Xi Xi’s Wholly Original Memoir of Breast Cancer

In the fall of 1989, when the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was in her early fifties, she found a lump in her breast. Within weeks, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, an illness she’d previously thought of as distant, Western, nothing for her to worry about. Cancer was then a taboo subject in Chinese culture, which did not dissuade Xi Xi from writing about it. In 1992, she released Mourning a Breast, an idiosyncratic text that was hugely praised on its reception and is now considered one of the...