Eating Chinese Food Naked

Title: Eating Chinese Food Naked
ISBN: 9780140256970
Author: Mei Ng
Rating: ⭐ 3.35 (29 ratings, reviews)

"When Ruby was a kid, around the time when other little girls were being dandled on their daddy's knee... and thinking about marrying him when they grew up, she was dreaming about marrying her mother and taking her away." Right off the bat Mei Ng's novel promises to be different from the run-of-the-mill mother-daughter saga so beloved of young, female first novelists of every ethnic persuasion. Ruby Lee, the heroine of Eating Chinese Food Naked, has just graduated from college and come back home to live with her parents over the family's laundry business. Her parents, Bell and Franklin, are hardly a match made in heaven, and for all of her life Ruby has been her mother's defender--a role she can't give up even as she longs to be free of it. During the course of her summer at home, Ruby must navigate the choppy waters of familial relations--her mother and father's estrangement, her irresponsible older brother's volatile relationship with everyone, her sister's recent marriage to a non-Chinese--as well as sort out her own feelings about Nick, a young man whom she loves but cannot seem to remain faithful to. Ng's melancholy novel perfectly captures her heroine's dislocation both within her family and within herself, at the same time offering readers a glimpse of the urban Chinese American experience across two generations. --Margaret Prior