[REVIEW] “A Series of Cyanotypes: Xi Xi’s 𝑀𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎 𝐵𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡” by Marsha McDonald

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Xi Xi (author), Jennifer Feeley (translator), Mourning a Breast, New York Review Books, 2024. 320 pgs.

From the preface to the final pages, Mourning a Breast, by the late Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (1938–2022), is a deeply personal, stylistically modernist examination of her own experience with breast cancer and its impact on her life. Upon its initial publication in 1992, the China Times hailed it as one of the best ten books of the year. It is translated here by Jennifer Feeley, with sensitivity to the author’s shifting narrative voice and mixed genres, her remarkable erudition, and her wonderful sense of humour. Mourning a Breast remains an important book by one of Hong Kong’s greatest contemporary writers. It deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.

The book recounts the author’s discovery of a small lump in her breast. In simple, clear, and exacting language, she recounts her long ordeal in overcoming cancer. While doctors consult her, and each other, after her biopsy, assessing and assembling her treatment and recovery plan, she compares Chinese and English translations of Flaubert (Xi Xi knew English and French), discovers the etymologies in several languages of the word for cancer, delves deeply into Chinese literature. 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.

Xi Xi (西西 also known as Sai Sai, penname of Cheung Yin 張彥) was a generous and empathic artist. In this book, she offers suggestions illness for the uninterested or anxious, as well as detours on life and art. She knows she does not know. How can she predict what chapters her readers will want to spend time with, especially those also diagnosed with breast cancer? She eschews linear storytelling, often leaving witty messages at the ends of chapters suggesting alternative routes. She invites her readers to leap forward, go back, skip, and skim. She encourages them to reassemble the work into a form that resonates with them. She intends her book to be used as a moveable template—something, especially for cancer patients, to resource and personalise. By doing so, she disrupts passive reading and invites engagement. She accomplishes this with compassion and without sounding patronising, as well as a generous dose of wit and good fun.

In one of the book’s chapters, entitled “Looking Good”, Xi Xi gives many examples of how women have been  idealised. They are symbols of purity, modesty, abundance, desire, warriors, and goddesses, as well as inspiring breast-like architectural forms. From the long world history of visual art, images of female breasts and bodies, well-known and unsurprising, are paraded before us. There is an exception. From a Ming Dynasty medical manual, she includes a single, beautifully drawn but heart-breaking print of a woman with a diseased breast. Xi Xi points out that the ideal has met the real in a textbook.

It must be said though that images of disease and the scarred bodies of survivors, outside of medicine, do exist in antique as well as contemporary art. Such images, though critically acclaimed, often remain aesthetically outré, disturbing, and very difficult to look at. Breast cancer and its scars are an especially effective reminder of this. Artist Hannah Wilke’s images of her mother and David Jay’s remarkable series, “The Scar Project” have envisioned this particular illness as part of life and art. In Jay’s work, recovery from breast cancer signifies not only resilience, but also the beauty found by accepting a changed body. Yet many of us continue to live, as our ancestors before us, surrounded by images of a comforting immortality—timelessly “perfect” bodies. Disease, after all, is a sign of mortality. 

But Xi Xi isn’t interested in dying, or in perfection. She does want to share the arduous journey that led her to a healthier body and a more balanced life. Cancer required her to abandon her bad habits. She had to seek ways to nurture and care, to reacquaint herself with her body. She understood that, for her, this must ultimately lead to a sustainable, life-long realignment, where her intellectual life shared time and respect with her physical self. Xi Xi embraces such a daunting commitment with humour and grace.

In contemporary literature, autopathologies are flourishing, even encouraged in many modern cultures. The impression Mourning a Breast left with me isn’t really of a breast cancer story, which it is, or of a blueprint for treatment and recovery, which it also is. I found the book more like a series of cyanotypes, those lovely blue one-off photographic solar-silhouetted photographs. For me, Xi Xi describes her cancer and recovery in the same way she approaches translation. I view this book as an object of creative process, a compilation of comparative communications, giving a factual narrative of her illness, but also a ruminant self-portrait of the artist herself. Reading Mourning a Breast is no guarantee that another person will have the same experience of, or get the same results, from cancer treatment. Xi Xi’s inspirited account reminds us that while knowledge is a powerful connector, experiencing illness remains a uniquely singular voyage.

How to cite: McDonald, Marsha. “A Series of Cyanotypes: Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 May 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/05/23/mourning-a-breast.

Marsha McDonald lives in Vilar de Andorinho, Portugal. An artist and writer, she works and exhibits between North America, Europe, and Asia. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, Mary Nohl (travel), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Gallery 224 Artservancy (artist working within conserved land in Wisconsin USA), and a New York Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Otoliths (Australia), The Drum and The Cantabrigian (Cambridge MA), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cha (Hong Kong), and La Piccioleta Barca (Milan). She has collaborated with artists and writers in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, North America, and Japan. In 2024, she will be an arts resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and Studio Kura in Kyushu, Japan. Visit her website for more information. [All contributions by Marsha McDonald.]