The Barbarians are Coming

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