Solidarity, not sameness

Walking in the park while recovering from a mastectomy, a woman observes the façade of a slaughterhouse and feels a surge of fellow feeling: “if the world were only divided into those who slaughter and those who are slaughtered, I’d still choose to be slaughtered”.

The woman in question is the narrator of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, a work of autobiographical fiction that grapples with the author’s experiences of breast cancer. A writer with a cult following in Hong Kong, Xi (1937–2022) is often credited with having written the first Chinese-language text to break the taboo surrounding the disease. Originally published in 1992 and now translated into English for the first time, Mourning a Breast is at times disarmingly ludic and formally inventive, as Xi proceeds through a non-linear accumulation of essayistic chapters. From poetic lists and encyclopaedic entries to long narrative paragraphs and rapid-fire dialogue, each chapter finds a form to suit the book’s wide-ranging content.

For all its uniqueness, Mourning a Breast is thick with cultural reference. Searching for a nutrition-dense bread that she imagines will aid her recovery, the narrator playfully compares her quest to both Indiana Jones and Liu Yu’s thirteenth-century Record of an Embassy to Regions in the West. Her vision and hearing are layered with the words of others: cataloguing the women arrayed around her in hospital beds as she recovers from surgery, the narrator observes that “everyone Simone de Beauvoir had written about in The Second Sex was gathered here”.

Xi’s narrator is a translator – she arrives at the hospital laden with books and, while awaiting her surgery, takes advantage of the wide hospital bed to lay out different copies of Madame Bovary, eager to investigate the variations across translations. Her understanding of her own bodily life is also one of vexed interpretation: “After my tumor, my body continued to signal SOS … I had no idea how to decipher it. I was body illiterate”. This “illiteracy” has its analogue in the inherent limitations of translation. “Don’t assume that I am searching for the ultimate, perfect translation”, she admonishes the reader. “I am not. There’s never a fixed and eternal ‘absolute spirit’ in books.”

Reading Xi’s description of the hospital ward as a manifestation of de Beauvoir’s multifaceted cast of women, or watching her narrator navigate the intersection between eastern and western systems of medical knowledge, it can be tempting to hold up Mourning a Breast as an emblem of the global women’s health movement. Grassroots movements for transnational health solidarity were gaining traction throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and some historians of the movement see its culmination in the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, just three years after the publication of the book. Like the activists in the movement Xi is concerned with dispelling shame and misinformation surrounding breast cancer and, even as her narrator anxiously develops new health regimens, she remains alive to the structural causes of the disease, including the “black smoke billowing from chimneys / exhaust puffing from cars”.

Yet solidarity can only go so far, and Xi Xi also cautions against assumptions of any seamless movement across languages and cultures. Interpreting the doctor’s announcements on behalf of a woman who is hard of hearing, her narrator begins to muse on her attempts to translate a story from Spanish into English. She feels she has mischaracterized a key relationship, unable to access its precise qualities. “One benefit of learning to translate another language”, she reflects, “is that it teaches us that beyond certain superficial common understandings among humans, there are deeper aspects that cannot be translated.” One may, in other words, momentarily find solidarity with the slaughtered of the world, but not sameness. Jennifer Feeley’s translation opens English-language readers to the pleasures of a novel that treats fissures in our understanding not as failures, but as sites for contemplation and experiment.

Emma Cohen is a writer and PhD student living in Chicago

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