Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.

“Your uncle doesn’t pay me enough to keep quiet about something like this,” Yifei says. “People need to know, Harvey. I didn’t come to America by myself when I was fifteen just to end up gutted in my own bed with a bat shoved down my throat. I am not going to be one of those bodies that we have to scrape off the ceiling, okay? Because you know damn well that when that happens, all anyone sees you as is a mess, a biohazard, something no one wants to touch. Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how 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. Because that’s what this guy is doing, Harvey. You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either. I know blood and guts is fun for you, but this could just as easily have been me or Cora. Would you joke around when you mopped us off the floor? Or drop your two-dollar Sonic key chain in what used to be our brains? No, I’m not going to sit back and shut up for twenty bucks an hour, which, by the way, is not enough to live in fucking Manhattan. 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’...

This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Buster.

But instead, she’s hiding behind two masks and a baggy hazmat suit because the thought that she could do anything meaningful never even occurred to her. Cora cannot fathom her actions mattering beyond her own mind. She feels herself slump smaller, as if her hazmat suit is eating her alive.

“It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. 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.

Next year is an election year, after all, and nothing quite dampens enthusiasm for an aggressively pro-police candidate like months of headlines about a serial killer your officers can’t catch.

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.

She knows that half the world sees Asian girls as pretty dolls, tiny trophies to parade around and fuck and then discard because you can’t love someone who isn’t a real person to you. She knows this, none of this is new, this is all just fingers running over scar tissue.

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.

Everyone who reads this book (at least, in the year it debuts) has lived through 2020 and will compare the experiences of these characters to their own at that time.

“You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

Do not let your empathy stop at the borders of your own community.