Linnell: "I think I was collecting possible song ideas and, for some reason, I ended up looking in the phone book, and there were about four pages of this name that contains no vowels, Ng.

They decide they're going to dig to China, but one of the smarter characters pulls this huge revolver out of a drawer and shoots a hole "in the desktop globe."

(Pitchfork Magazine, 1996).The song, or at least part of it, is set against the backdrop of the 1964 New York World's Fair, which John Linnell attended as a child.

Longtime music critic Robert Christgau called it "a beyond-perfect tour de force about a Vietnamese woman they never got to meet.

"[6] In a review for Lincoln on AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine described "Ana Ng" as a standout song having "irresistible pop hooks".

He cited its "typically playful, seemingly free-associative" lyrics, noting that the syntax is "elongated and convoluted, as one prepositional phrase after another gets tacked on; it's a subtle expression of the group's sense of humor".