Embodiment as Enigma: On Xi Xi’s “Mourning a Breast”
Xi Xi, transl. Jennifer Feeley | Mourning a Breast | New York Review of Books | July 2024 | 320 pages
Good health allows itself to be forgotten. It allows our minds to forget the very fact of our embodiment. Our bodies might be so serenely and submissively compliant as to simply dissolve, so hollow and harmonious as to seemingly collapse into mere vessels of ourselves. But illness disrupts this invisible harmony and so confronts us with the gritty reality of our own bodies. To become ill is to be split in half, faced with the delicate, dynamic, and now destabilized inter-dependency that was lurking beneath what had all along been the mere illusion of your unity. It is to endure the revelation—or the reminder—that you are not a singularity but a relationship.
Transformed by this revelatory rupture, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast reflects on how she lived her first 50 years as though she had “nothing but a mind” – in other words, with a blessedly healthy body. So long as her mind and body coexisted peacefully, and so reliably depended on each other for survival, there had hardly been the need for Xi Xi’s mind to give her body any thought. It was not until she received her breast cancer diagnosis that Xi Xi began contending with the baffling reality of having a body at all.
Originally published in Chinese in 1992, Mourning a Breast has now been translated for the first time into English by Jennifer Feeley. Although the book is inspired by Xi Xi’s own experience of illness and surgery, it is ultimately not about her so much as about our very embodiment and the enigma that it presents us all. Xi Xi suddenly finds herself striving to learn the body’s language—as she calls it—that her mind had never noticed her body speaking all along. While Mourning a Breast does endeavor to translate and articulate the story of Xi Xi’s illness, it also serves to illuminate the ways in which illness itself resists translation. What emerges is a genre-bending and stream-of-consciousness meditation that is not an act of mourning so much as an expression of curiosity. Xi Xi’s meandering reflections wander freely from the personal to the universal and ultimately create a generous and compassionate portrait of illness and embodiment.
It is fittingly ironic that Xi Xi describes her confrontation with embodiment using the metaphor of language, something that is (for a writer and translator) decidedly within the mind’s domain. Although our minds and bodies are entwined by an inextricable intimacy, they are also kept apart by an impenetrable opacity. They cannot leave each other, and they cannot know each other, and so they remain suspended in this relationship that might blissfully melt into a melded unity but will always simmer with instability. Illness awakens this bubbling core, the dormant truth of what we are, by disturbing the peace and so splitting us apart. Our minds are not only confronted with but also collapsed by the weight of our embodiment, put into their place, disabused of their illusion of sovereignty with a visceral reminder of the material shackles they are ultimately helpless against. A mind contending with its embodiment is facing an enigma that it cannot decipher, a language that is not merely different from but incomparable with its own. Xi Xi explains:
Communication between people is difficult, but talking to the body is even more challenging. There are so many parts, each with its own grievances, the body’s language split into distinct regional dialects…How much of the spirit of the original work can we glean from the translation? Can a translation properly convey the verb tense in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?
Although some of us are far more attuned to and so identified with our bodies than are others, introspection can never illuminate our material interiority in its entirety. Our minds will never be fluent in the language of our bodies, can never keep up with our bodies’ manifold and ever-evolving dialects, and so their messages will always elude the kind of clarity that our minds crave. What illness and pain cast into relief is that our minds will always be lost in translation—and will always remain in a liminal space—somewhere between our embodiment and the outer world. Still, this insight is itself an immense gift. To understand the limitations of a translation—the negative space of what remains inscrutable—is to enhance the translation’s expressive powers, as we can see things a little more clearly when we can see that something must be lost.
•
It is a bewildering cruelty of nature that pain—the most desperate and deafening of our bodies’ cries to be heard—is rendered all the more paralyzing by its ineffability. I can remember lying there, immersed in the ambient medicinal drone that fills and familiarizes a hospital’s air, with no space left within me for anything besides the pain. This was a pain that felt nearly impossible to even hold inside my head, its intensity and magnitude seemingly bursting through the very seams of my cognition. I remember desperately hoping that pain of this sort simply could not be contained within a single being for very long before the laws of nature would finally force it to disperse. And I remember trying to explain to well-meaning loved ones that the suggestion of distractions – listening to music, watching some television – these were not even things to be attempted, for the thought of squeezing additional stimuli into my experience was itself more than I could bear. I was already dilated and saturated beyond my own experiential limit. If anything, the mere idea of a “distraction” was so deeply misguided that it served only to twist the all-consuming knife, as it was a cruel reminder of how profoundly far away these well-meaning loved ones were from the universe within which I was trapped. All that I could do was lie there, and be in it, and wait for time to pass. And as I did, recovering from a surgery that I will almost certainly have multiple times again over the course of my life, I remember telling myself to never forget and etching a note into mind—again and again—for my future self: Mala, you would rather die than go through this again. You would rather die than go through this again. You would rather die than go through this again.
But the inscrutable language of embodiment is not nearly so easy for us to translate, and this does not merely serve to constrain our capacity to communicate with others. Rather, it is also a constraint on just how much we can ever really tell ourselves. At its very worst, pain may not only be impossible to describe, but also impossible to remember. Although I can recall having this experience of pain, I cannot recall what the actual experience was really like. The content of my memories—the words and phrases that I kept thinking—do not completely capture or convey the pain itself. I know the string of words in that message that I etched into my memories, but I also know that, when the time comes again, I will go through with the surgery; the words could only leave me with a glint of what drove me to write them.
The phrase “pain amnesia”—sometimes used to describe the psychological aftermath of childbirth—captures something deep and universal about the nature of pain and the limits of memory and language. I was baffled by the experience as it was transpiring, and now that it has passed, I am baffled by my inability to comprehend it at all. The ineffability of pain alienates us from our former selves just as well as from each other. It is no surprise that living with it often feels like being trapped alone, in an invisible and impenetrable world of one’s own.
Xi Xi’s description of recovery offers a similar arc of alienation from her previous self. She describes feeling as though her surgery had transported her from her former body into a wholly unfamiliar physical form, a strange new costume in which she would have to practice “getting to know” herself. Puzzled by this renewed body, her search for the right language reveals uncommon resonance in fantastical tales, supernatural movies, butchers and slaughterhouses. Finding herself in imaginary beasts that populated the stories of her childhood, Xi Xi reflects, “I’d lost a breast. I was a monster formed by a lack of organs.” Seeing the film Alien’s human-infesting creatures as symbolic for the vicious rampancy of cancer, she explains, “once [the aliens] spread, they proliferate to other corners, capable of both shrinking and expanding, making them nearly impossible to eliminate.” A sly and slithering beast with otherworldly wicked powers, illness can indeed transform our bodies into aliens, monsters, or mere ghosts of what they once were.
The gruesome reality lurking in the fleshy underbelly of our being is thrust upon us in the bizarre brutality of surgery. In Mourning a Breast, Xi Xi’s candid depictions of her mastectomy and recovery all flicker with a Lynchian aura that is eerily familiar to me. While she is lying in the operating room before her procedure, Xi Xi’s surgeon suddenly begins looking like a local butcher to her. “Was he an ordinary butcher who replaced his knife every month,” she wonders, “or a skilled butcher who only replaced his knife once a year? In his mind, was I a person, or was I just a tumor?” While watching her doctor removing each of the stitches in her chest—all with the “crystal-clear” sound of a “neat snip, snip,”—Xi Xi feels as though she “were a shoe, and the doctor a shoemaker.” “If a surgeon were ever to lose their job,” she reflects, “they could easily change careers and become a cobbler.” Ultimately, to be a patient navigating illness is to become something smaller and stranger than yourself. Stupefied, you are nakedly fragile and wholly unmoored, and you are wandering back and forth in the fluorescent hallway that stretches from dehumanizing banality to dehumanizing horror.
I have also found surgery to be a nightmare and a miracle, an experience that can only be translated into the surreal language of contradictions. Although surgery has forced me to contend with myself as an object—modular, mechanical, ripped apart and reassembled—I have also never felt more alive than while suffering the horror of self-awareness in seeing my own mechanistic core. To undergo major surgery is to experience your body as—all at once—your enemy, your prison, and everything that you are. But perhaps most bizarrely, there comes a point when one’s post-surgery narrative transforms from supernatural horror into a love story or perhaps even a fairy tale, and this is when one’s body slowly, mystically begins to mend. We shift, from resenting our physical shackles as the locus of all our agony, to observing their natural magic in awe and reverence as we heal.
•
Living as though you had nothing but a mind. I often use the very same words to describe my own relationship with embodiment. When I say this, however, I do not mean that my body is so obedient as to simply dissolve beneath me and so allow itself to be forgotten. Rather, I mean that my body is so rebellious that—for as long as I have known it—it has never felt like me so much as my most persistent antagonist. I’ve always known my body as a thing in pain, and so I’ve always seen my life as something I live despite rather than because of it. I don’t know if there was some moment in my life, one that escapes the reach of my memories, when I simply decided that this was going to be my way of coping with embodied life. But I’ve never known it in any other way. I’ve only ever known myself as a thing split in half.
If Mourning a Breast is indeed a story of mourning, then perhaps what Xi Xi mourns is the blissful illusion of weightlessness that enveloped her former life, which is not a loss that I will ever have to endure myself. I do sometimes find myself mourning a life I have never lived, however, and the weightlessness I never felt and so did not have the chance to lose. Still, there is something different about pain that has always been there—something disorienting and discordant with a sense of loss. I have never known myself without pain and can never know what exactly I would be like, which is to say that it is ultimately inextricable from who I understand myself to be. I will probably always vacillate between acute resentment and chronic ambivalence toward my own pain, as it is difficult to sustain resentment for something that has also shaped the entirety of who I am. I might even find some comfort in the idea that tasting weightlessness was never meant for me at all.
The hard truth about embodiment is that none of us can ignore it forever. I did not understand as a child—or even as a young adult—that the passage of time would eventually burden all of us with the weight of ourselves. But lately, I have noticed it burdening those around me more and more. I find that the most comforting thing I can give others is simply the affirmation that what they are feeling can never really be put into words, can never be perfectly expressed and so never completely understood, and that even those who know and love them the most will never really be able to visit their world. I know that this alone can spark some relief, as I can see it in their eyes as the darkness of desperation lifts in the light of feeling seen and—eventually—I can join them in the quiet clarity of our mutual recognition. Moments like these leave me with the heartening feeling that I have something to give, that there is something strong about the body that I have always resentfully regarded as something weak, and that my own bitter wounds of isolation—once my closest childhood companions—are also healing from the sweet catharsis of connection.
Before her death, Xi Xi too expressed that Mourning a Breast was written with the hope of bringing some comfort to others. By unearthing the inscrutability of our embodiment, her book gives us the space to find connection in the ultimate alienation. Jennifer Feeley’s tender translation has now expanded that space, making for a reverent tribute to Xi Xi’s words just as well as what she hoped to achieve with them. Xi Xi reflects:
It seems that if we want to better understand the original work, we need to seek out multiple translations for comparison, hope that someone else will retranslate the text, or simply learn more foreign languages. But don’t assume that I am searching for the ultimate, perfect translation. I am not. There’s never a fixed and eternal “absolute spirit” in books. Translations are interpretations…Each interpreter can thus proclaim “Madame Bovary is me,” and no one will object that there are too many Madame Bovarys.
By writing, we capture and preserve the insights that are otherwise lost to time in our fleeting thoughts, ephemeral chats, and fading memories – and by translating, we perform acts of generosity by unlocking these insights, extending their reach, and giving others the precious gift of understanding. That we can never perfectly translate the body’s language is precisely why we must continue proliferating its translations, as collectively filling the world with shards and fragments is our best chance at creating a mirror in which all of us might find glimmers of ourselves.
That said, I have come to realize that the body’s inscrutable language is something that also tirelessly serves to protect us. It is what allows our minds to enjoy their illusion of sovereignty and sometimes even forget the very existence of our bodies entirely. It alleviates the full weight of our embodiment by concealing its intricacy and complexity beneath a veil of oblivion, and it preserves the space for an imaginative playground in which our minds may freely frolic without regard for all the material systems that continuously sustain us. But like any blissful state of ignorance, this unburdening also deprives us of the capacity to appreciate the fact of our liberation, ultimately rendering us wholly unprepared for the eventuality of our own reckoning. We cannot prepare ourselves for all the stories of mourning that our bodies slowly write for us behind their impenetrable veils; instead, we can try our best to remember this gift of oblivion and savor it for as long as we can, and we can defiantly reach for eternal life by leaving some of ourselves behind in the ageless realm of words. Then, when the weight of our embodiment does become difficult to live with, bewildering our minds or alienating us from the world, there might be some comfort in the reminder that weightlessness was never meant for any of us.