Xi Xi’s Wholly Original Memoir of Breast Cancer
She also directs our attention to the book’s second arc: the protagonist’s rapprochement with her body. Until her sickness, she reflects, “I never really knew I had a body. The books I’d read had focused on caring for the soul. As a result, the body was completely set aside, and while my soul had seemingly made no progress, my body had secretly deteriorated.”
At first, the narrator tries hard to hide in literature, though her goal is more to avoid her body than to care for her soul. When she checks into the hospital for her biopsy, she brings Madame Bovary in French, English, and Chinese in order to compare translations (the English one, she sniffs, is “dreadful”). But, unsurprisingly, she can’t focus, and sets the novel aside to concentrate on her new surroundings and just-as-new anxiety. After the operation, though, she goes back to books in her mind, managing the disgust she feels at having to wear a pan to catch drainage from her wound by deciding she’s like Santiago Nasar, the main character of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, who ends the novel with his own intestines in his hands. But Santiago dies—it’s right there in the title—and Xi Xi’s narrator is diagnosed with cancer. She tries once more to take refuge in literature after her mastectomy, turning to the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, but in its myths of one-legged ghosts and headless, nipple-less deities, she sees an unwelcome reflection. “I was a monster,” she thinks. “I’d lost a breast—I was a monster formed by a lack of organs.”
Yet the same curiosity that leads her into books from across continents and centuries leads her toward her new physical self. Despite her distress at her mastectomy, she marvels at the taut, leakproof stitches keeping the skin of her chest together. She sees the existence of stitches as both a sign of tremendous human progress and proof that the “human body is extraordinary … a true heavenly robe without any seams.” Before long, she’s emerging from her apartment, walking and exercising, gradually adjusting not only to the rhythms of recovery but to her new interest in caring for her body. As she goes through radiation, she concentrates on her clothes, her diet, her physical relationships to her doctors. She wants to know if the surgeon who did her mastectomy saw her as a whole being or just “bones, tendons, and flesh,” and she’s pleased when a class of medical students comes to examine her. Her surgery is only months in the past, but already, she has changed enough that the lesson simultaneously makes her feel “as though I had another body, as though I were detached” and offers her a chance to “practice getting to know myself.” By the end of the book, she’s still very much in need of that practice. Mourning a Breast hardly engages with breasts until its closing chapter, a survey of breasts in art history. Xi Xi has her protagonist discuss pyramids, Madonnas, and a Henry Moore nude with concave breasts as proxies for talking about the one she’s lost, which still remains somewhat beyond her. Her relationship to her body has come a long way, but she’s not fully inhabiting it yet.
