October 1986

October 1986 is the month Ma underwent surgery for breast cancer at Yale–New Haven Hospital. The date anchors a turning point in her illness and, through a striking comparison with her family photo album, brings the wear of an ordinary object into the same frame as the vulnerability of her body.

The Date and Ma’s Illness

Before the operation, Ma had spent several months feeling tired and run down and dealing with a cold that did not fully go away. She found a lump in her left breast, described as no bigger than a pencil eraser, and went to a doctor after being urged to do so. The account does not give the exact day of the operation, only that it took place in October 1986.

Ma’s breast was removed. A week later, she learned that the cancer had spread to her bones and lymph nodes. Her oncologist estimated that aggressive treatment might give her another six to nine months. In retrospect, the month falls in the final stretch of Ma’s life: the narrative identifies 1987 as the year she died of breast cancer.

The Album and the Operation

The account places the surgery beside the long decline of Ma’s photo album. As she repeatedly opened and closed it, its two brass binding pins bent and eventually broke; most of its black construction-paper pages came loose. By October 1986, the album had already been broken for years.

That history gives the date a material as well as medical significance. The album’s covers had opened and closed around the accumulated record of a family; now Ma herself was opened and closed on a surgical table. The comparison does not make the two kinds of damage equivalent. Instead, it draws the reader’s attention to their different scales of vulnerability: a family object gradually coming apart through use, and a body subjected to surgery as cancer advanced.

Place in the Narrative

October 1986 fixes the album’s deterioration against a specific moment in Ma’s illness, making the damaged book more than a background keepsake. Its broken binding becomes part of the narrative’s way of holding family memory alongside bodily loss. The operation also marks a sharp change in what the family knows: a lump first noticed as small is followed, within a week of surgery, by news of metastasis and a limited prognosis.