Topping from the Bottom

Spent Bullets by Terao Tetsuya, translated from the Chinese by Kevin Wang. HarperVia, 208 pages. 2025.

Humiliation enters the cleaning supply closet; it circles, descends, unzips its trousers. The closet is so obvious an image—we’re just pages into Terao Tetsuya’s short story collection of queer ambition and shame—that it exceeds metaphor. But instead of the anguish or shame we’d typically associate with hiding in the closet, pleasure ensues: “I felt my hard dick pressed tight against Wu Yi-Hsiang’s piss.”

In Kevin Wang’s translation of Terao’s debut Spent Bullets, Yi-Hsiang, Jie-Heng, and Ming-Heng are junior high students at a Taipei boys’ prep school, gunning for admission to National Taiwan University—the country’s top engineering school—and, afterward, Silicon Valley. On clandestine NTU balconies, American interstates, and the upper floors of Las Vegas hotels, humiliation refracts around their triangle of desire. From “Flatworm ∀,” during the boys’ youth: “My dick kept shrinking under everyone’s attention until it was barely visible.” From “Flatworm ∄,” around early middle age: “So that was it. Total impotence.” But whose impotence, whose abasement, whose arousal? From story to story, Yi-Hsiang, Jie-Heng, and Ming-Heng shunt the narratorial baton around. Terao compounds this anonymous enigma by scrambling Spent Bullets’ timeline, so the collection’s interlinked stories toggle not just between childhood and adulthood but between Taipei and California, narrator and narrator and narrator. One Goodreads reviewer charmingly called Spent Bullets a “nothing burger.” Yes, this book means to perplex you, but part of its thrill is in decoding who narrates what and how the stories interlock; to unglue voice from voice; to decrypt the disequilibria of power and envy, the circular path from desire to destruction.

Like Spent Bullets’ plethora of narrators, Terao graduated from NTU, then worked as a Google engineer. Now a full-time writer, Terao clarifies in his afterword the strictures of ambition that Spent Bullets purports to reflect. Citing “E,” a talented “younger colleague from the competitive programming circle,” Terao describes the gulf between the external gaze and self-perception. “Most people saw E as dazzlingly accomplished, with a job that inspired envy,” he writes in Wang’s translation, “yet he was unable to recognize any value in his striving . . .  I was all too familiar with E’s patterns of self-harm.” By Spent Bullets’ end, the reader is all too familiar with these internalized patterns of shame. The collection is predicated upon Jie-Heng’s life and suicide; like E, Jie-Heng is recognized as a genius, admired and resented since junior high. “With Jie-Heng out of the picture, it’s finally a level playing field,” says one character on the way to Jie-Heng’s annual memorial. “Yeah,” replies another. “Jie-Heng was a freak.” Is this genuine disgust, or is it “hopeless fascination,” as another character puts it? Terao’s structure has already taught us to withhold easy credence, just as he withholds information.

Disgust and fascination mask a sublimated envy, obliquely cast through the prism of aslant details: “I fumbled around for a lever to adjust the height . . . I noticed a receipt lying by the brake pedal and leaned down to pick it up.” All this verbal sidestepping; the only straightforward thing about Spent Bullets is Terao’s inexpressive, almost blunt prose, even as the author’s deadpan first-person voice advertently (or inadvertently) flattens his speakers into a psychologically singular “I” unit that throughlines the book. “I straightened the receipt, folded it twice, and tucked it into the ashtray.” And yet this amalgamated inexpressiveness does carry emotion, that of a Joycean paralysis, a decrepit embarrassment at having failed to avoid being seen. The same passage yields one of the most severely beautiful lines of the collection; coincidentally or not, it gazes outward rather than into the quicksand of the self. “‘So many stars. The whole sky’s a landfill.’”

Of his jumbled chronology, Terao notes: “I’ve arranged these stories to convey what I have seen of psychological transitions and stark absurdity. This experience is intended to be, above all, aesthetic in nature. I’m afraid those seeking social commentary or indictments here will come away disappointed.” Terao seems to hold beauty at the highest regard, above whatever moral value “social commentary or indictments” could possibly inculcate. But in Spent Bullets’ dog-eat-dog world, there is perhaps no such thing as moral value, only who comes out on top; it’s a doggy-style world after all, replete with unvarnished, unerotic scenes of piss, impact, and pup play. How long before play becomes pain? “When my punches landed on his forehead, Jie-Heng didn’t even flinch,” Tereo writes:

I pinned him onto the ground with an elbow locked around his neck, fixing his head in place. His nose bumped against my cheek as I pressed my mouth to his, our lips locking at a ninety-degree angle like goldfish attempting resuscitation . . . At the same time, I felt his erection quietly pushing through layers of fabric against my thigh.

Maybe violence turns you on, maybe it doesn’t. Humiliation preens at either end. Yi-Hsiang and Jie-Heng take pleasure in, and are pleasured by, humiliation, with Yi-Hsiang as the top, and Jie-Heng as the bottom. But who wields authority? Not only does Terao’s anonymous structure upend our grasp of the link between voice and authority, we also can’t rely on the normative dynamics of erotic play to comprehend our characters’ relationships. Kink entangles humiliator and humiliatee, rendered interoperative like the structure of their stories. And yet, as in Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (also an interlinked fiction collection on sex and shame in an Asian diaspora), kink turns on no one quicker than the humiliator, a proposition that holds in Spent Bullets. In “Las Vegas,” the final story in both sequence and timeline, humiliation is sublimation. “I called out to Jie-Heng: you must be getting what you wanted.”

Jie-Heng’s unending appetite for humiliation recalls Jude St. Francis’s trauma plot from A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. “When Jude finally reveals the details of his horrific childhood to Willem, the two are lying on the floor of a literal closet,” observes Andrea Long Chu in “Hanya’s Boys”; this is much like Terao’s cleaning supply closet, scene of Jie-Heng’s first humiliation. But a Taiwanese iteration of Yanagihara’s novel Spent Bullets is not: misery is not Terao’s cause, though it is part of his content. What drives his characters, instead, is the yearning to achieve recognition through the accumulation of power and its inevitable thwarting in a society where other desires must be repressed. To be recognized is to be perceived as sublime, yet Terao’s story deals with all the possibilities that branch out from misrecognition; misery is only one option. “I wanted Hsiao-Hua to suffer more when she wasn’t miserable enough, but when she was really on the verge of disappearing from this world, I wanted her to stay,” one narrator recounts. Death is another choice, and, as Hsiao-Hua demonstrates, not one to toy with.

But there is also sublimation—making humiliation beautiful again—as well as conformism, with the glossy tribulations of Silicon Valley’s nouveau nouveau riche. By the end of the timeline, Ming-Heng, the third narrator, has fathered a son: “You know how competitive the school district is. We have to get it sorted.” Of Spent Bullets’ narrators, Ming-Heng’s own father is the only parent to meaningfully appear, and in the collection’s only truly tender piece, “The Avalanche Joseki.” A failed Go child prodigy, Ming-Heng’s father takes out his insufficiencies on his equally prodigious son, to quietly calamitous, paralyzing consequences for both. So humiliation too is hereditary, a condition of social failure rather than genetics.

Humiliation steps into the same river twice. Terao’s preoccupation with failure and fatality means that the dilemma of free will haunts Spent Bullets, and Terao is clearly an incompatibilist. In “Interstate 5,” Terao has his narrator ask:

“Imagine it’s the first day of high school again. You walk into the classroom not knowing anyone. Your skills and intellect are back to where they were when you were fifteen, but you get to bring along your insights—all the things you’ve learned from life. Would you still devote all your energy to exams and competitions at the cost of everything else?”

. . .

“I’d probably still choose the competitions,” he said.

I looked at him and tried to read his face. “Doesn’t that mean nothing would change? We’d still turn out this way. And Jie-Heng, he’d still—”

And in ‘Las Vegas,’ later in life, the same narrator hedges again for the same answers:

“Let’s put it this way . . . I’m past the days when I couldn’t . . . get the things I wanted . . .”

. . .

“You’re still saying that if you could do it all over again, you’d choose the exact same life?”

“But really,” Terao’s narrator rationalizes, “our future—or fate—would not deviate by even a grain of sand.” To-may-to, to-mah-to, fatality, futility, but the funereal pathos of “the glow of the streetlamps” and “the misty rain” lend an auratic halo to Terao’s predeterminism. He and Wang excel at the cutting simile (all of Terao’s narrators do: it comes with the voice), though Wang’s lexicon assumes a sensual, sibilant specificity. Indulge: “Dead skin flaked off him as though he were a giant shiitake mushroom dispersing spores into the wind.” “Churning from the back-and-forth movement, my spit looked like froth from a frog laying eggs.” “I held his tip in my mouth, covered it with my tongue, and felt his foreskin recede like a flower bud in a time-lapse.” “I often wonder, if a person jumped off the twenty-third floor of a hotel and their brain broke apart like a piece of tofu, would each piece have felt pain?”

 Yi-Hsiang, Jie-Heng, and Ming-Heng’s lust for success at the cost of death is never explained (as desire can never be), though Terao foregrounds enough childhood trauma to justify a stab at analyzing their needs and neuroses and impossible, botched competition to master one another. “‘When will you start to live in the real world?’ . . . I wanted to tell him that there would never be such a day.” Cultural circumstance, too, strings its bow. In his original Taiwanese reader, Terao can assume an awareness of contemporary Taiwan’s Sisyphean crucible of social pressure, rooted in the onerous ideals of Confucian piety and class ascension. For the anglophone reader, this dearth of context leaves a putative knowledge gap that Wang anticipates in his translator’s note: “There was a catchphrase in Taiwan. . . : ‘Come come, come to NTU; leave, leave, leave for the USA.’” Wang elucidates, too, why a Taiwanese writer might elect to use a Japanese pseudonym. After all, the pressure to thrive within the capitalist system is universal. It just takes a genius to game it.

Terao writes in the tradition of a veritable wave of queer Taiwanese literature, starting with Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys in 1983, translated by Howard Goldblatt; cresting through the 1990s with Qiu Miaojin, in Bonnie Huie and Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translations; and most recently Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, winner of a 2024 National Book Award for Taiwan Travelogue along with translator Lin King. Some of these books bear more social and postcolonial critique than others: Terao could be accused of under-historicizing, keeping his chronology undated even as it spans decades of his characters’ suffering (you can easily infer Spent Bullets’ timeline from the post-2010s ascendancy of technocapitalism and era-specific descriptions of video games: “The characters walked along the horizontal space like paper cutouts, with every square of their pixelated form clearly visible”).

The choice to circumvent history sets Terao in the realm of the aesthetic experiment, even as one of Spent Bullets’ stories takes for its blurred backdrop Taiwan’s 2014 pro-democracy Sunflower Movement, which aimed to resist encroaching trade ties with the People’s Republic of China. “Big-P was draped in a body-length ROC flag,” writes Terao. “It wasn’t quite the right symbol, but we didn’t have any sunflowers.” Symbols and images are what concern Terao, at the expense of historical time. In the same scene, Terao includes “a lady speaking Cantonese . . . handing out simple, crudely made flyers against the flow of the march.” But the Sunflower Movement took place in spring 2014, and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in the fall of the same year. Is it unethical to slight the linearity of the past if slighting serves the fictional narrative?

If the plot itself depends on the mystery of cause and consequence, perhaps not. Whenever Taiwan appears in the international media cycle, it is figured only in the orbit of the PRC. This orbit, as writer and scholar Michelle Kuo recently demonstrated, swirls with meteoroids of untruth, distortion, and gross historical error, far more dangerous than Terao’s minor fudging. Taiwanese authors are beginning to respond, for the canons of national literature come freighted with nothing less than the cannonball of identity. I quote Terao again: “I’m afraid those seeking social commentary or indictments here will come away disappointed.” And why not? Why must we seek social commentary? We’ve already established that Spent Bullets has no time for morality, and if it explodes the contract between the aesthetic and the ethical—just as in a game of Clue, where anyone can be the murderer—then Terao gains the same free will to write whatever he desires for which his characters would happily perish.

A character encases the shell of a spent bullet in a Snow White-esque glass box, removed from the California pool in which it had been fired: “The salt from the pool crystallized on the surface of the metal, forming an eternal miniature forest.” Melodramatic, a little on-the-nose, just like Spent Bullets’ sex scenes. But you must be getting what you wanted.