ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the representations of exotic culinary authenticity in Chinese American writer David Wong Louie’s debut novel The Barbarians are Coming (2000). Louie arguably conducts a literary reinvigoration of U.S. historical fascination with Asian cuisines in the era of the Cold War. While the novel explores the workings of the dominant culture’s quest for exotic authenticity in achieving the racial appropriation of Asian body and culture, it maps how the Chinese American hero Sterling responds to the cultural discourse through various forms of material and affective performances to construct an alternative culinary authenticity as embodied and political. The chapter investigates the ways in which the American eating of the labelled Chinese food legitimizes their positing of the Chinese subject in a controlling network of exotic othering and racial gendering. The cultural myth of egg foo yung brings forward Chinese American food’s strategic initiation of invented tradition – the trope that grants Sterling with potential to infuse distinctive political affects. Louie’s narration of Sterling’s cooking and eating “real” Chinese food facilitations the challenge of U.S. racial politics and imagines the recuperation of Chinese collective memories, thus confirming the versatility of culinary authenticity as well as Asian American cultural identity. Key Words: David Wong Louie; The Barbarians are Coming; exotic culinary authenticity; purity and invented tradition; collective memory
