rev. of The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie
The Barbarians Are Coming
A novel by David Wong Louie. Putnam, $23.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee.
Sterling Lung has problems. The narrator of David Wong Louie’s first novel,
The Barbarians Are Coming, is a recent graduate of the CIA — the Culinary Institute of America — and he has landed what he regards as a plum job, cooking haute cuisine lunches at a Wasp ladies’ club in Connecticut. But soon enough, Sterling’s parents conspire to import a picture bride, Yuk, from Hong Kong for him to marry and carry on the Lung line; his sometime girlfriend, Bliss, a Jewish dental student, announces that she’s pregnant; his father falls ill with renal cancer; and the snotty ladies at the club, who “talk without moving their lips,” want him to cook, of all things, Chinese dishes, that “barefoot food, eat-with-sticks food. Under harvest moons, rinse off the maggots, slice, and steam . . . squatting-in-still-water food. Pole-across-your-shoulders, hooves-in-the-house food.”
His entire life, he has been rebelling against his culture and his parents, immigrants who have the droll nicknames of Genius and Zsa Zsa. Sterling grew up in the back of their laundry in Lynbrook, Long Island, and instead of becoming a doctor as they’d wished, he went to Swarthmore and majored in art history, then trained to become a French chef. “In their eyes I was a scoundrel, a dumb-as-dirt ingrate. This was the reward for their sacrifice, leaving home for America, for lean lives among the barbarians.” He has proved to be a particular disappointment to his father, with whom his relationship has always been remote and cold. During one hilarious and poignant scene, Genius seems to cherish a used refrigerator more than his son, lovingly wiping it down after it has been installed: “Cut off from the rest of the family, my father basked in the refrigerator’s chilled air, its silvery vapors, its measly light’s glow. What I saw in my father’s gentle cleaning of each egg holder’s deep dimple was kindness,
and the pang I felt, like fingers fanning in my throat, was envy.”
As in his story collection,
Pangs of Love, Louie draws great humor from clashes of assimilation. Some of the best moments in
The Barbarians Are Coming involve Morton Sass, Bliss’s father, a mendacious investor who convinces Sterling, after he marries Bliss and bears two sons, to host a cooking show on cable TV. Later, Sass sells the rights to the show, and it’s retooled into a humiliating Chinese parody called
The Peeking Duck, with Sterling assuming the voice of Hop Sing, the houseboy on
Bonanza, as he gives viewers what they want: “Today I make velly famous dish . . . Shlimp and robster sauce! This one velly good and velly chlicky dish. Aw time peoples say, ‘Wah! Where is robster?’ ”
Yet the heart and power of Louie’s novel lies more in the tragedy, not the comedy, of the Lung men — the father, doomed by a love affair with a white woman when he first arrives in the U.S.; the son, while begrudging his father’s aloofness, unable to see the selfish distance he himself creates, failing his parents, wife, and children, all in the “desperate attempt to overcome the unremarkableness of being a Lung.”
