ABSTRACT
For the Chinese immigrants and their descendants in David Wong Louie's novel The Barbarians Are Coming (2000), to make it in America, to climb up the socio-economic ladder, means to be able to move freely across boundaries, both geographical and gastronomic. Food and automobiles are two major fascinations of the Chinese American narrator, Sterling Lung, and his father, Genius, in The Barbarians Are Coming. Many anthropologists and sociologists have expounded on cooking and eating as symbolic of social relations. The way people eat and cook can be a statement on their individual and group identity. In his article, "China Man Autoeroticism and the Remains of Asian America," Tomo Hattori reads A-Gung's autoeroticism or aberration from heteronormativity in Kingston's China Men as an example of resistance to model minority discourse.
