Sandra Tsing Loh

Sandra Tsing Loh American Writer ( 1962 - ) Source: Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Biography Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning Updated:04/09/2003

Table of Contents:Awards Career Further Readings About the Author Personal Information Sidelights Writings by the Author

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

Born February 11, 1962, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Eugene (a scientist) and Gisela (a homemaker) Loh; married Mike Miller (a musician), September 2, 1995. Education: California Institute of Technology, B.S., 1983; University of Southern California, graduate study, 1983-89. Addresses: Home: Van Nuys, CA. Agent: Sloan Harris, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail: [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and performance artist. Performer and composer of jazz music, album, Pianovision, K2B2 Records, 1991; Buzz magazine, Los Angeles, wrote "Valley" column, 1992-96; composed music for film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, Fanlight Productions (Boston, MA), 1996; KCRW-FM Public Radio, Santa Monica, CA, commentator-host, The Loh Life, 1997--; one- person theater shows, "Depth Becomes Her," "Bad Sex," and "Aliens in America"; commentator on National Public Radio (NPR), Morning Edition and Marketplace.

AWARDS:

Pushcart Prize for fiction, 1995, for "My Father's Chinese Wives"; MacDowell fellowship, 1996; included in Los Angeles Times "100 Best Books of 1997" for If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

 Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, Riverhead (New York, NY), 1996.  Aliens in America (monologue), Riverhead (New York, NY), 1997.  If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now (novel), Riverhead (New York, NY), 1997.  A Year in Van Nuys, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to anthologies, including Absolute Disaster: Fiction from Los Angeles, edited by Lee Montgomery (a Santa Monica Review anthology), Dove Books (Los Angeles, CA), 1996, and Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 1999; contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Elle, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar.

Sidelights

Sandra Tsing Loh is an essayist, novelist, humorist, composer, and performance artist based in Los Angeles, California. She wrote a column for that city's Buzz magazine during the first half of the 1990s, and since the late 1990s has been a radio commentator for a station based in Santa Monica, California, as well as for National Public Radio (NPR). Her German-Chinese heritage has been the subject of some of her well-received performance pieces, including Aliens in America, which was published as a monologue in 1997. Her first book, Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, was published in 1996, followed in 1997 by her first novel, If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now. Her humorous memoir A Year in Van Nuys was published in 2001. A multitalented artist, Loh recorded Pianovision, an album of self-composed jazz piano music, in 1991 and composed the music for the film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien in 1996. She is known as a keen and funny observer of American life, especially middle-class life in southern California.

Depth Takes a Holiday is a collection of some of Loh's writings for Buzz. The essays discuss life in Los Angeles for overeducated, underworked people in their twenties. Topics covered include working for a temporary-employment agency, shopping at Payless Shoes and IKEA, watching Baywatch, and sex on the Internet. Reviewers of Depth Takes a Holiday responded favorably, and more than one mentioned that the title is a misnomer, due to Loh's insightful perceptions about the lifestyle of her Los Angeles peers. Erica K. Cardozo, in a review for Entertainment Weekly, proclaimed that "all the pieces are terrific: intimate, acerbic, . . . subtle and perspicacious--and really, really funny." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded, "Loh succeeds in making Generation X angst far more appealing and sympathetic than usual." Marlene McCampbell in People magazine cited both "barbed observations" and "rueful, self-deprecating humor" as reasons to enjoy Depth Takes a Holiday and pronounced Loh the "wicked wit of the West." Loh used material from the book for her one-person theater show, "Depth Becomes Her," which premiered in Los Angeles in 1997.

In If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now, Loh tries her hand at fiction. She introduces protagonist Bronwyn Peters, a female graduate student about age thirty. Bronwyn, unlike her peers, is living in the past as the novel opens: still an aficionado of Guatemalan earrings, she shares an apartment with her similarly situated aspiring-screenwriter boyfriend, Paul, in a decidedly unprestigious neighborhood of Los Angeles. She is tempted, however, by the materialism her friends have embraced, and when Paul's parents give them some money, the two purchase a fashionable condominium and try to find gainful employment--and possibly even to sell one of Paul's scripts. Meanwhile, Bronwyn decides to christen her new lifestyle by throwing a party for all her friends and relatives in the new condo. Unfortunately, the party takes place on the night of the Los Angeles riots.

Reviewers had differing opinions on the merits of If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that the novel "holds more promise than what's delivered," and judged that Loh "never does lob the firebombs she so accurately aimed in her previous books." Kevin Grandfield wrote in Booklist, however, that the novel "resonates with . . . wit and incisive observations" and concluded it to be "a quick, humorous read, with a good moral at the end."

A Year in Van Nuys is a hilarious commentary on middle-class pop culture and a thirtysomething resident of the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, California, namely Sandra herself. She takes on such subjects as the Zone diet, e-mail, Gap advertisements, writers' groups, a novel she'll never finish, a sitcom based on her articles that never materializes, plastic surgery, and aging. Covering interactions with her sister, her therapist, her mother-in-law, and many others, Loh combines self- deprecating humor with real e-mails from a Web site she wrote for, charts, diagrams, and bits of commentary from TV in the book. In a review for Booklist, contributor GraceAnne A. Decandido said the book "bounces from embarrassed giggles to straight-out guffaws" and "reads like an extended NPR rap just before the top of the hour." A Publishers Weekly contributor depicted the book as a "crackling, witty, loop-the-loop ride," and said that although Loh, a "self-described downwardly mobile nonachiever" looks at the world through "dung-colored glasses," her attitude eventually improves as she comes to "accept her age and station." Mark Athitakis, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, said Loh is "intimately attuned to the anxieties caused by a media-soaked life. . . . She has a lovely understanding of how something as simple as a credit card advertisement can gum up the emotional works for days. . . . Mostly, however, Loh is having fun both sympathizing with and skewering people like herself: smart and well-intentioned types who can't help but define their self-worth by pop-culture trifles." Loh does this well, according to Athitakis, who concluded, "Her gift is her ability to approach those subjects in a way that goes beyond cheap, hey-what's-up-with-that riffing."

In an interview with Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor, excerpted in Migration World Magazine, Loh talked about her one-woman stage show and her as-yet-unsuccessful prospects for a television sitcom based on her humor. Her show is staged in three parts, covering first her Chinese father's marrying "a succession of Chinese brides" late in life; second, her family's 1969 vacation to Ethiopia, taken because it was cheap; and third, "an adolescent's coming of age." Loh told Goodale that her goal is to appeal to everyone, no matter their ethnicity or lifestyle, saying she finds "theater based on racial exclusivity to be very limiting."

In another interview, with Douglas Eby for the Talent Development Resources Web site, Loh spoke about her childhood. Although her parents tried to steer her and her sister toward careers in science, they were supportive of anything their daughters wanted to do, she said. The girls took ballet and piano lessons, and Loh painted from the time she was in elementary school and into college, when she began composing music. Although she graduated from Cal Tech with a science degree, Loh said she knew by the time she was in graduate school that she did not want to be a scientist, so she majored in English. She said she has been influenced not only by the women comics she admires but also by such women writers as Flannery O'Connor and Jane Austen. Loh talked about feeling like an outsider: "With the comics I admire, they do come from an outsider place, and can take whatever enrages them or makes them cry or whatever, and transform that into something hysterically funny. I think that is the tool, that's what comics do; they are very much outsiders, they are not in power, they're the underdog, and that's what makes them funny."

In the interview with Eby, Loh also discussed her feelings about gifted women and how easily they can be discouraged from their path by a male figure in their lives, be he father, boyfriend, mentor, or husband. She advised women who want to break into a creative career to "be a man about it, find the soldier, because it's a war, it's a battle . . . you just have to 'be a man,' and there's nothing wrong with that."