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Summary
Summary
Mei Ng invents a new genre of heroine in this stunning fiction debut. This simultaneously witty and poignant first novel explores the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, and the daughter's reluctant homecoming to a family she couldn't wait to leave.
For a twenty-two-year-old college graduate, Ruby Lee is surprisingly world weary. Restless and searching, no one is more surprised than Ruby when, after graduating from Columbia University), her first stop is back home to Queens. Even Ruby doesn't quite know what she hopes to find there, but the longer she stays the more she is forced to confront the family and emotions she tried to escape, especially her deep, protective love for her mother, Bell, a housewife bullied by Ruby's tyrannical, cigar-smoking father. The hundreds of laundry parcels stacked in the family living room, the detail and distraction of her mother's Chinese cooking, even the sexual fantasies that have long been a part of her waking and dreaming life begin to surround and smother her. At times these fantasies return her to the bed of her on-and-off boyfriend, and at other times they find her walking fro
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A Chinese-American's ambitious but flat first novel in which recent college graduate Ruby Lee comes home to face the family she fled. Settings, people, and activities (especially the preparation of remarkable meals) play prominent roles and are vividly and lovingly evoked. But that's not enough to carry a narrative that often seems an underpowered vehicle for characters whose problems feel more contrived than convincing. Ruby is confused about a lot of things: her sexual identity; her relationship with her parents, Bell and Franklin, and with her boyfriend Nick; as well as her reasons for coming home. While she was at Columbia, she rarely visited, even though her mother and father live in nearby Queens, where her father owns a laundry. Since childhood, Ruby has always felt protective of her mother, a quirky character who works in a garment factory, hoards food in the basement, and sews clothes for a granddaughter she's never seen. Ruby's parents sleep in separate rooms, and their relationship is also one of the issues that she's come home to resolve. She describes her father's trip to China to marry Bell; her parents' uneasy relations with her two siblings; and her own sexual needs and anxieties (she finds herself increasingly drawn to women), which have led to numerous panicky one-night-stands as well as an on-and-off relationship with Nick. As the months pass, Ruby intermittently works as a temp, saves to take her mother to Florida, and tries to understand her family. By fall, following a series of confrontations and revelations, she's finally able to move out, having accepted the tangled nature of family life and family history and its influence on her character, and having come to grips with her own sexuality. A coming-of-age story that pushes all the current multicultural buttons--cuisine, custom, and conflict between generations--but never truly comes alive. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Asian American mother-and-daughter genre stories were in danger of becoming a clicheafter Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club dominated best-seller lists during the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, Mei Ng has arrived to update the genre for the 1990s and delight readers with her excellent first novel. Naked is terrific. Ng writes in an earthy, rhythmic prose that captivates the reader. She expertly captures the sadness and frustration of Franklin and Bell, immigrants toiling in a Queens, New York, laundry; the alienation of Van, their rebellious son; the emptiness of Lily, the eldest daughter; and the confusion of Ruby, the prodigal and prodigious daughter, living at home with her parents after graduating from college. Ng can write at any level, expertly combining the explicit and sublime, humor and tragedy. Sex is the glue that holds the book together: dispassionate sex between Franklin and Bell; Ruby's random sex with strangers, passionate sex with her boyfriend, and dreaming of sex with other women. The title refers to one of Ruby's postcoital rituals that also serves as the denouement. A marvelous book. --Ted Leventhal
Library Journal Review
In this contemporary novel, readers find Columbia University graduate Ruby Lee returning home to Queens, New York, to stay temporarily with her parents. Living in the four rooms behind Lee's Hand Laundry, which is owned and operated by her aging father, Ruby finds herself unable to escape issues past, present, and future as she battles with her identity as a Chinese American woman, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a lover. Realistically portrayed, each possessing her or his own strengths, weaknesses, and individual personalities, Ruby and her family all evolve over the course of this first novel, much to the satisfaction of the reader. With strong female protagonists inhabiting worlds that are both Chinese and American, Ng's writing can be likened to that of Amy Tan and Gish Gen. A nice addition to most general fiction collections.Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Stanton, Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
