The Barbarians are Coming [Hardcover]

David Wong Louie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2000

A stunning depiction of the Chinese-American experience and a deeply affecting novel about fathers and sons from the author of the prizewinning story collection Pangs of Love.

"Louie is elegant, funny, a touch spooky, and he has as fine a hair-trigger control of alienation and absurdity as any of the best of his generation."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Sterling Lung grew up in the back of his parent's laundry dreaming about being a real American while speaking Chinese to his mother, English to his friends, and very little to the father he seemed always to disappoint. Now twenty-six and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Sterling cooks French food for the WASP ladies of a private club in Connecticut and conducts an arm's-length affair with an old Swarthmore classmate, a Jewish-American Princess from New Canaan, thereby frustrating his father's dream of a doctor son and his mother's scheme for a Chinese bride. For Sterling's parents, the barbarians are not coming: they are here now.

In a tale that alternates between black comedy and out-and-out slapstick, between the pain of a son alienated from his father and a father an alien in his son's native land, The Barbarians Are Coming reveals the deep psychic wounds each man has suffered even as it ultimately leads to a reconciliation that is as moving as it is necessary. Here is a tale of the immigrant experience--indeed, of the American experience: of the deracination of the second generation and the wrenching losses of the first.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In David Wong Louie's finely crafted, funny, and exceptionally well-written coming-of-age story set in the late '70s, a young Chinese American struggles toward the American dream of affluence, leaving behind his befuddled immigrant parents and their small apartment over their laundry business. The narrator of The Barbarian's Are Coming has been trained at the Culinary Institute of America and is ready to rise to any challenge a capon or a champignon can offer. Newly appointed resident chef of the Richfield Ladies' Club in Connecticut, Sterling Lung ignores his well-coifed employers' urgings that he cook Chinese food for them. His father, on the other hand, who wanted Sterling to become a doctor, takes his revenge by never allowing his son to cook for him. Aging and unwell, he nurses a bittersweet anger at having raised a child who knows almost nothing about his family's culture, who speaks little Chinese, and who prides himself on his ignorance of Chinese cooking. On the one occasion Sterling is allowed to cook in her kitchen, his mother scowls over his shoulder, criticizing every move. "You call yourself a chef?" she prods him.

"Didn't they teach you anything at that school?" She clucks her tongue and goes to the refrigerators and returns with a bottle. "Oyster sauce is always good." The store-bought sauce is against everything I've ever learned about gastronomy. Sauces are the supreme test of a chef's skill. Often, cooking is the sauce. But sauce out of a bottle, some anonymous committee of tongues in a laboratory determining the proper blend of flavors for my palate, my dishes? I read the label: "Oyster extractives, sugar, water, monosodium glutamate, salt, cornstarch, caramel color." Why not ketchup? Why not Drano?

In a last bid to set Sterling up in the only way they know how, his parents bring a "picture bride" from China to marry him. At the same moment, a relationship he had assumed was casual suddenly and alarmingly metamorphoses, as his girlfriend announces that she's pregnant.

Louie's much-lauded 1991 short-story collection, Pangs of Love, gave hints of his future development. In his first novel, as promised, he shows a narrative ingenuity as remarkable as his cultural insights. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

The author of a highly praised story collection, Pangs of Love, has now written an ambitious and appealing first novel, brilliant in its scathing insights. From his first sly pun, Louie's hapless narrator, Sterling Lung, wins the reader's rapt attention: "One day my Bliss is in Iowa, studying dentistry, gazing at the gums and decay of hog farmers and their kin." It is 1978, and 26-year-old Sterling, the bright American-born son of Chinese parents, has already disappointed his parents by choosing the Culinary Institute of America rather than medical school, and he's about to disappoint everyone else as well. His casual girlfriend Bliss wants more from their relationship; his parents want him to marry the Chinese picture-bride they have chosen for him; and his employers, the Waspy women of the Richfield Ladies' Club, want him to cook Chinese food, though his specialty is French cuisine. Although Sterling becomes deeply involved with Bliss, their relationship seems doomed from the beginning. And although Sterling learns to cook Chinese dishes to become a cable-TV chef, the best he can do is to parody a Chinese cook, calling himself the "Peeking Duck," and turning all his Ls to Rs as he speaks. At the heart of Sterling's failings is his troubled and distant relationship with his ailing father, Genius, who is devoted to the Chinese laundry he runs. Louie dazzlingly captures the bitter ironies of Asian-American life, but it is the scenes between father and son and, eventually, the scenes between Sterling and his sons, that expose the most complex realities of Chinese-American identity. To his parents' dismay, Sterling is Westernized to his roots--and yet, isn't that what they wanted? Though they expect him to cleave to his Chinese heritage, his parents chose "lean lives among the barbarians, so [Sterling] might enjoy penicillin and daily beef and be spared Mao and dreary collectivism, shared destiny, rationed rice, the communal butt-rag at the outhouse door." Louie's coruscating novel is full of astonishing writing, but the real delight is his wit and humor as he keeps plucking away the prickly petals of his characters' desires until he finds their hearts. Author tour. (Mar.) FYI: Louie's Pangs of Love received the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and the Ploughshares First Fiction Book Award.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: A Marian Wood Book/Putnam; First Edition edition (March 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399146032
• ISBN-13: 978-0399146039
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,393,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Engaging But Frustrating Read, March 12, 2001

By 

Ted (SAN ANTONIO, TX, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Barbarians are Coming (Paperback)

The Barbarians Are Coming is an interesting story, but altogether frustrating due to the main character's inability to act upon, or even recognize, his emotional response to any given relationship. His relationship to his father,his wife, and to a lesser extent, his mother, is frought with tension due both to cultural disparities and emotional immaturity. He rejects his Chinese heritage, but feels lost in his American birthright. His passivity is at once frustrating and an elemental part of the story. In the end, though, you just want to grab him by the shirt collar and shake him into awareness of all of the damage he has done by not doing anything decisively in his life.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Barbarians, March 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Barbarians are Coming (Hardcover)

This is a quality book with fine writing, but for me, was warming rather than deeply powerful. The protagonist, Sterling Lung, is a first-generation Chinese American in his late 20s. He's a passive, perceptive, self-deprecating but laid-back guy who's ambivalent about his heritage, as represented most strongly to him by his obsequious, uncool launderer father. Sterling falls in with a Jewish gal who directs his life for a while (children, coerced marriage; then "glamour" career working for her father). Things go sour, and in the end Sterling comes to his senses, affirming at last his Chinese identity and values and attempting to internally reconcile with his father. It may be a limitation on my part, in that I'm a non-Asian American woman, but the ending, in which all the "American" pieces of Sterling's life somehow dissolve away and he achieves redemption by embracing his family and heritage - registered with me as simplistic. Nevertheless, I was looking merely for a good read and was satisfied. I think anyone is likely to appreciate the evocative, amusing, and moving writing. END

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Barbarians, Barbarians every where, May 21, 2000

By 

Kathryn R. Ziemnik (OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Barbarians are Coming (Hardcover)

From the start of the book, one knows that the characters are headed for disaster. Their lives are a wreck and there is little they will do to correct their situations. Barbarians, barbarians everywhere. Many act cruelly toward their "loved" ones. This is one very dysfunctional family. David Wong Louie accurately gives the readers an understanding of the depth and pervasiveness of the behavioral disability.

Louie's repetitive use of the car was creatively woven with the behaviors of the main characters. The main characters went about their lives careening out of control. Regardless of how many miles they traveled or years they lived they would remain the same tragic characters. The characters carry a lot of emotional package with them throughout their lives. As a reader I was an observer. I got the sense that the main characters approached their lives as observers as well. They acted as if they weren't in the driver seat of their destinies. Instead they traveled as if they were on a tour bus, with very few reflective stopping points, inactively going where ever it would take them.

It was an accurate painful portrayal of many people who passively sit by and let others' actions lead them. They opt for the coward's choice, freeing themselves from responsibilities. The book will carry the reader through the full gamut of emotions. It is brilliantly humorous at times and bitterly pathetic at others.

The San Francisco Chronicle Online Book Club chose David Wong Louie's "The Barbarian's are Coming" for it's 3/19 - 4/15 selection. Chime in on the online bulletin board.