Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Harvey Chen is a young, Chinese American man whom Cora befriends when they start working together on crime scene clean-ups in the pandemic. Harvey’s uncle, who also owns a dry-cleaning service, runs the crime scene clean-up work.

Of the trio, Harvey is most light-hearted and fun-loving. He routinely tries to flirt with the girls, though Yifei shuts him down. He is also unfazed by the blood and gore that they deal with every day, having been desensitized to it by the video games he grew up playing. However, despite his easygoing exterior, Harvey is also sensitive and serious. After having accidentally killed a bat at one of the crime scenes, Harvey insists that they hold a funeral for it; once he learns about Cora’s “hungry ghost,” he brainstorms ways to help her solve the problem. It is also Harvey who first pieces together the mystery behind the murders, though he is killed before he can tell the other two.

Harvey is also hiding a dark past, one that he refuses to talk about. He once mentions being locked in his father’s basement for endless periods of time, and he later confesses to Cora about having seen a ghost in that same basement. However, Harvey never opens up any further to either Cora or Yifei, and this becomes a thorough line for his character—he stops just short from anyone learning the entire truth of what he has faced. Cora and the reader never discover why Harvey was locked in the basement, or how the ghost in his basement met her end; similarly, Harvey is not allowed to reveal the truth of what he learned about the murders, as he meets his end before then. His hesitation in opening up about his past becomes his defining trait, and it is reflected even in his death.

Yifei Liu makes up the third member of the cleaning crew trio. She is a Chinese woman born and raised in a village in China, which she fled for the city after her parents were killed by her younger sister, who also attempted to kill Yifei. Born without a name, “Yifei” is the name she later adopted for herself, naming herself after an actress she saw on TV.

Of the three, Yifei is the fiercest and most outspoken character, and geared towards action. She initiates contact with the reporter and is visibly furious when the reporter fails to follow through. Similarly, when she learns of Cora’s “hungry ghost,” she is the one who takes the initiative on both the subway station plan, and the feast they later prepare for the dead.

Yifei is selective of the company she keeps—she lives with an American roommate, Paisley, to whom she pretends she cannot speak English. However, Yifei is particularly protective of Cora. Despite being a largely private person who prefers to keep her own company, Yifei welcomes Cora in when the latter goes to her for comfort and advice about the “hungry ghost.”

However, like Harvey, Yifei, too, meets an end that mirrors her enduring character trait—her insistence on running from her past. Until the very end, Yifei doesn’t tell anyone about what happened with her family; it is only when she believes she is about to die that she opens up to Cora about the past with her sister, and more to establish what she regards as her own selfishness than to confront and process this trauma. Thus, Yifei dies the same way she lived, trying to run away from something: She is killed when the car crashes as she and Cora are driving away from the city.

Delilah Zeng is Cora’s half-sister who appears only in the first chapter of the book, where she is murdered at the subway station. Following this, she appears largely in Cora’s memories and recollections; the “hungry ghost” is assumed to be Delilah for most of the book, but is eventually revealed to be Yuxi He, one of the many murder victims in the city.

Delilah’s character is not independently fleshed out in the book. She exists largely as a plot device to kick off the incidents in the book, and to explain Cora’s grief and trauma. Cora’s relationship with Delilah is implied to be a complicated one, especially in her death—Cora is resentful of Delilah’s abandonment of her by dying, but also of the fact that she was planning on leaving Cora and moving to China while she was alive. Delilah was the one who took charge of things and Cora leaned on her, which heightens Cora’s sense of isolation. Delilah’s death also gives rise to feelings of guilt in Cora, as she neither could prevent Delilah’s death, nor initially did enough to find Delilah’s killer.

In the larger context of the book, Delilah becomes yet another example of The Invisibility and Erasure of Marginalized Victims. Her death is the result of a hate crime, and despite its horrific nature, it goes unsolved; Delilah becomes yet another forgotten victim of the widespread violence enacted upon East Asian women in the book.