The second time I heard the song “白月光与朱砂痣” was in a Chinese grocery store at the corner of Wonderland and Oxford in London, Ontario. It was January 2021 and one year into the pandemic. I lived in three places: the hospital, the Chinese grocery store, home. I called my mom sporadically. I learned to play melancholic Chinese pop songs on the guitar. I drifted listlessly down hospital corridors at 3 a.m. Over the phone, I asked my mom about the meaning of the song’s title, “White Moonlight and Cinnabar.” Was it a Chinese-specific allusion I hadn’t heard of? My mom said she didn’t know. Something about love, maybe.

The Chinese grocery store got me through my psychiatry residency from 2017 to 2022. It kept me fed and watered and sustained. At the beginning of the pandemic, their employees wore masks weeks ahead of other Canadian grocery chains. They were also the first to stock face masks in London, long before hospitals provided consistent PPE to their staff. I wandered the aisles in a daze on my way home from the hospital after 24-hour shifts. Finding a new grocery item—a firm vegetable, a bright melon—was the most entertainment I had. The cashier once commented on my alarming snack-to-vegetable ratio. We shared a chuckle. The store shuttered in February 2023 after successfully seeing me through to graduation.

In January 2021, the CEO of London Health Sciences Centre was fired. Months prior, he sent a hospital-wide email berating staff for the high rates of staff COVID-19 infection and sick leave. I still have a copy of the email. This was, however, not the reason for his employment termination. When news broke of his multiple travels to the US over the year against national policy and public health guidelines, the hospital board initially came out in support on a Friday. They dealt with public backlash over the weekend. The following Monday, the board recanted. Then, days later, the former CEO sued the hospital for $2.5 million dollars for wrongful dismissal.

That month my mind settled on two anxieties. The first: to get vaccinated as soon as it became available. The second was related to the first, in that because the vaccine was not yet available in London and because of multi-level institutional failure, I would catch COVID-19 at work and die. My body wouldn’t be found for days, maybe weeks. I would become a thirty-year-old virgin ghost and haunt the hospital and my replacement, warning them of my fate with ambiguous omens and ghostly gestures.

Two years later in a Toronto bubble tea shop I encountered “White Moonlight and Cinnabar” again. The name of two teas on the menu, 张爱玲与朱砂痣 and 张爱玲与白月光, were rendered in English as Eileen Chang Watermelon Coconut Juice and Eileen Chang Thai Coconut Lime Tea. I ordered the coconut lime tea. It was tart and refreshing.

When I returned home from the bubble tea shop, a quick internet search provided the answer to my question from 2021. The allusion was to Eileen Chang’s 1944 novella 红玫瑰与白玫瑰:

也许每一个男子全都有过这样的两个女人，至少两个。娶了红玫瑰，久而久之，红的变了墙上的一抹蚊子血，白的还是床前明月光；娶了白玫瑰，白的便是衣服上沾的一粒饭黏子，红的却是心口上一颗朱砂痣。


The pandemic had been my excuse for never meeting anyone ever again, but I decided to download the dating app Hinge for the third or fourth time. I swiped left and right. People unmatched me for not responding after six hours, for having simultaneous conversations, for many, any reason. I swiped after work, in the grocery aisle, before bed. I didn’t reply to a message for a day and a man said I disrespected his time. I actually spent time trying to understand this. I finally stopped when he said he expected his future wife to not disagree with him in public, lest he lose face with his friends. Another man casually mentioned he could crush my arm. I had no reason to remember the context.

I translated the passage from the 1944 Eileen Chang novella, Red Rose, White Rose, like this:

Perhaps every man has had these two kinds of women, at least two. Long after marriage to the red rose, the red becomes the mosquito smear on a wall, while the white is still that moonlight across the bedroom floor; after marriage to the white rose, instead the white will be the leftover rice scab on a collar, and the red the cinnabar mark across the heart.

A nurse handed me a discreet note in the emergency department telling me I had a period stain on my scrub pants. Another time I left a bloody mark on a ward chair after sitting on it for a little too long charting. Then I bled all over the on-call bed linen while I tried to sleep. I was exhausted. I was sad. I blamed it on the ceaseless hours and cognitive load of medical residency. But I was overworked and so was everyone else around me. After putting it off for months, I went to see the doctor about heavy menstrual bleeding. The bloodwork results came back showing anemia.

I waited several more months—an attempt to avoid academic disruption—before finally requesting a medical leave of absence. I had already completed the academic requirements of that year. Still, the doctor warned against taking a medical leave longer than a month in case it left a mark on my permanent record. Administrators agreed. They elevated the issue to the provincial physician licensing body to extend my academic year by one month. This would cause me hours of additional administration work every time licensing came up in the future. I also lost pay because resident doctors are salaried according to their year of training. After four weeks of rest, my health barely improved. I still felt ragged and on edge. When I returned to work, I discovered my card access to all clinical areas revoked. I spent hours on the phone with hospital security. Yes, I said, I’m trying to return to work. It felt like another petty kick to my uterus. It was March 2021.

At the time, I was reading Sara Ahmed’s What’s the Use? and her subsequent book Complaint! She examines the trajectory of complaints at institutions and cases of those who complain about unequal working conditions and abuses of power, including harassment, bullying, sexual violence. I tweeted this sentence from the book:

Complaint seems to catch how those who challenge power become sites of negation: to complain is to become a container of negative affect, a leaky container, speaking out as spilling over.

In July 2021, two hours east of London, Dr. Sophia Duong filed a complaint of sexual assault against her supervisor to the Sunnybrook Hospital and the University of Toronto. She was just starting her second year of medical residency. The supervisor, Dr. Benedict Glover, with at least one prior complaint against him, then sued Dr. Duong for defamation. The Globe and Mail detailed the institutional inaction on that complaint a year later, with both the university and hospital denying any duty to investigate or take on the role of upholding basic labour rights or protections for doctors. To the journalist, Dr. Duong said that until the matter was resolved she did not want to return. Her medical training was on hold indefinitely. She gave the newspaper permission to publish her name, to destigmatize both complaint and complainer. That’s where I read her story.

I went to the public library in search of Eileen Chang’s other works and found her 1966 novel 怨女. 怨: to resent, to blame, to complain; 女: woman, daughter. I couldn’t be sure if the woman was the subject of resentment or if she was the one complaining about her station in life. The novel starts with a clanging at the gates and someone on the street clamouring for sesame oil after the vendor family has closed shop for the day. When the young woman finally goes to answer the incessant racket outside, she realizes the man at the gate doesn’t want sesame oil at all but to touch her, to sexually harass her. After she reprimands his advances and cusses him out and (at least) seven generations of his ancestors, she returns to her shop only to be admonished by her brother and sister-in-law for causing a scene. Instead of coming to her defence, they warn her to keep her voice down so as not to lose face with the neighbours.

I returned this book to the library without finishing it. I could not bear to read another narrative of women suffering despite their attempts to resist and refuse. I already knew there was no way things would end well for this fictional young woman.

The longest conversation lasted two months. He sent bold romantic declarations, photos of himself walking home at dusk, pictures of a meal he prepared and was sharing with roommates (egg and tomato, a whole fish). I replied with a photo of my rice lunchbox-for-one at the hospital. He was too busy with work to meet up in person that weekend, the next weekend, one month after that. He dropped screenshots of some cryptocurrency platform he was investing in, with graphs. To my lukewarm response, he sent dick pics and requested nudes. At some point, I concluded that I was dealing with not a man but a cybercrime syndicate dealing in 杀猪盘—pig butchering scams—and I was to be the pig, bleeding from a neck wound.

Re-reading Eileen Chang’s words, I encounter again and again the violence in her metaphors. Women as mosquito smear on the wall, women as leftover rice scab, women to be picked off, women to be discarded, women to be crushed in hand. Violence could not reach them only when they were unobtainable, distant as the moon, not of this world. To live as a woman in the world is to live in violence.

At the start of my fourth year of residency in July 2022, I filed a complaint against my supervisor for abuses of power and bullying in the workplace. It was not my first time; I was a serial complainer. I had been through the institutional complaint process enough times to know its futility. This time I told the program director that until they addressed the problem or arranged an alternate work environment, I would rather sit at home and fail the rotation. I was refusing the hospital my labour. I couldn’t just sit there and be smeared against the institutional wall like a pesky mosquito again and again. But my refusal was not enough. Administration combed through my records to find proof that I was making this complaint maliciously. Objectively, my records were stellar. When they found nothing concrete, the dean decreed my complaint unprofessionalism, mandated I take a communication skills course and reconcile with the same supervisor, alone, with no additional oversight. Nothing about my situation changed. I accepted this. I returned to work with the same supervisor. I smiled. I tried to be friendly. My whole body hurt.

The program director later told me he was concerned about my collegiality after I submitted the complaint. He worried I wouldn’t be able to get along with my future colleagues. Worried about my future as a doctor if I couldn’t get along with everyone, anyone. I almost believed it myself.

A year later, an applicant to my residency program posed a question during her interview. She asked what Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives the workplace offered. I was conducting the interview on a Zoom panel of three (me, program director, faculty member). The program director, pointing to his virtual left and right to women of colour, declared that the representation on this panel was commensurate with their DEI efforts. To this explanation, I did not smile. I did not offer a step-down to the discomfort. I had learned to keep my mouth shut.

In my voice notes from March 2021, I found a couple of my piano covers of sad Chinese pop songs. And a few more on guitar. I didn’t make a recording of “白月光与朱砂痣.” That song was lost to that year. The recordings were melancholic, pining and sincere. I could hear myself hesitate, start over. My voice was quiet. A record.

Eileen Chang depicted the violence inherent in women’s lives in her time and turned it into a beautiful love story. Almost a century later, that story is a ubiquitous pop culture reference, with bubble tea shops and pop lyrics alluding to the beautiful part of the metaphor. But what about the mess, the complication, the violence, the woman’s body represented? Marketing was not going to name their coconut watermelon tea Eileen Chang Bloody Mosquito Smear.

A full calendar year after I left medical residency, my body was on the mend from the institution. That’s when I encountered Eileen Chang again at the local bubble tea shop and tried her namesake tea. My anemia had normalized some time before that on medication. I no longer had to contend with spills and leaks everywhere. I no longer left a bloody trail.

My isolation during 2021 was life-depleting, but not completely. I was not a moon detached from the world—I was a woman’s body living in it, working the same workplace conditions, shopping in the same grocery store as others. Hours and days and centuries apart from me, there were others. Before me and beside me and after me, there were others. There was a mark, a smear, a mess, a sound, a complaint, a trail, a record.

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Image: Lan "Florence" Yee, A Visible Minority, 2016, oil on canvas