Author Spotlight: Kevin Wang on Translating “Spent Bullets” and an Untranslatable Taiwanese Phrase
Kevin Wang describes himself as a teacher, a writer, and a translator — but not necessarily in that order. He moves between New York and Taipei; however, he was born in China and raised in the United States from when he was nine years old. Spent Bullets is the first book he has translated and published (with HarperCollins, no less), and EnVi Media is his first interview for the collection.
“Perversion, genius, and despair” describe Spent Bullets, according to the translator. Across the nine linked stories set in Taipei and Silicon Valley, the original Mandarin work by Terao Tetsuya “traces the life of a prodigy.” Readers witness the Honor Board in the best schools in Taipei and soak in despair as this prodigy climbs higher on the corporate ladder. Yet, as Wang also points out, “It seems like the work is so meaningless that it’s not worth mentioning. Or when the characters are working, they enter some kind of fugue state where they don’t even remember anything.”
Irony and dark humor pierce the pages and are expressed through the bright yellow cover of the English translation. The yellow captures the eye — and memory — immediately, but it’s also “reminiscent of a major liquid in the book,” Wang noted.
A pattern of a business person glancing at their watch emerges on the covert. The author’s name and the collection’s title — Spent Bullets — form the eyes of the creepy smile. “I think that smile is brilliant,” Wang said with a hint of humor. “It’s like the characters who try to pass themselves off as being okay and normal, and inside they’re totally twisted.”
EnVi Media spoke with Wang about his translation process for Spent Bullets, why he is a translator, and a phrase he believes to be untranslatable ahead of the collection’s October 14 release date.
Translating the Untranslatable
“Translation is something I naturally do.” Wang and his family moved from China to the United States when he was in fourth grade. In doing so, he shifted into a translator role for his parents. He also translated Chinese culture for his friends and his classmates, serving as a bridge of sorts between languages and cultures.
Eventually the prose and contemporary works became his focus after translating Classical Chinese poems during his first year of college. By translating this type of literature, “[I can] experiment with how I can turn translation into something like self portraiture and imbue them with my own experiences,” Wang told EnVi. “I am now removed from the language that I grew up in, [so translation] is a way to still be with it.”
But some words, phrases, experiences, and cultures are untranslatable. For Wang, the Taiwanese Tai-gi phrase “Hiān-Tsāi Sī Hit Tsit-Kang,” which appears in Spent Bullets as a short story’s title, was the most difficult to work through. The lyric comes from the song “Island Sunrise (島嶼天光)” by Fire EX., which became the anthem of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. For three weeks, Taiwanese university students occupied the country’s legislature to protest a China-related bill that was viewed as a threat to Taiwan’s safety. Some of the characters in Spent Bullets want to help this social movement even when they are in California and unable to directly participate.
“In the English translation, I leave it untranslated,” Wang said. Sometimes words are “so rich,” you do an injustice to them and the stories, the histories they carry by directly translating it for another audience’s comfort. This was the key reason behind Wang’s choice to not translate “Hiān-Tsāi Sī Hit Tsit-Kang” into English; it’s a piece of Taiwanese culture, history, and identity.
Inside the Mind of a Translator
Before we asked Wang why he chose to translate this queer contemporary Taiwanese piece of literature, we first had to ask, “Why Taiwan?” Wang’s response came in three parts: Firstly, “I wanted to experience the culture that shares a classical heritage [with Mainland China] in its text, but made its own thing entirely in the past couple of centuries and has its own languages,” the translator started off.
The second piece comes from a perspective of Wang as an educator, as he noted living in Taiwan created an opportunity for him to “teach in an education system that I’m fascinated by and is so different from the one I grew up in.” The last part was simple but just as powerful, if not more so: “I wanted to see how people here experience life and what their literatures are like.”
Spent Bullets is an intersection of all three. The short story collection takes place between Silicon Valley and Taiwan during the early aughts and the 2010s. “It’s not really a book that tries to be situated in a dialogue about the historical movement,” Wang mentioned, referring to the short story “Hiān-Tsāi Sī Hit Tsit-Kang.” “But it is in dialogue about a culture of overachieving and striving.”
This points us to Taiwan’s educational system. Wang didn’t personally experience the intensity, the brutality, and self effacement found in this education system, especially in high school and college. (He went to American schools with philosophies of “living in the moment, enjoy life as it comes at you, don’t always be planning ahead.”) However, being in Taiwanese classrooms as an English teacher and translating Spent Bullets brought more understanding. The characters in the collection are “optimizers;” they must be “productive at every moment.” They also strive through life with an attitude of “the humbler your origins and the cheaper you live, the better,” Wang said.
“I wanted to translate this book partly to understand that. It’s such an important part of Taiwan’s academic culture, which I also live in as a teacher,” he began. “And I saw the reactions of readers to the book in Taiwan. They resonated so much.” Wang added. “They said things like ‘I feel so seen by this book.’”
But like most works of art, Spent Bullets took time to become the bound book we now know it as. The translating process varied from story to story. In one “mode,” he first literally translates the work word-by-word until he moves onto the draft where he doesn’t look at the Chinese “at all.” At this stage, Wang just wants to “make the English work.” Afterward, he looked at the original Chinese to “make sure I haven’t gone too far,” he said. These drafts often included a pinch of anxiety and a healthy dose of him “scrutinizing over the word [choices]” — a relatable feeling to any writer.
While the drafts stages are similar, Wang’s “cinematic mode” strikes a different chord than the word-by-word process. An example he gave was how he translated the story, “Some Kind of Corporate.” In this piece, two work colleagues pretend to be a couple for convenience’s sake (he’s gay and she’s a lesbian). “The whole thing felt like a Black Mirror episode,” Wang told EnVi. “I could see it so cinematically.”
“Translating that became like living in that cinematic experience,” he noted. “I turned up the soundtrack to an episode of Black Mirror (“San Junipero”), and I played one song over and over again. It was called ‘Waves Crashing on Distant Shores of Time.’” The translating experience then emphasized “imitat[ing] the atmosphere” created by the story — and the unwritten — as well as the atmosphere Wang enveloped himself in through the soundtrack.
Bringing Real-Life Experiences to the Page
You might have heard the phrase, “Art imitates life.” Sometimes that’s true, as Wang found out while working on Spent Bullets. He started translating the collection while he was teaching English in a Chiayi junior high school, which is based in southern Taiwan. Wang considered this first-hand experience with Taiwan’s educational system “richly informative.”
He also personally experienced details that showed up in the stories, such as the numbered popsicle sticks in each classroom — for calling on students — and students cleaning the school every day on an unwavering schedule. “Having experienced [them] and knowing how these things are talked about by other English teachers allowed me to translate them in a more on-the-ground, accurate way,” Wang reflected.
A year later, the translator-educator worked on Taipei college campuses as an advisor for Fulbright English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) program. One of these college campuses included the National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, which is considered to be the best university on the island and the college of the characters from Spent Bullets.
Once again, this part of Wang’s life unexpectedly contributed to his “tactile” research. Through his time working on college campuses, Wang was able to “get the details down logistically.” This included just soaking up being in a place that also shows up in the stories. Wang, who has also dipped his toes into screenwriting and acting, paused for a beat before noting, “[It’s like] method acting, in a way.”
Research came in the form of collaborating with the Mandarin author Teraro Tetsuya, too. Wang noted to EnVi that Tetsuya “cares about the life of the English manuscript very much.” He continued, “the author totally trusted me to deliver on the English; he was just there to guide me.”
As Wang worked through translating each short story, he would gather together questions to discuss with Terao over Google Meets or in person. One of those questions revolved around salted yogurt, a food that appears in the second story, “Interstate Five.” Wang resurfaced the memory during our conversation, noting that he asked Tetsuya about this — because who knew salted yogurt existed? (It in fact does exist.)
Above all, Wang and Tetsuya had a partnership, a creative collaboration founded on trust. “Once in a while, he’d ask me about an English choice I [made] and why I made it,” Wang remembered. “But he never pushed back against my decisions, which is also maybe scary since I had that free reign. But I also really appreciate the trust.”
Learning Curves
While translating works of literature from Mandarin to English was not new for Wang, the business of translation was something he had to learn from the ground up these past few years. “I didn’t know how to pitch when I first started,” he said, going straight to the point. Wang added, “I learned how to pitch as I translated this book.” Now, he shares the knowledge he has gained with other aspiring Mandarin-English or English-Mandarin translators who want to publish their work with publishing houses.
Thinking of Spent Bullets in terms of its market positioning was a piece of the publishing world Wang had to learn. In publishing, books may have something called comparison titles (or “comp titles). Spent Bullets’, however, kept changing. Of course Wang had some of his own, and his editors also had their selections to “stay up to the trends of the market.” At the time of our interview, the comp titles were the novel Severance by Ling Ma and also the TV show Severance.
Better understanding how a book fits in the market and its trends was illuminating. In part, things like comp titles and staying on top of what readers want are important for convincing them to pick up your book. But there’s another crucial person you need to persuade: the bookseller. Market positioning often helps show booksellers that it’s worth having your work on their shelves.
Wang reflected, “It does take a village; so many people have their fingerprints in this book.”
Capturing Understanding Through Translation
The Translator Note, though, is all his. As a guest in Taiwan, the Chinese American translator understands his translation comes with responsibility. Although Wang was considering other topics to address in his note, he eventually decided the “better way to use that space is to talk about where I come from and my experience as someone who is a guest in Taiwan.”
Wang thoughtfully shared, “We shouldn’t cast judgement on [the characters]; we shouldn’t say their efforts are futile and not worth it.” The cast of Spent Bullets just barely keep their heads above water, and they have various coping mechanisms in order to help them tread water a little bit longer. They have been thrust into a culture of striving, a culture that has been ingrained into their society for centuries. Who are we — outsiders of Taiwanese culture — to judge?
Wang takes a similar perspective. Some things in the Taiwanese education system he had anticipated. Since he grew up in China until he was nine years old, Wang witnessed similar philosophies play out in the classroom. Instead of judgement, Wang emphasized learning more about the particular mindsets of Spent Bullets’ characters through his translation efforts.
“The system doesn’t change nor is there any desire for it to change,” the translator added. “It’s about learning to work with it, and that reminds me of this book [Spent Bullets] that these characters, they don’t want to overturn the system either.”
Another beat passed as Wang also considered the perspective of Terao Tetsuya when he wrote Spent Bullets: “Instead I think the author wants us to appreciate who these people are and to see the beauty in the self-effacement and dedication.”
Spent Bullets is now on shelves. Find the short story collection wherever you buy books or on HarperCollins’ website. Keep up with Kevin Wang on Instagram and HarperVia on Instagram and Facebook.
Want to find more books for your To Be Read pile? Check out EnVi’s Author Spotlight with Peng Shepherd here!
