Eating Chinese Food Naked deserves 5+ stars. It compares to no other novel nor writer I've read except maybe Albert Camus. Read it without expectations of where you expect it to go, and appreciate Mei Ng's use of language and selective poor English to speak in the voice of immigrants speaking English as a second language. When she speaks as Ruby virtually every paragraph or chapter ends with such punctuation and clarity it's like a punch in the gut and a light bulb going on type revelation of a world you knew nothing about, nor were perceptive enough to realize you were in the dark about until now.

If you like predictable stories with nicely tied up story lines and happy endings, you'll be frustrated the characters and plot don't go where you want. Where it goes is real. The characters have their own experiences and logical truths. They are sympathetic and brilliantly written. Read it for what it is and where it goes, and be enlightened.

Writers like this do not disappear after one book, nor do they publish tripe yearly. I eagerly await Mei Ng's next book. Actually... I can't wait, I think I'll read this one again.

Matt - San Francisco 94124

As someone who has taught this novel in several of my classes, I would like to say that Mei Ng writes with intelligence and wit and pathos. I would rate this up with Fae Ng's BONE as one of the best portrayals of Chinatown life from a young female perspective. Yet whereas BONE achieves its effects through absence and silence, EATING CHINESE FOOD NAKED is full of flesh and longing...Ng writes with passion and daring and a full command of her material. If she manages to stay above the fray of Asian American literary politics and simply keeps writing, I am sure she will go far.

I don't usually spend my time writing reviews on Amazon (in fact this is my first) but I just happened to be looking at the comments about this book and was shocked. People talking about grammatical errors and places in Queens where the names have been changed! Amazing. First off, a writer writes in a voice, not in perfectly grammatical sentences. That is what structures writing in high school, not in literary work. Second, in fiction, you don't have to use the real names of places, that would be why it's called fiction. Anyway, it's a shame that a quiet subtle book, one where the landscape is emotional and not existing streets of plot-driven excitement and adventure goes so underappreciated. This book got rave reviews and they were well-deserved. Ng writes about the interior life of a family that communicates less through words than through gestures, like many families. She portrays this with remarkable acuity and grace. It may just frankly be a book that goes above the heads of some readers. Once I was steeped in her world, I didn't want to leave. Can't wait for her second book.

I'm not particularly picky when it comes to books. I'll excuse flaws after flaws if something about the book catches me. This book, however, was such a chore to read. Ng's grammatical errors were obvious and frustrating. Sentence structures were poor, unimaginative and many times defensive even at times when it need not be.
But her biggest flaw were her storytelling paths. They were unfocused, many times uninteresting, lacking grasp and shaky. I found myself trying to help her re-write her book. It simply became tiring.
While I'm not against the use of profanity, I felt Ng's excessive use of it left me with the impression that the author was a poseur trying too hard to reiterate Ruby's angst.

Mei Ng tries too many things in this book. While I give her credit for trying, I feel that there were just too many flaws in this book for me to give it a higher recommendation. First, on a technical level, I don't know why she decided to use third-person multiple points of view. This is one of the trickiest kinds of narrative to do successfully because it often feels choppy and unfocussed. Such was the case here. In many chapters, Ng changes point of view in every single paragraph -- sometimes mid-paragraph. She could just as easily (and more effectively, I think) have done longer sections in a single character's point of view, switching only between these longer sections (or, simply done the whole thing in Ruby's POV). Also there were chapters where she started in present tense, for no particular reason, and then switched back to past tense. This can be done effectively, but I felt like here it was simply a mistake; it came across as sloppy rather than stylistic.

OK, enough of my boring discussion of technical stuff. As far as the storytelling, here too the novel comes across as unfocussed. Ng can't seem to fix on one aspect of the story long enough to do it justice. We get a few fascinating insights into the lives of Franklin and Bell, but then we'll veer into yet another long, boring section about how aimless Ruby feels and how she just can't bring herself to go into the city. Ng teases us here and there with hints of Ruby's bisexuality, but never goes anywhere with this either (the scene near the ending at the party is a particular letdown, almost as though Ng and not Ruby is the one who "chickens out").

Moreover, Ruby comes across as grotesquely shallow at times in ways that I'm not entirely sure were intentional (the way she weighs the "pros" and "cons" of her boyfriend, for example) because they made me completely lose sympathy for or interest in her. Some of the side characters, particularly Ruby's brother and sister, remain so underdeveloped (though with plenty of potential that could have been developed) that I wonder if Ng didn't put them in there to pad the story a bit, lest the reader get tired of Ruby's uneventful life.

Overall, disappointing -- and in a large part because it does have good potential, with some solid characterizations, details and scenes. I had a hard time getting through it and didn't come away with much of anything once I did get through it.