Eating Chinese Food Naked: A Novel - Softcover

Ng, Mei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671011456 ISBN 13: 9780671011451

Publisher: Scribner, 1998

Synopsis

This piquant, irresistible first novel explores the complex relationship between a mother and a daughter, a daughter's reluctant homecoming to a family she couldn't wait to leave...and her own sexual awakening....

Eating Chinese Food Naked

Surprisingly world-weary for twenty-two, Ruby Lee is stunned to find herself back home at Lee's Hand Laundry in Queens after graduating from Columbia University. Restless and searching, she's suddenly forced to confront the family and emotions she tried to escape, especially her deep and protective love for her mother, a gentle, resilient woman who is emotionally estranged from Ruby's bossy, cigar-smoking father.

The laundry parcels crowding the family living room, the distraction of her mother's Chinese cooking, and the sexual fantasies that envelop her combine to overwhelm Ruby. Sometimes the need for comfort returns her to the bed of her on-again, off-again boyfriend; at other times she finds herself wandering from café to Manhattan café, seeking the one affair that might relieve her anxiety. As she struggles to make a coherent picture of the clashing pieces of her life, Ruby at last begins to face reality as it is -- and not what she wishes it could be.

About this title

About the Author

Mei Ng grew up in New York City and lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Franklin was telling his wife, Bell, about the little boy who got his head caught in the power window of the family car, about the Chinese woman (a doctor) who was kidnapped from a Citibank, about the four people who were shot down outside a bowling alley, about all the people who got dead that day. Franklin likes the news.

He never have anything nice to talk. Why don't he be quiet and eat his dinner, Bell thought. He was talking and Bell was looking at his little brown teeth moving up and down. She pulled at the waistband of her pants; her stomach was getting nervous. The elastic was old and hardly made a sound when it snapped back around her. If not for her daughter, she would pick up her bowl and go down to the basement. Ruby had just moved back home and no one had told her yet that while she had been away, her mother fixed a plate for herself and went down to the basement while her father ate in the kitchen by himself.

Bell kept her face in her bowl, but every now and then her eyes opened wide as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing. What she really couldn't believe was that her baby had come back to her. And all dressed up in tight black clothes like she was going out to a party. Maybe it was her clothes that made her sit there so stiffly, as if afraid of her own family. Bell picked out a choice morsel of chicken and placed it in her daughter's bowl.

Ruby was so used to fending for herself that when the sweet white meat appeared in front of her, she nearly broke down and cried right there at the table. It didn't matter that she liked dark meat better. Her mother was chewing on a chicken foot. "You eat," Ruby said and tried to put some meat in her mother's bowl.

Bell waved the foot in the air. "More sweet near the bone," she said.

Franklin talked louder. "So then, in the Bronx there was a big fire. Some young mother, one of those single mothers, go out and leave her babies alone. When she come home, the whole place is burning up. She run back in and try to save them, but she end up dead and the two kids too. One boy and one girl. The youngest one, a baby, all wrap up in a blanket, not even hurt. What good is it, all alone now, no father, no mother. Some luck, eh?" He talked quickly, then sat, chopsticks poised, not touching his food. He was used to Bell not answering him, but still, sometimes he hoped she would.

The night Ruby moved back home, she couldn't wait for her father to leave the table. Her mother was twisting her slipper on the floor as if she were smashing a roach; she hated bad news. Franklin pretended not to notice; he had news to tell and gosh darn it, he was going to tell it. Ruby felt his words sliding under her mother's skin, to rankle her long after he stopped talking, long after he put his bowl down, swished water around his mouth and left the table.

In the living room Franklin turned the volume up on the television and settled into his chair. Bell got up to close the door; she could smell his smoke already. "Your father and his cigars." She pushed a chair over to the sink, jumped up on it and opened the window. "Smoke, smoke, smoke. Every minute with that cigar in his mouth," Bell said. She held two fingers up to her mouth and blew imaginary smoke at her daughter.

"The minute I walk in, he tells me to buy cigars. I had to go to three stores," Ruby said. "Three stores. No one carries his stupid brand anymore."

"He told your sister to buy some, but you know her, take her time. He must be happy you're back." Bell got quiet.

"No, he doesn't like me anymore."

"He don't like no one." Perched on the edge of the sink, Bell turned her face toward the open window. Next to her, dried salted flounder hung on a string that stretched from cabinet to window. She touched them respectfully. "Remember you used to love salty fish? These are almost done. They have to get good and dry first."

"I still like it," Ruby said quickly. There was something in her mother's voice that she needed to defend herself against, as if her mother were accusing her of something that had nothing to do with fish.

"Nobody saying you don't like it. You need some pajamas?" Bell got down slowly from the sink, as if she had aged since climbing up there. She had no idea what her daughter wore to bed these days and her voice was gruffer than she had intended.

"How do you make salty fish?" Ruby knew she would never make salted fish in her life. Bell knew it too.

"On the farm I make salty duck. You open it up and make it flat with your hand so it's just like a cookie." Bell busied herself with the fish, although there was nothing she could really do with them.

"I had this duck one time. There was a sauce, with berries. And you know what? It wasn't even tough. You know how duck is. But this one, I don't know. It was real tender." Ruby talked slowly, as if it hurt her to remember that dinner; she had just thrown away all her pink clothes, cut her hair short and was ready to try kissing. But now, sitting in her mother's kitchen, she didn't think it seemed right that a duck should be that sweet and soft. "And the sauce. Oh, I told you. It had berries," she said. Her mother's hair was starting to thin on top. Ruby blinked and looked away. just imagining that the sun might burn the top of her mother's head filled her with an angry rush of love and protectiveness.

"Berries, huh? At least it wasn't tough. Well, getting late. You better get some rest." It was only eight o'clock, but Bell didn't know what else to say. She wished she had never mentioned the fish, it seemed to upset her daughter so much. She put the kettle on and retied her apron. "Go ask your father if he want tea. Before he come in here with his smelly cigar."

Ruby was still thinking about the sun. It was May and starting to get hot. "Ma. Do you have a hat? A sun hat?"

"I walk in the shade when it gets hot."

"You've got freckles. Maybe you need a hat," Ruby said. Finding the right hat for her mother could occupy her for days. Shopping was a misery for her, but she was looking forward to it. She and her mother had always loved each other through sacrifice and worry, and ever since she could remember, her mother had been better at it. Look at their bowls. Ruby's bowl is piled high with all the good bits, and there in her mother's bowl, a heap of bones. But now that she's grown, for once in her life she would like to push away the full bowl and eat from the other, the one her mother guards with both hands.

For the four years that Ruby lived at school, she was haunted by a feeling of uneasiness, as if she had forgotten something, something important. But for the first time in her life she was having fun, so she ignored the feeling as best she could, hoping it would go away on its own. She bought new clothes that she thought disguised the fact that she was from Queens, wrote poems that were almost good, stayed up late talking with her new friends, who didn't think she was a geek at all; sometimes she drank and then she talked about how her mother had been seventeen when she was married off to a man she didn't know. But it bothered her to talk about that and after a while she didn't anymore. Late at night, she cooked. The first year there was no kitchen, so she bought a two-burner cooker and waited until the hall counselor went to sleep; then she opened the tiny rented refrigerator, which fit exactly two six-packs but which Ruby had filled with food she had bought that day at the markets on Broadway. Later, she walked down the hall to see who was still awake; she fed them. Her friends gave her cookbooks and told her she should be a cook since she wasn't going to be a journalist anymore. One morning her hair got in her way, so she cut it off. What was left stuck up all over her head. She took up with a boy she refused to sleep with for six months for fear of becoming a slut and after she became one she dated men who wanted to own her, giving her the pleasure of asserting that she wouldn't be owned (except in bed -- damn that pleasure of giving in); she threw herself into her new life, but the nagging feeling wouldn't leave her. She pushed it away, but it came back stronger each time and finally, at the end of four years, she gave in, packed her things and came home again.

One summer, she told herself. One summer at home wouldn't kill her. But she would have to sleep in her mother's room again, as she had for eighteen years. Her brother and sister had slept in the same room too, but Lily had moved to the apartment upstairs and Van had moved away. Her father slept in his own room. It had been years since Ruby had slept in the same room with someone she wasn't fucking. It gave her a funny feeling. But right now she had no choice. She had $124 in her account. She would save money over the summer and then she would move out. She wasn't planning on staying forever. Not on her life would she stay forever. That's what she told herself as she packed up her things and headed back to Queens. She hadn't told her parents she was coming.

"What'd you think? We'd throw you out on the street?" her father said when she showed up and asked if she could move back for a while. He said it triumphantly, as if he had waited for years for her to ask him for something so he could say yes but begrudgingly, and there was her mother asking, "You're here for a while?" with fear and hope in her eyes. Ruby was fighting mad to be home again (she felt coerced, as if someone or something had twisted her arm behind her back) and she had answered grumpily, "I don't know how long." Her mother's face closed up again and then she disappeared into her room and when she came out again she was wearing a pale blue shirt with pleats and puffed sleeves that she had gotten on sale at JCPenneys. One side of her collar stuck up higher than the other; the buttons were done up wrong. Ruby put down her bags and it hit her right away that the blue shirt was for dress-up and that her mother had put it on for her sake. And then it was all over. The words "You win" popped into Ruby's head, although she hadn't been aware that there had been a fight going on. They didn't look at each other as she fixed up her mother's buttons. Her fingers were clumsy and damp; every little defense that Ruby had built up against her mother was stripped away. She wanted to throw herself around her mother's knees and cry out, "Don't leave me." It didn't matter that her mother wasn't going anywhere and that she herself would be the one to leave. The nagging feeling was stronger than ever (what was it she had forgotten?) and it was then that she realized that it was her mother she had forgotten; it was her mother she had left behind and had finally come back to get. Ruby buttoned the last button and took her hands reluctantly from her mother's shirt.

It is May and I am home once again in the rooms behind Lee's Hand Laundry, located in Springfield, Queens. It's not a place you would happen to end up in during your travels, you really have to want to find it. First you get on the R train and ride all the way out to the very last stop. Get off at Union Street. Go upstairs and take the bus, the Q44, the Q63, the Q29 -- or, if you're lucky, you can take the Q66 so you don't have to walk down from Main Street. But chances are you've come on the weekend; the 66 doesn't run on the weekends or holidays, like you should just stay home on those days. So take one of the other buses I told you about and walk down from Main. You can walk down Cedarhurst Boulevard if you want an ice-cream sandwich from the German deli, or you can walk down the side streets, where there is shade and rows and rows of single-family houses. You can tell who just got new aluminum siding. That was a good choice, nice color. But that one over there, the green one, just awful. In front are grassy plots with flowers and hushes trimmed on Saturdays by husbands in their undershirts. Among the hushes are statues of ducks and deer and the Seven Dwarfs and the Virgin Mary holding her arms out to you.

When you hit Hollis Avenue, you can see how things have changed. There are new bodegas that have the same yellow-and-red awnings and men sitting outside on crates. You can buy cold cuts, cold beer and big green bananas. There are homemade churches without stained glass, just cardboard signs: VISION OF VICTORY TEMPLE, HOUSE OF RECONCILIATION, LA PUERTA ABIERTA. Sometimes there isn't even a sign, Just curtains across the storefront window, but you can hear the preaching and singing and clapping on Sundays and you can see the dressed-up people coming out afterward with light in their eyes. Some even wear hats.

Next to Shell Gas Station is the transmission place with the pack of rabid dogs that bark and jump and throw themselves against the fence when someone walks by. Better not to walk on that side.

The two bowling alleys are gone. The one on the corner, where we used to play handball, turned first into a karate school and then into a shooting gallery. Now you see people coming out of their cars carrying rifles in protective sheaths instead of bowling balls. Cardinal Lanes is now a nightclub. "Don't go near there," my father tells me. "People get shot."

In the middle of the block is Lee's Hand Laundry, where I grew up. The swinging sign that said LAUNDRY in big block letters no longer swings above the door since it fell down during a storm. My father was glad no one was walking by, or he would have gotten sued. The other sign, the one that's painted right onto the glass in red at the top of the window, LEE'S HAND LAUNDRY, is chipping off. You can barely make out the LEE'S.

The screen door slams behind you and you find you're no longer a visitor but a resident again. Visitors come for a few hours and leave when the sun goes down, before the sitcoms begin. The crumb cake or Danish ring you pick up at Hillsdale Bakery and swing back and forth as you walk down the hill is proof you are visiting. If you lived here, you wouldn't be swinging that cake like it was the sweetest thing you ever carried, the sweetest thing you were ever going to eat with a cup of tea that your mother will make for you when you get there, after she says you shouldn't have gone to the trouble. If you lived here, you would be carrying an Entenmann's cake, like all-butter pound, or cheese buns. Now you're not swinging any kind of cake, but dragging your suitcase behind you.

When Ruby was a kid, around the time when other little girls were being dandled on their daddy's knee, touching the stubble on his face and thinking about marrying him when they grew up, she was dreaming about marrying her mother and taking her away. She pictured a small house in the woods with a garden out back where her mother would grow vegetables. There would be no building next door blocking the sun, stunting her tomatoes and beans. In front, there would be a porch, not just a sidewalk in front of a store where people sat on lounge chairs and fanned themselves with magazines. In the evenings, she and her mother would sit on the swing bench, drink tea from a blue and white pot and talk until the night ran out.

Six years old and in love with her mother. After dinner, her mother would go out to the yard and water her garden. As she stood there with the hose in her hands, she would look past the neighbor's fence. Ruby watched her night after night before she figured out the look on her mother's face; it was a lonesome look. That was her father's fault, Ruby thought. He had gone to China and had taken her mother away from everyone she knew and brought her to a strange country, and then, to top it off, he wasn't kind to her.

The soil in the backyard was poor, there wasn't enough sun and squirrels picked the green tomatoes, took a few bites and left them on the ground. Ruby was six when she gathered the ruined tomatoes and decided it was up to her to look after her mother. Her mother was fiercely independent, though, and wasn't looking for anyone to take care of her, but slowly Ruby found little ways to help her mother and her mother came to lean on her.

Now Ruby was twenty-two and still wanted to take her mother away. It was past midnight on her first night back and she lay in bed too wired to sleep. The little house in the woods was gone and now she saw an apartment in the city -- wood floors, lots of light. Sometimes it had one bedroom and sometimes two. Her mother had a lot of things. They would need hundreds of boxes and a big truck. Take a look at her kitchen counter, all cluttered with milk containers and bits of used foil and tons of jars, all the labels soaked off. Bell loved jars and ended up buying things she didn't particularly care for -- stewed prunes, mint jelly, even pickled beets -- just because they came in a nice jar. It made Ruby sad as hell that her mother ate all those things she didn't even like. Maybe she had made a mistake in coming back; her mother had always saved things and would go on saving things, and there was nothing Ruby could do about it. It wasn't just jars but paper bags and old zippers and bakery string and anything else she could put in a corner and forget about. Lately, Ruby had noticed that she had such tendencies herself, but she fought them by throwing everything away.

She liked her apartment bare. If her mother came to live with her, the place would get all cluttered. They would have to get a big place; her mother would have her own room and Ruby would have her own room and the two rooms wouldn't be right next to each other. You wouldn't hear every little thing the other person was doing in her room, but if you needed help and called out, she would hear you. Maybe they would live up the block from a bakery where they could get apple turnovers for dessert. Shoot, maybe they'd even get a ficus tree to put in the window. She latched on to the idea of the tree, maybe a braided one, but then again, maybe it hurt the tree to be all twisted up like that. The plain kind might be better, but a good tall one with lots of leaves. The tree helped to shake the feeling that she was fooling herself.

A two-bedroom in Manhattan. With lots of windows and wood floors. Keep dreaming, sister, she told herself. Don't be so negative, she told herself. How the hell are you going to get a house for your mother when you don't even have a house for yourself? I'll figure it out, give me a break. What are you going to do, play Lotto? Goddammit, maybe I will.

If she won Lotto, she would take her mother to Florida. Her mother had always wanted to go to Florida; she had heard that it was hot there, like her village in China. And then, a few years ago, her friends Louie and Sheila from around the corner had moved there. They used to stop by the laundry once a week with a box of Italian pastries, miniatures. Now they lived in Florida and called their old friends a couple of times a year to invite them down. They said to Bell: "When's the last time your old man took you on vacation? Tell that cheap bastard husband of yours to leave his cigar at home and come on down."

But Franklin would never go to Florida. The idea of her father getting on a plane with shorts and undershirts in his suitcase cracked her up. He didn't even walk to the corner to get his newspaper, cars made him dizzy and shoes hurt his feet. When he was in the army he had been stationed in different countries, and now he was satisfied to stay at home and resented it when anyone else went out except to run his errands. "I've already seen the world, why should I go out?" he said whenever anyone told him he should get some air.

Florida didn't cost so much; Ruby didn't have to win Lotto to take her mother on vacation. If she could put up with temping for a couple of months, they could go. A vacation, that's what they needed. Blow out of town, have some goddamned fun in life. They could visit Louie and Sheila. But Ruby didn't want to stay with them. She wanted to stay in a hotel where she could see the water as soon as she woke up in the morning.

The night she moved home, the room was too small, her hair smelled of cigars and her mother's bed was too close to hers. Her father was snoring in the room next door, making such a racket he might as well have been in the same room.

If only someone would touch her, maybe she would calm down. Her hand played with the hem of the flowered granny gown that her mother had ironed for her and soon she was touching herself to ease the tightness. As her knees fell open, she wondered if her mother was really sleeping or whether she could hear the slippery wet sounds. Ruby waited, listened to her mother's breathing and then her hand started moving again until she was soft and open and soon she wanted to scream. She didn't because she knew that if she let out even the smallest, most harmless sound, all the rest would come rushing out and she wouldn't be able to stop. She wouldn't be able to stop all the noises she did not make in her parents' house. That no one made in her parents' house.

Now she lay in bed smelling her fingers. Christ, she smelled good. It was too bad Nick wasn't there; the smell drove him crazy. He was her boyfriend, although she didn't like that word. He wanted her to come and live with him, and when she was having a weak moment she wanted to. But then she thought about her mother sitting in the basement watching TV by herself and she got mad at him for harassing her, she called it. He'd look resigned and she'd wonder with fear in her heart how long he would wait.

He knew in his heart it was silly to think about marrying a girl like Ruby who wouldn't stop running around. But she loved him, she told him so. His friends who didn't know her thought she was a selfish bitch, the ones who knew her thought she loved him but was confused. Sometimes she cried when he fucked her, just as she was coming. That made him feel close to her and gave him hope that one day she would grow up and settle down.

Secretly, Ruby hoped she would too. At school she had wanted to sleep alone some nights, but when he knocked on her door at two or three in the morning, she only pretended to be mad. Now she wanted to call him. "Where are you?" he would say, even though he knew exactly where she was. He had never been there, but he had heard all about it for three years and had almost given up on seeing it for himself. When he first met Ruby, he had taken her home to meet his parents, who lived in Boston. His father had given him the thumbs-up sign. His mother was a bossy lady who had decorated her house with country touches. Her extra-friendly manner was the only sign that she didn't like her son going out with a Chinese girl. Nick had pulled his mother aside and talked to her in his reasonable way and in the end she had let them sleep in the same room.

Now he was three trains and a bus ride away. Ruby got out of bed and went out to the laundry.

The store was dimly lit by the street lamp and passing cars that threw shadows across the walls. Two spray guns for spritzing clothes hung from the ceiling. Ruby remembered she hadn't been allowed to touch them or the ceiling would fall down, her father had said, but when he wasn't looking she would grab a sprayer and start a water fight with Helen Hong until he chased them outside, cursing in Chinese.

Although Franklin had never bought one plant, somehow the laundry was lush and green. Lemons and tiny sour oranges grew in the window. Aloe, good for iron burns, grew too big for their pots, crowding and pushing like too many children. Franklin hardly remembered to water them, but still they grew, defiantly, almost, not needing much from anybody.

The laundry was quiet except for the murmuring of the fish tank and occasional trains passing. Ruby sat crosslegged on the ironing table, meditating on the rows of laundry wrapped in brown paper with numbered tickets in front. There was no ironing, no starching, no heat. No Daddy's cigar puffing in her face, no Daddy telling her she'd get piles from sitting up there. No customers bowing and winking, "No tickee, no shirtee."

The last train on the Long Island Rail Road's Springfield line went by. People leaned their heads against the dark windows and had no idea that the storefront rattled and the whole house shook as they passed. After the train was gone, the only thing moving was the lonely sign at Shell Gas Station; it turned round and round with the patience of nuns, a big yellow seashell that split the night. It was hours before people would gather at the corner again, counting their change into open palms, waiting for the bus to bring them to the train to bring them to yet another day at work; hours before the first shopkeepers would arrive, unlocking the gates that covered their windows, waiting for the first sale of the day; hours before Ruby would put her shoes on, take a few coins from the register and go around the corner to Jack's Candy Store to get her father's newspaper so he could look for a story to tell his wife at dinner, a story that would make her look up from her plate and take notice of him once and for all.

In the darkened laundry she blinked her eyes, which were worse than ever. At college, with all the books she could pile on her back and carry home, soon she could only see things that were very near -- words on a page, food on a plate. If it was near enough to touch, to taste, she could see it. That was it.

Graduation was over. On account of the rain, she hadn't even bothered to go, but she did put on the rented cap and gown, satiny blue, over her regular black clothes and Converse All Stars and walked around campus with her mother, who told her to stand by the blooming azalea bush, and then she took pictures to show her friends at the factory. ("Pretty, what a pretty daughter you have. Does she have a boyfriend? I have a son, same age. Good boy. Study hard, smart in school. Save money too, not like my other boy, spend all his money on clothes. Is she fussy about boys? She's kind of tall. How did she get so tall? Must be too much American food. Does she eat cheese?")

After they finished taking pictures Ruby and Bell went for tea and cake at Magda's. It was empty that day; everyone was standing in a muddy field, in their good shoes, no less, holding black umbrellas. Bell looked at the cakes. "What kind is that one? Is that nuts on top? What about that one? Oh, cranberry. Cranberry make my tongue feel funny. Do you come here a lot? What time does it close?" She did not say, "Is this where you are when I call you late at night and you're not home?"

Even though she hadn't lived so very far from the laundry, just one borough away, for God's sake, it was rare that she would visit. She told herself it was the subway ride she couldn't bear, and waiting on the platform for the train to take her closer and closer to Queens. Reading the same ads over and over gave her that closed-in feeling, and so she looked at the other people traveling to places they didn't want to go to either, driven by love or money or pain back to the places they would be happy never to see again.

Once again Ruby found herself in the four rooms she had grown up in and all she had to show for herself was a degree written in a language she couldn't even read, that hardly anyone could read. It did come with a translation, but she'd lost it the first day she got it. At first it seemed important that she find it, as if it could explain, of all the places in the world, what the hell she was doing behind the laundry again. It was only partly that she didn't have money or a job or a house of her own. There was something else, something she couldn't quite place that had pulled her away from mornings where she would reach out and touch the hair of the one sleeping next to her. This was how she figured which of her lovers would eat the plums that morning, drink the tea and slip her a dream, get on top and hold her down as if she were trying to get away.

And there were irises on the nightstand, for crying out loud. Day after day, croissants and omelettes and pancakes with cream on top. One day the butteriness was too much for her stomach. No one could hold her down long enough to keep her from running. When she stopped running, there she was, back where she had started from. She hated the entire borough of Queens and particularly, the laundry and the people who lived behind it. Her hatred made the laundry and the people belong to her and her alone, and so her hatred was softened by a sense of ownership, like someone who kicks his dog and then gives it a biscuit because it is his dog to kick and to give a biscuit to. Even while she was hating it she couldn't take her eyes from the walls and the ceilings and the television, and out of the corner of her eye she could see her mother and father living in separate rooms. She put her hand to her chest and wondered how she had ever left the house that wasn't even a house but four rooms behind a laundry, how she had gone away to school and lived like a regular American girl.

Copyright © 1998 by Mei Ng

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671011456
• ISBN 13: 9780671011451
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256