I was very disappointed in this novel. Granted, the author is talented but, I could not get into this book. I did finish it but it took me a weeks. Nothing in this book made me want to pick it up once it was put down. I struggled to get through it. The chacters were lifeless and uninteresting. I did feel sorry for Ruby's father Franklin. These characters had such an opportunity to discover why they didn't get along but nothing was resolved. Ruby remained selfish and Bell a doormat.

Mei Ng, the author of "Eating Chinese Food Naked", her first novel, shows us her great skills as a writer. Mei captures her readers' attention through her portrayal of a young Chinese-American woman and her struggles to understand her complex relationships with her mother and her boyfriend, who she deeply loves, but cannot be faithful and committed to.The main character, Ruby Lee, regretfully finds herself back home at her parent's apartment in Queens after graduating from college. Ruby becomes restless and impatient while living with her parents and working a temporary job as a secretary. Each day at her parents' apartment behind Lee's Hand Laundry, forces her to question her protective love for her resilient mother and her own open
sexuality. Ruby often runs from her uncertainties by wandering from cafe to clubs to search for her "one-night-stands".

Ruby finally understands herself and the reality in which she deals with through her daily struggles in her assorted relationships. Eating Chinese Food Naked is a novel about how a contemporary Asian-American woman who finally found her true self and is satisfied with it. This book was great and recommended to read, Eating Chinese Food Naked, explains a lot about family life and how the Chinese Traditions can have a great affect on a young person's life, like Ruby. Although Mei have explained and showed well about Ruby's life and her struggle to find her true self, the relationship Ruby had with her boyfriend may have ruined the suspense a little on Ruby's journey to find herself.

Hasn't anybody ever thought why there exits a whole bunch of caught-between-two-cultures-and-pity-me-I-can-command-perfect-English-but-I-do-not-know-a-word-of-Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese-I-am-only-an-American kind of books? The saddest thing is that those writers hardly would get to the point of having their second books published. Statisticly, Eastern Asian Americans are people who have got the highest college education rate in the USA. The enourmous amount of their one-hit-wonder phenomena explains that those publications are the effort to overcompensate their voicelessness in our society. They are ignored and still giving in the conditional acceptance situation.
The author Ng seemed to be relevant to go beyond the mere handle of the one dimensional racial identity politics story and seemingly attempted so; she acutually threw a lot, perhaps more than she could dealt with in one work. Her overridden discourse of the main character's s sexuality is one effort of it, although it seems no success. She should DECONSTRUCT it instead of showing off the explicitness and putting her mom on the spot. Just talking about sex is not a courage. Handling and being responsible (show some more consistency, please! like what Ruby thinks of her dragging relationship with her Caucasian man as a Asian American. Isn't she feeling such a pain and mortification after all?) for it is the real one. At the point of Eating Chinese Food Naked, Ng has not accomplished anything particularly remarkable. I am writing this in the hope that the work is not on the road to be another soon-to-be-forgotten-Asian-American-one-hit-wonder-novel.
I don't deny that the necessity of the game Ng(or any Asian American) fell to play simply to be recognized and 'understood' by people in US society in a generic and unsophisticated sense; the game of playing the role that people expected her to be (I mean, social level such as race and gender, instead of philosophical sense). What Ng performed was What an second generation Asian American Ivy leagur grad chick is supposed to be. At least she never failed to live up to this expectation. The predicament was that she never went beyond it. I could see Ng succumbing the role and never managed to shake it off in the work. Any gesture she performed, frustration and confusion, even a bit of saucasm for the world against her just fits to what's always expected to secend genaration immigrants' story. If the resentment for being treated as an eternal Foreginer by peers and alienated by her parents as well for the cultural and generational gap laid is not the clichest of cliche, though, what could we possibly expect? If the author meant to go deeper to the self conflict torn between two different value systems(Eastern and Western),two different generation and the pain of belonging to neither, isn't this work a bit too superficial and easy/lazy ?
For there were some poignant recognitions and seemingly reconciliations with oneself over the course of development, this story is still worth reading. For an instance, the uncontrollable pain and the sense of guilt Ruby could not help feeling might be the unconsious cause of her returning to her parents unwillingly in the first place. The author knew too well that Ruby could not go any further unless she goes through a ritual of detaching and emotional independence from her parents. This whole novel was the path to complete the initiation of being your own no matter how sad or painful it would be. The comfort of the work was that it did not offer any easy-and-catchy-to-understand solution for the argument the set brought up---sencond generation's identity problem. It goes on forever and you only stumble over and over again if you expect any easy solution. At least, Ruby learned the big lesson of the life; there is not such a thing that we really understand and/or save someone else, but that does not necessarily means we hate.
After all, I have got to confess that I consider Ng as the most promising (Asian American)writer in the last ten years whose next work that I am dying to read!