Customer Reviews

The Barbarians are Coming

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Well written and often witty, but lacking in substance and sometimes embarrassingly self-indulgent. The book could have used a good editor (on several counts).

I agree with a previous review that this book is quite different from the more popular genre of Asian American litreature. The traditional Asian American literature usually ends at the point where the protagonist gives up on her cultural roots, and that is only the halfway point in this book. David Wong Louie tells the story of what happens after that point, and provides a touching portrayal of what many first/second generation Asian Americans must go through in the multiple stages - and generations - of their lives. I would recommend this book over many other standard textbooks of Asian American literature classes that reflect Asian American lives as accurately as blaxpoitation films reflect African American lives.

Sterling Lung grew up in the back of his parents' Chinese laundry. His parents expected Sterling to attend medical school so he could become a doctor. When he rejected their choice to attend a culinary school, Sterling's parents felt he dishonored them.

Now twenty-six, Sterling's goal in life is to become the All-American male. However, he will soon find his roots, love interest, and employer pulling at him from different directions. His parents have chosen his Chinese bride, but Sterling wants to make his own selection. He feels very strongly that he is not ready to marry. His girlfriend wants Sterling to commit to a more meaningful relationship, but he is not ready to do so since she is in Iowa studying dentistry. His employer wants him to cook genuine Chinese cuisine, but Sterling studied French cuisine. He will have to "Americanize" the genuine taste. If he honors the wishes of others, Sterling dishonors his own desires.

THE BARBARIANS ARE COMING is an incredible tale that provides the audience insight into the discord confronting Chinese-Americans. Sterling is a wonderful protagonist, but it is the support cast that brings him to life. His parents' paradoxical philosophy towards their son is extremely interesting, as they want him to make it in America while remaining Chinese. This cacophony will remind readers of their descendants' struggle between the "old country" and the Americanization of the children. David Wong Louie shows a clever talent that uses wit to describe the inner desires and conflict of his characters.

Harriet Klausner

David Wong Louie has written an exceptionally fine novel about our misconceptions of love and the willful ignorance we wear like armor against knowledge that can and will hurt us.

I won't take an academic approach with this review, but will say this: The Barbarians Are Coming is one of the few books both my father and I love. My dad thinks he's Genius Lung. For about two weeks after he finished the book, he'd flesh out our day-to-day interactions by saying: "Remember when Genius.... heh heh heh." Then he'd smile and nod at me knowingly, as if we shared some secret knowledge that he'd never known how to impart.

The shift into Genius's POV later in the book is a move that a lesser writer would've ruined his novel with, but Louie pulls it off with flair and heart, giving voice to a generation of fathers who might not have known what to say and how to say it.

This is a book I will teach for years to come; something to be treasured and shared.

First, a disclaimer: David Wong Louie's name popped off the shelf for me because, about 14 years ago, a literary journal I was editing published one of his early stories. I hadn't really tracked his career since then, but was interested to see what his new work was like, remembering that his prose had been, in my experience, technically polished and brilliantly funny, though rather emotionally flat.

As I expected, Louie's keen eye for satire and hilarity remains; and his prose is as high-gloss as ever. But the big, and very pleasant, surprise is the degree to which he has woven beautiful prose, pointed satire and weighty themes (the immigrant experience, how immigrant identities conflict and merge with American identities, etc.) into a deeply moving story. The Barbarians are Coming has the power to make you weep, even while you're laughing. It would be difficult to read it, I think, without profoundly re-evaluating your own behavior toward parents, lovers, children, your own Americanness, and your relationship with whatever ethnic or national identities you hold beyond that Americanness.

.... But these are cavils. This is a powerful and beautifully written novel that has the rare power, like a book of Roth's, to combine wit, heart and meaning.

The Barbarians are Coming is a shining example of Asian American literature taken to the next level of sophistication, primarily because it forgoes the cliched, played-out gimmicks of "ethnic genre writing" and instead focuses on characters and situations that are universal to the human experience. Thankfully, the author does not pander to self-exoticism, which unfortunately has become a disturbing trend among many of today's foremost Asian American writers. In the hands of a less capable writer, Sterling's story might have descended into the muck of italicised, explanatory nonsense about mystical ancestors and kitchen gods, but Louie is far too accomplished for that. The Lung family members, though Chinese American, face hardships and conflicts that all people can relate to. This book will make you laugh and cry all in one sitting, as the characters are supremely endearing for their very human faults and desires. Each one of them will undoubtedly remind you of someone you know; perhaps even yourself, at times. David Wong Louie is the present and future of not just Asian American writing, but of American literature in general. Do not miss this book.

This is a book I lovingly hold on to and relish over during impromptu dinners in my college dorm. Louie's story is quite the relief from generic Asian American nonfictions. Less academic and more romantic, it gives vigor and life to the interchanging passion and lovelessness that plaster Chinese lifestyle and interaction.

That said, Louie's piece is his own. One can intellectualize the Chinese male's femininity, inter-cultural skirmishes, and traditional values portrayed in the book, but in reality, it's just a really good story. The prose is exemplary, the plot is seductive, and the narrator is as human as it gets.

Don't pass this book up!