages an innovative mix of writing drawn from multiple genres and disciplines, all centered on the exploration of an unwelcome sign—a tumor inside a breast. Xi Xi transports us from the technique of stitching skin to the process of splicing film for an experimental movie, and moves freely between her post-surgery feelings about her renovated bathroom and a public debate on the architectural design of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Xi Xi would be delighted to read Feeley’s attentive and even playful translation, especially given that translation is one of the book’s key motifs. A brilliant reader of her own illness, Xi Xi regards a literary work, a person’s body, and the earth itself in need of continuous translation and interpretation.” — Dorothy Tse