Top
Sterling Lung grew up in the back of his parents' laundry dreaming of being an American, while speaking Chinese to his mother, English to his friends, and very little to the father he seemed always to disappoint.
Now twenty-six and a graduate of Swarthmore and the Culinary Institute of America, Sterling cooks French food for the Wasp ladies of a private club and conducts an arm's-length affair with a Jewish-American princess, thereby frustrating his father's dream of a doctor son and his mother's scheme for a Chinese bride. For Sterling's parents, the barbarians are already here.
In a tale that alternates between black comedy and out-and-out slapstick, between the pain of a son alienated from his father and that of a father alienated from his son's native land, The Barbarians Are Coming is a template of the American immigrant experience: of the deracination of the second generation, the wrenching losses of the first, and the legacy of misunderstanding that binds the two. By turns antic and deeply moving, it is, ultimately, a powerful depiction of the Chinese-American experience and a profoundly affecting novel about fathers and sons.
