If Amy Tan systematically stripped one of her books of all its lyricism and emotional baggage, she'd end up with something like Mei Ng's debut novel Eating Chinese Food Naked. Ng's subject matter is pure Tan, full of neurotic Chinese-American families, mother-daughter dynamics, intergenerational and intercultural identity crises, Chinese food metaphors, and more. But the similarities end at the storyline. Tan steeps her novels in evocative descriptions of female pain; Ng's writing is flat, terse, and to the point. Her characters' conflicts are wholly internalized, mostly presented in a moment-to-moment account of the disparities between what they think and what they say. Befuddled college graduate Ruby Lee is the book's nominal protagonist, but Ng's focus wanders aimlessly through the minds of everyone near her: Her emotionally repressed Chinese-born parents are portrayed with the same non-committal abstraction as her emotionally stunted American-born siblings—and, for that matter, the man who admires her breasts on the bus. Lee, too, wanders aimlessly, working laconically at meaningless temp jobs, screwing strangers for the physical contact while fearfully avoiding her commitment-seeking boyfriend, and vacillating between her parents, who want her sympathies but are afraid to expose their need for her approval. Like their children, the elder Lees can't communicate, can't commit to emotions, and can't decide what they want. Ng's text expresses this guarded reserve a little too well; the entire book is emotionless and firmly distanced from its subjects. Her writing is smooth, and her characters artfully developed, but Ng's lack of sentiment or sympathy makes Eating Chinese Food Naked seem like either a therapeutic autobiographical exercise or a calculatedly apathetic Gen-X answer to Tan's gushy fervency. Either way, it reads well without making any significant claim on its readers' emotions.