By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop's fable, "the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast." In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously--persistently and patiently--re-engages with these divides in her failed research. (Contains 2 notes.)