NOT JUST A BREAST CANCER MEMOIR
Which of us has not lost someone to cancer? A late Chinese writer of immense depth of perception lays it out in her memoir about cancer, the body, environment, stigma, medicine and literature.
A few years ago I lost a friend to breast cancer. I realized, upon her sudden death, how much there was still left to say. This week’s book in translation from the Chinese world invites us to think about the disease in ways we may not. There are some chapters in the work that put us on a voyage into a landscape we think we know because of what we hear from a close family member or a friend who was a victim of the disease. We really do not get it, however. Until I read this book, I realized I hadn’t traveled into the mind of someone who has been ravaged by news of a breast malignancy or of the inevitability of a mastectomy.
Written by Xi Xi (pronounced Sai Sai), and translated with so much clarity and feeling by Jennifer Feeley, Mourning A Breast also took me on a journey into my body, one that I’ve seen enough of for the last sixty-two years. Of late I’m also painfully aware there’s so much of it to see and hence, at nice events, I try to hide most of it in yards of the prettiest silk.
Xi Xi peels off the layers of our flesh and tells us to peer in and look at the most grotesque moments possible with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Simultaneously, however, Xi also manages to make us marvel at the human body and its potential to repair itself in the most miraculous ways.
This book constantly grazes on the contiguous. It pits the present against the past. It’s about both the ugly and the beautiful. It’s as much about facts and statistics as it is about artistic ideas around health and disease. It’s always hovering in that the liminal space between life and death and then pushing us over the edge into the vast expanse between sudden illness and subsequent wellness.
Standing in the park one morning, I saw an unusual sight: a cow and calf taking a stroll on the grassy slope outside the iron fence of the slaughterhouse. The cow stood there dazed, while the calf wagged its tail, bowing its head to graze. What a heartwarming pastoral image of mother and child. Who would know that on the other side of the iron fence was a slaughterhouse? Life and death were separated by a mere fence.
Mourning A Breast tends to look at world literature on the human condition while describing the predicament of the narrator. The references in literature to the idea of a monster are some of the most powerful passages quoted in this memoir. What if the body we stare at day after day suddenly became unrecognizable to us? There are times, the author of this terrific ode to the breast tells us—and in the harshest paragraphs I’ve hitherto read—that we may be looking at a body that has become a monstrosity. We have become the very monster we fear.
How did the eighteenth-century Frenchman George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, put it? There are three types of monsters who can be distinguished from humans: The first type is a monster formed by an excess of organs; the second type is a monster formed by a lack of organs; the third type is a monster formed by an inversion or misplacement of organs.
One of the first Chinese-language works about breast cancer, Mourning a Breast was published at a time when baring it all was considered shameful. In a society in which stigmas were associated with disease like cancer, this book was groundbreaking for its time.
I thought I was in the same situation as the man on TV, only I had a zipper-length incision, but no, that wasn’t the case. The scar on my body was oblique, sloping at a 45-degree angle from the side of my ribs up to my chest, spanning several ribs. The entire breast was missing. The entire breast, including the nipple, areola, mamary gland, and large amounts of fat and connective tissue.
What Xi Xi does so brilliantly is delve deeply into her own and others’ physical and psychological responses to cancer, thereby exposing common myths about breast cancer and confronting the shame often associated with it. The literary works she alludes to often illuminate life from another angle. This is an ambitious book which, like the Great Wall below, soars while marching through so much terrain.
Furthermore, in our zest for crabs, we should beware the karmic wheel—one day, the crabs would return to exact their revenge. This was truly prophetic, as I myself was pinched by a crab. The English word “cancer,” derived from Latin, means “crab,” because crabs are hard, tyrannical, and take a sideways approach, running rampant and unbridled.
What I found absolutely intriguing was Xi Xi’s approach to telling her story. Each chapter gives us pause. Sometimes she gets into the details that feel banal and a tad gratuitous; yet as we close a chapter we do feel that there was a reason for her deliberations.
In a chapter titled Beards and Brows, she reminds us that men can get breast cancer, too, although it’s much rarer in men. In yet another uniquely conceived chapter, our eyes glaze over all the things in the world today that are carcinogenic. We realize that it’s a hopeless battle unless of course we pack up and move to another planet. To live on this earth means that we have chosen to participate in the toxicity with every breath we take. As I write this paragraph, Amazon just dropped off another package by my front door.
plastic wrap, scented cards
enamel, paint thinner
furniture made from particle board
carpet made from synthetic fibers
toxic gas generated by incinerating trash
ceramic bowls and plates with painted patterns
stonewashed jeans
When someone falls sick, the process of living never stops for others. The others in the world must still eat, breathe and commune with others. Hence, a patient is forced must go on and participate in the world because nothing in the world will stop for them. Xi Xi examines the state of the world from within and outside the world netted by her cancer and that’s what packs this book with a sense of wonder.
In a chapter she titled The Third Kind of Eye, the author tells us about the simple yet complex world of light that first reached out to us in the physics classroom. I realize how Xi Xi is all-seeing in a way I’m not. Here’s an author whose curiosity is insatiable. Indeed, thanks to the many uses and applications of light, the world of medicine has made innumerable strides in diagnoses and treatment.
Light allows us to see. We are always looking, observing everything around us, looking at things near and far. But there are many things in the world—big, small, far away, concealed, deeply hidden, and ubiquitous—that we can’t see with our naked eyes, so we create telescopes, microscopes, cameras, scanners, and other eyes: humanity’s third kind of eye.
What we discover, by and by, as we keep reading Xi Xi’s dense collection of vertical and lateral pondering is that for every little thing that cancer eats inside us, the last thing it manages to consumes is our intellect and the human spirit.
Upon its initial publication in Taiwan in 1992, Mourning a Breast was named by the newspaper China Times as one of the best ten books of the year. What has astonished me during my time with the book is its unflinching candor. I know how there is such a stigma around ill-health in India as well as in the rest of Asia and I do know how the Chinese people find it very hard to divulge their personal stories. Hence what the late Xi Xi attempted is quite unbelievable and for her contribution to the annals of breast health and its associated medical arena, this book needs to be in every library in the world and certainly on every bookshelf related to health.
As I turned the pages, it became clearer and clearer why The New York Review of Books decided to publish this project as an “NYRB classics original.” While working on my LETTERS FROM EVERYWHERE project, I managed to read several of these NYRB classics and thus far I’ve found the NYRB choices to be among the more unforgettable of my selections.
Another must-read book, thanks, Kalpana!