Following the highly acclaimed short-story collection, Pangs of Love (1991), this debut novel by David Wong Louie represents an in-depth exploration of the theme of cultural assimilation. Critical opinion of The Barbarians Are Coming is generally very positive, praising Louie’s wit, humor, sensitivity, and insight. There is also, however, the sense that the superb narrative powers Louie exhibited in his short stories are somewhat strained under the weight of the extended form of the novel.

Still, The Barbarians Are Coming is far from another typical story of the East-meets-West type of cultural conflict. Yes, it is that, but it promises much more: as David Wong Louie tells us on the Acknowledgments page, “[M]ore than anything else, this book is about family and love.”

Its title taken from the name of a poem by Marilyn Chin, The Barbarians Are Coming is a story about fatherly love and its transformational powers. The first-person narrative of Sterling Lung, a 26-year-old Chinese-American chef of French haute cuisine, is one filled with irreconcilable contradictions and disappointments. While his parents want him to be a doctor, he chooses to become a chef.

“In their eyes I was a scoundrel, a dumb-as-dirt ingrate,” relates the narrator. “This was the reward for their sacrifice, leaving home for America, for lean lives among the barbarians, so I might enjoy penicillin and daily beef and be spared Mao and dreary collectivism” (28).

Another rift between father and son is that as the sole male heir, Sterling is expected to preserve family tradition and ethnic identity by marrying Yuk, his picture bride from Hong Kong. Yet he is forced to marry his wealthy Jewish girlfriend after she becomes pregnant. Sterling’s father, sick and weary from a lifetime of backbreaking laundry work, is temporarily rejuvenated by the birth of a grandson who, though half “barbarian,” takes after him.

Although the novel ends on a somber note with the death of Sterling’s father, precipitated by the loss of a second grandson, it promises new hopes for love and understanding between Sterling and his son.

Despite the melancholy ending, The Barbarians Are Coming is also a work of boisterous humor, biting sarcasm, and dazzling verbal ingenuity. Sterling’s earthy, unassimilating parents are referred to throughout as Genius and Zsa Zsa, names mockingly conferred upon them by a mysterious white woman of Lung senior’s past.

One of the funniest moments in the novel features a scene in which Sterling’s parents refuse to believe that their son is a chef; they prefer to see in their son a doctor, dressed in his white uniform, supplemented by apron, side towel, and a full set of chef’s knives.

We can get a glimpse of the bitter irony of Sterling’s Chinese-American life from the title of his Chinese cooking show on TV, The Peeking Duck. Trained as a French chef at America’s leading culinary school, Sterling is never fully accepted as the artiste that he is. Instead, his blooming career relies on his co-opting the personality of Hop Sing, the Chinese houseboy in Bonanza: “Evvy week I peek into you lifes!” (296).

His empirical optimism aside—“One moment you’re blinded by heavy rain or snow, and in the next you can see again—each swipe an epiphany” (114), the view Sterling sees through the windshield of life may be forever clouded by visions of the castrated rooster he has cooked, “a nice capon” (5).

SOURCES

• Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Hunger and The Barbarians Are Coming,” Journal of Asian American Studies 3 (2000): 378–382.
• Chin, Marilyn. “The Barbarians Are Coming,” Ploughshares 16 (1990): 104.
• Eder, Richard. “Now We’re Cooking,” New York Times Book Review, 2 April 2000, pp. 8–9.
• Gogola, Tom. “Talking with David Wong Louie: Fictional Fusion Cuisine,” Newsday, 1 April 2000, p. B11.
• Sucher, Cheryl Pearl. “David Wong Louie: Traveling the Distance between Fathers and Sons,” Poets & Writers 28, no. 4 (2000): 48–53.
• Whiting, Sam. “Louie Spices Up the Mix in Barbarians,” San Francisco Chronicle, 30 March 2000, p. E1.
• Wiegand, David. “Sweet and Sour: Chinese American Chef’s Travails Serve as Rich Family Saga,” San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Review, 5 March 2000, p. 1.
• “Wong Deftly Uses Comedy to Tell Immigrant Family’s Sad Story,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 11 March 2000, p. C2.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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