Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Cora thinks there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.

there’s no harm in finding what joy you can in a dirty and depressing job that someone has to do.

But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.

the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.

Her mind spins through a few hundred kinds of deadly mold that she might breathe in, but she prefers any of them to church service, so she follows him in.

Same.

not liking that her aunt talks about her job as if she has any idea what Cora sees, what Cora can handle.

Relatable

Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

I want every person in this whole city to keep their lights on and look for this asshole, to lock their doors and buy those handguns that you Americans love so much, because I’m tired of scrubbing Asian women off the walls. I’m so fucking tired.”

All I could tell the cops about the man who pushed her was that he was white. He had a mask and hat on, all I saw was his hand and his eyes, and that’s enough to tell that someone’s white but not much else. And you know what the cops told me? They said that’s not enough to go on. We can’t just look for white men. You should have looked harder, they said. But white men are going after Asian girls, and that’s all they have to go on, us being Asian. No one wants to look harder at us. To imagine that we’re real people.

It’s one thing to commute to a crime scene, to see the broken locks on the front door held in place by tiny screws, or the shattered garden-level windows. It’s another thing entirely to see how weak the doors of your own building truly are, to know that the walls you want to think are impenetrable are no obstacle for someone who truly wants to break in.

since the UV light also illuminates semen, and Cora doesn’t want to go down the rabbit hole of imagining how much semen she’s accidentally touched.

Literally everywhere

the secretary doesn’t understand that you don’t have to know someone to mourn them, that Cora has seen this man be unmade, and now she knows what his smile used to look like, the smile that was blasted off his face with a machine gun.

It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.

the kind of person who tangles their fear and hate together and elicits their rage, the kind of person who scares them. And Cora knows all too well that you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.

I dedicated this book to “everyone we lost in the pandemic,” but “everyone” should also include “everything.” The pieces of ourselves that died in 2020. The hope we had in others, the trust we had in our leaders, the dreams we once believed in.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng focuses on the discrimination faced by a group of Chinese Americans because this is my personal experience (and the only one I feel comfortable profiting off of), but many other marginalized people in the US face even more violent systemic racism. There would be no Stop Asian Hate movement without the advances of the Civil Rights Movement or the hard work and suffering of Black, Latine, and Indigenous communities. There is no justice for Asian Americans without justice for all BIPOC.

Anti-Asian hate is real and deserves attention, but it is only one symptom of a deeply broken society, and we cannot understand or stop it without acknowledging the danger of white supremacy and all the other people it has hurt. Do not let your empathy stop at the borders of your own community.