Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

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.

In a strange way, Cora feels bad for Harvey. Most people don’t know how easy it is to end a life. In video games, you can swallow rounds of bullets before going down. But in real life, bodies are delicate. Skulls pop open like biscuits, bones shatter beyond repair, torrents of blood rush from a small wound.

No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing. You get a sense for it in games when things aren’t going your way, when it’s better to just start over. But this is my only life and I’m losing already, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“That’s right!” Cora shouts, her voice echoing across the frozen crosswalk, words grating up her throat. “I am a fucking bat eater!” The words silence the man, a cork jammed into a bottle. Cora Zeng decides in that moment, with the whole block staring at her and headlights searing her vision and a hungry ghost looming behind her, that this is the kind of person she will be. The dirty street urchin who eats dogs and cats and bats raw, the communist spy who wants to kill Americans, the virgin in a schoolgirl skirt that will seduce him and ruin his life—all of his crooked fantasies can be true for all she cares. Because a bat eater is the kind of person that white men want to hurt, 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. She picks up her propane tanks, stares back at him, dares him to try to grab her again with all these people watching. But the man is stunned, out of words to say. Sex dolls aren’t supposed to talk back.

For me, no needle-neck ghost can compare to the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world—the way we sacrificed the elderly and disabled on the altar of capitalism, the way trust in the government and the CDC swiftly dissolved, and the way we proved we as a country still haven’t learned not to scapegoat an entire race of people in times of fear.

This author's note made me cry

Lastly, it is important to note that 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. So please do not pity Cora Zeng while condemning Trayvon Martin. 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.