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another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose. I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human.
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.
and I know that a white man coming for me isn’t an if, it’s a when. And the worst part is I know no one will find out who did it, no one will write about it in the newspapers, because who cares if another Chinese girl is dead—they’ll hear me screaming and just put in their headphones and keep walking.
We’re dying and no one can hear us.”
His platform has always been More Police Everywhere All the Time, and in times of fear, a lot of people think that’s enough to keep them safe. But a few months ago, the city had protested for days after the police shot a Black man trying to fix his flat bike tire on the sidewalk. The NYPD drove a police car into a crowd of protestors and all the mayor had to say was that the protestors shouldn’t have surrounded the police car in the first place.
He’s spineless, all of them are. They only printed bullshit copaganda during the Black Lives Matter protests—of course they’re not gonna help us either.
Wasn’t she supposed to outgrow the childish reflex of crying when men scold her? Some part of her feels like she’s still a little girl in pigtails and overalls that her third grade teacher can put in time-out.
no one hears Cora, no one ever hears Cora, because her thoughts are only half out loud and half in her mind, anxious sounds that haven’t quite coagulated into words.
It is a slow and quiet drowning, to not know your destination.
She especially can’t imagine herself ten years from now. Even thinking about the next year of her life is like staring off the edge of a canyon. Maybe it’s a sign that she will end like Delilah—one moment she’ll be everything all at once, the next she’ll be in pieces too small to be human, not even worth saving.
Half the things she thinks aren’t even real. Thoughts are nothing at all, they come from nowhere and disappear into nothing and you can’t wade in their river as they pass by—that’s
Cora wonders what it must be like to be Harvey, to switch in and out of realities so easily, to think about pineapple cakes after escaping a flock of hungry ghosts. Cora is perpetually trapped in her one broken world.
Auntie Zeng offers no empty platitudes,
no kind reassurances. She finds the root of Cora’s problem and rips it from the
There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
Half of the profiles are men from neo-Nazi groups afraid that white people are a dying race. Some just seem like regular white people working cubicle jobs, though.
And the Lord said, “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” But Cora remembers.
Auntie Zeng said there are thousands of doors that will open to anyone who knocks. This is the door that Cora chooses—the one that opens up in the starbright fires of hell.
This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.
She remembers, back in her worst days, watching a video about black salve, a substance so caustic that it eats through flesh overnight, leaving holes Swiss-cheesed through your body. Cora never bought it, of course, but the thought haunted her for weeks, for all the spots she could never clean deep enough, the spots she wanted to hole-punch out of herself.
I think being a hungry ghost isn’t that different for her, because I’m sure she was always hungry when she was alive.”
the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.
She has survived her worst fear, and there is a sad kind of confidence that comes from it, which she hopes will endure.
But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole.
the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness.
she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.
But the idea of never waking up again scares me so fucking much. I don’t even like going to sleep because I hate not being fully there in my dreams—I’m afraid I’ll never resurface.
They were never supposed to be her friends, but they didn’t give Cora a choice.
Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.
Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.
and to white men there’s no difference between Chinese and Koreans. Asian women are all just prized sex dolls until the moment they say no.
Cora wonders if it would have been the same if all the victims had blond hair, blue eyes, American names. If they hadn’t been bat eaters, disease carriers, responsible for the deaths of New Yorkers and the refrigerated body trucks in the streets.
It takes Cora all of thirty seconds of scanning the text to realize what kind of America these people had dreamed of.
the quiet ones on buses who glared at Cora for wearing a mask, who crossed the street to avoid her like she was a living breathing virus even though she was cleaner than any of them, the words China virus like a poison promise, go back home, repent for killing Americans.
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
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Sex dolls aren’t supposed to talk back.
The end of the world lasts longer than Cora expects.
people grow tired and start to pretend the apocalypse is over. Truth be told, Cora never really thought there would be an After.
Wuhan was the epicenter of body bags, and New York City was the epicenter of anti-Asian hate crimes.
