Seize Your Copy The Barbarians Are Coming Narrated By David Wong Louie Released As Publication

is a word that I cannot handle, No matter how many times Ive encountered it and looked it up, I have to look it up again for the next encounter, Same for words like flout, flounder, flaunt, F for failure to remember, I dont know about native speakers, but for nonnative speakers like me such an inadequacy is negligible, compared with other annoying language incapacity Ive discovered and felt powerless to deal with.
I can always attribute my memory lapse to the fact that my mind is not wired for alphabets, Genetically I am a tonal language live machine even if scientists havent found the tonal genes, or probably will never find,

Then I watched an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and all those cool things Leon teaches Larry, By the way, I think Leon should open a language school for immigrants since he can make the language alive and kicking, unlike those English language courses I took in school for which vocabulary memorization and grammar rules strangled the last bit of spirit out of English.
Leon tells Larry that hes been foisted with a secretary that everybody wants to unload onto somebody else, Bingo! I suddenly learned the word foist without really learning it and memorized it without beating my brain with a mental stick,

And “foist” is the most suitable word to describe the central character Sterling Lung in “The Barbarians Are Coming”, His relationship with Bliss is practically foisted on him by Bliss onesided enthusiasm, sort of like the motherly love, Bliss is pregnant with his child, Even this unborn child seems to be foisted on him, Then he cooks for a beautiful Xena like woman and the next thing he knows, shes drunk and tries to foist herself on him, His parents try to foist all kinds of things on himthe idea of going to medical school which he rebels against, their contempt for his culinary aspiration etc.
They even arrange to get a picture brideI think the barbarian in the title actually refers to her but I can be wrongfrom Hong Kong for him, forcing him to ditch other women and to marry this barbarian.
This last piece of foisting is the most egregious of all,

I am still at theth chapter of the book and I dont know if more foisting is going to happen, It seems that cooking is the only thing nobody foists on him and everything else in life is imposed and unwelcome,

He writes so well and it almost pains me to talk about the prevailing foisting in his book, Fortunately he passed away two years ago and would not get hurt by whatever I say about his book, Onlyyears old. Too young to die for a modern man, I loved this book most of the way through, then felt it devolved into predictability and soap opera toward the end although to Louie's credit, he did not eventually take the easy way out.
Sterling Lung is Americanborn Chinese, a French chef who refuses his parents' desire that he be a good Chinese son and his patrons' desire that he be a Chinese chef.
"Can't you make a Happy Family" one diner asks, Well, that's what this book is about: the hard, sometimes twisted, spoken and unspoken, secret and revealed relationships between fathers and sons and grandsons and husbands and wives and all who come under their roofs and sit at their tables.
A good but, in my view, flawed work, What works well is the voice of the narrator, Sterling Lung, a ChineseAmerican chef who would rather cook French haute cuisine than the food everyone assumes he would be expert at preparing.
His strained and strange relationship with his wife, Bliss, has some rich and dark humor, as does his depiction of his relationship with his Chinese parents, whose weird American sobriquets, Genius and Zsa Zsa, belie their decidedly old country origins and attitudes.
What doesn't work so well is the extended retrospective section over the life and romantic entanglement of Genius and the jolting introduction of an unredeemable tragic event that consumes the last third of the narrative.
I found the first third of the book engaging and amusing, the second third bewildering and somewhat boring, and the last third depressing, I did not find Sterling that sympathetic through much of this novel, but the ending was touching and I feel that at least Sterling is a dynamic character, righting himself in the end to realize his place in the world.
Giving up on ethnic books for a while, OK story, but best part was a couple of hastily tossed out list of ingredients for dishes I ate as a child, but whose recipes I never got from my Mother, so I was very happy to find them.
Not a memorable sentence inpages, I'd like a little more for my effort,

What's happened to David Wong Louie

This was a gem of a book, and all the better, like a discovery of a hidden stash of chocolate, because I came in with middling expectations.
I'd heard of him when I was in college, . along with Maxine Hong Kingston et al, But since then nada. Book jacket says that he's the author of the short story collection Pangs of Love, a New York Times Notable Book ofand a Voice Literary Supplement Favorite of the same year.
Mr. Louie apparently lives in Venice, California and teaches at UCLA,

The plot. A classicallytrained French chef, who is second generation Chinese from Longuylun a, k. a. Long Island Sterling Lung struggles with identity, fatherhood, ancestry, and that clash of ideology and values that only a second generation Chinese growing up in Nixon America would.
Into this stew, David Wong Louie throws in a secondgeneration Jewish woman, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, but who grew up in Connecticut, She becomes pregnant with Sterling Lung's child, ahem, out of wedlock,

Meanwhile, his parents, despairing that their only son, out of a family of four, would ever produce an heir to "carry on the Chinese surname", brings over a picture bride for him from Hong Kong, and situates said Chinese bride in the basement of their laundrybusiness/home.


Sterling Lung also works at a country clubstyle establishment, cooking for a group of "WASPy" women who liked to fondle his ponytail black brush and constantly asking him to cook Chinese, which Sterling can't do, because he wasn't trained for it.
Instead, he can produce a superlative boudin blanc or gigot d'agneau, His only friendship seems to be with a Jewish butcher, from which David Wong Louie constructs amazing, downright hilarious interactions and revelatory moments,

Louie is deliberately playful with his naming, Get this: his parents immigrants from China take on American names Father, "Genius", Mother "Zsa Zsa", His Jewish girlfriend's name is Bliss Sass, and she's anything but blissful, more like a tenton truck that flattens anything standing in her way toward marriage and kids.
The Chinese bride's name is Yip Yuk Hing, and Louie writes, "Yuk which means Jade rhymes with cook, " The Jewish butcher is only addressed by his last name, Fuchs,

The writing is wonderful, the sentences snappy, the scenes insert fresh elements like that scene with his fatherinlaw involving the fivethousand dollar fence he constructed to keep deer out of his property and Sterling gets zapped by electricity.
David Wong Louie forges elemental connections in his sentences that had me chuckling and shaking my head at the same time, In a quick aside, he writes of the father who learned to drive after losing a kidney "The man loses a vital organ and, naturally, he wants to learn to drive a car.
In Genius' universe, there's a perverse logic in the substitution of an internal combustion engine for a kidney, which squeezes piss from blood: Both make you go.
"

The best thing about this book is how Louie captures the identity crisis of a secondgeneration Chinese born in the U, S. of A. Not really Chinese, but not really American either, as "Americanism" is defined by the WASPy ladies he worked for, Witness this: Libby Drake, the woman who is president of the club, introduces Sterling to her assembled guests, "Everyone, this is Sterling, our very own Chinese chef, " She is beaming, flush from her trip to China, as well as from the wine racing through her system, I can read her perfectly: Not only are the slides and the memories they hold hers, so are the people and objects in those pictures, And here I am, as if I'd just stepped off the screen, proof of her assertion, " The confusion that follows then as the matter is clarified: Sterling actually grew up in Long Island and had never been to China, and though he might be Chinese, he had no clue about how to cook classical Chinese, other than the pedestrian fare his mother made at home eggfooyung is NOT classical chinese Louie paints all this with a light and deft touch, letting the characters speak and impale themselves.


It's the throwaway detail that catches my eye time and again as a writer, The throwaway detail that tells so much in its economy, Zsa Zsa who could neither read nor write English despite having been in America to birth four children, for whom riding the bus is an ordeal, because her "ultimate nightmare is getting off too early or too late".
Genius' reaction to a discarded Frigidaire out on the kerb, "I won it, It's all mine. " Sterling's secondgeneration American eyes assessing his crazy father filching a discarded Frigidaire off the street as if he'd just won the lotto, "The man is a whole human being, bearing all the requisite parts, but at the same time everything about him feels wrong, patently untrustworthy, "

Louie also unravels the interpolation of the American dream for a secondgeneration Chinese, Sterling wants his fatherinlaw's magnificent house, with "its entirely glass, tenfoottall windows looking out at acres of prime Connecticut real estate, " The money, as evidenced by the lavish wedding he threw for his daughter and Sterling, the confidence with which he takes on the world to wit: the urinal scene where fatherinlaw and soninlaw pee side by side who has the bigger dick, who has the bigger bladder.
But really, where it cuts to the bone pardon the cooking metaphor, although it ties in so well with the cooking theme

of this book and Sterling's friendship with a butcher, is the ironic reflection Sterling makes of his communiques with his fatherinlaw.
The man asks him immediately to call him "Dad" before the wedding is over, He puts his hands on his shoulders, he confides in Sterling, and yet, Sterling is filled with horror at the way the man responds to deer as vermin, and in a rare poignant scene, Sterling becomes the deer in headlights, as his father in law looks through him at the deer and says, "Look at that son of a bitch standing on my property".
These intimacies shared between fatherinlaw and soninlaw are simultaneously all the intimacies lacking in Sterling's relationship with his own father, Genius, The gulf between father and son, first and second generation Chinese in America, is explored through the lens of The Other the Jewish father in law thus, flipping the archetype of "the other" as a doubleentendre of the racial power dynamic.


A lot of this kind of racial territory has been explored ad infinitum since, in myriad stereotypes of the Asian American experience, but when David Wong Louie first wrote all this in, this was fresh ground, and the writing, the narrative, the plotting reveal that.
The story is all in shade, the shade of that beautiful thing called 'nuance', There's so much to learn here for the immigrant novelist,

Definitely, take a leaf out of this book,
.