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Isn’t that the kind of person Delilah likes? The tortured artist types who smoke indoors and paint with their own blood and feces.
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.
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.
A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.
Cora knows this, but she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.
prisoner. Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.
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.
She came here for God, to be normal, to be Good, and now there’s someone else’s spit in her mouth and God’s door is still shut in her face.
allowed. If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.
“To Zubat,” he says. “May he fly in a world better than this shitty one.”
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
She knows that memories are not like turning pages in a photo album until you find the right one—every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different. It has to be, because brains are not video cameras; they don’t have that much empty space for unnecessary details.
that ghosts are not real just because Yifei Liu the kleptomaniac crime scene cleaner says so.
The smell of mildew hits Cora in a hot wave. It’s the kind of rotting wetness that she can taste, like she’s swimming through a bog and the mossy water is filling her mouth.
“Don’t you mean bats?” the other one says, and they both laugh, the loudest sound they’ve made since sitting down.
“And there’s still been jack shit about it in the news,” Harvey says. “Don’t you think people should know that bloody Batman is ravaging Chinatown?”
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.
“Because Chinese people like to shove bats down our own throats before blowing our brains out, or paint bat murals on our walls after slitting our own throats with hunting knives? When this whole city—this whole country—calls us bat eaters?”
But Cora thinks that maybe it wasn’t a waste of time. Because in her pocket she can still feel the USB that Delilah gave her pressed tight against her thigh. She lays a hand over her leg, trying to make the gesture look casual, then presses down, making sure that it’s real.
“No, it’s an old Hong Kong movie,” Harvey says. “About those Chinese hopping corpses, you know? Jiangshi?”
Cora lets out a tense breath. Some asylums have decorations, but of course Harvey Chen doesn’t know that.
“There,” Cora repeats, as if testing the word. That’s how Cora feels—like she’s just passively existing while the world turns around her. If Cora ever becomes a ghost, she’d be like that 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.”
“Stop calling him that,” Yifei says. “Batman is a good guy.”
And Cora realizes, all at once, that the only reason Delilah would send her after a serial killer is if he’s the one who pushed her.
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. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not.
will. Cora can’t be the only one who believes. Because if Cora Zeng is the only one who believes in something, it’s not real.
they didn’t give Cora a choice. 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, Yifei once said. But somehow, Harvey and Yifei feel more human now than ever before.
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.
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.
Asian women are all just prized sex dolls until the moment they say no.
She knows that Officer Wang didn’t write Copy on the profiles because he copied and pasted the files from somewhere else. He wrote it because these are copycat killers.
Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty. No one wants them to talk.
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.
usually dumped into communal graves on Hart Island, so maybe she’ll go there one day, when she feels less ashamed.
Wuhan was the epicenter of body bags, and New York City was the epicenter of anti-Asian hate crimes.
The day after, Cora sat in the corner at church coffee hour and listened to her Auntie Lois and her friends talk about how “China virus” isn’t an offensive term, just factual, and Cora decided she doesn’t want to go to church anymore. It means Auntie Lois won’t help with her student loans, but because of the federal payment pause, that’s a problem for another day.
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.
But I need to remind myself that the future is not a booby-trapped temple in an Indiana Jones movie, full of nothing but unpredictable pain. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green wrote: “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.”
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.
