Mourning a Breast

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 Hong Kong cult classic writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer and began writing in order to make sense of her diagnosis and treatment. Mourning a Breast, published two and a half years later, is a disarmingly honest and deeply personal account of the author’s experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery.

The book opens with her gently rolling up a swimsuit. A beginning swimmer, she loves going to the pool, eavesdropping on conversations in the changing room, shopping for swimsuits. As this routine pleasure 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. In a conversational, even humorous, manner, she describes her previous blinkered life of the mind before she came into her body and learned its language.

Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she coaxes and confesses, confronts society’s failings, and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as the first Chinese language book to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. A radical and generous book about creating in the midst of mourning.

Xi Xi (1937-2022) was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong in 1950. Over the course of her career, she wrote several books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as numerous screenplays and newspaper and magazine columns. In 2019, she became the first writer from Hong Kong to win Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, and her literary career was the subject of the 2015 documentary film My City. Upon its initial publication in China in 1992, Mourning a Breast was named by the China Times as one of the best ten books of the year.

Jennifer Feeley was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship in 2019 to translate Mourning a Breast. Also the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, she holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and currently serves as a part-time Faculty Mentor in the International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.