In Search of the Real Valley

Sandra Tsing Loh is a radical among her friends.

Loh’s friends happen to fit the definition of set-painting, freelance bohemian types. So, of course, that means she’s married, likes to barbecue and enjoys her happy home in the much- maligned Valley--pool, Ikea furniture and all.

It was not always thus. In Loh’s not-too-distant youth, the writer-cum-performance artist was in the throes of her avant-garde phase, living in that other Valley, the one where Pasadena nestles. She would find herself summoned to meeting after arts board meeting, all in the darkest reaches of L.A.’s surly downtown.

“You were always stepping over homeless people and into pools of urine while someone flung keys down at you,” recalls Loh, 34. “They always insisted that you drive to the most dangerous place because that was where all the art was going to happen. And then I gradually realized that I preferred living in a house with butcher block furniture and a little garden, and downtown life was too tough for me.”

These days, Loh somewhat perversely lives the Valley life for fun and profit. Laying claim to “the lowbrow cheese-ball middle class,” she writes about L.A.’s great unwashed for the relentlessly trendy Buzz magazine. There her 3-year-old column displays such a joie de Valley that it attracts a mountain of mail. Indeed, her quirky take on that most normal patch of suburbia is the rare un-chic feature in a magazine otherwise dedicated to the chardonnay universe of the Westside.

Loh’s Buzz dispatches form the core of her first book, “Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles” (Riverhead Books). Already culling warm reviews and climbing the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, Loh hilariously takes on such neglected topics as a time-share pitch on the “California Riviera” in Orange County, the woes of being a single gal in SoCal and her eccentric father hitching a ride with Anjelica Huston.

Loh’s Valley isn’t the Rodney Dangerfield of American suburbs, but “the second act in people’s lives.” It’s life’s backdrop for downwardly mobile post-boomers after the dreams and crummy Hollywood apartment of their 20s have given way to the Trader Joe’s-adjacent house of their 30s.

And it’s populated with the non-Uma Thurmans of the world, “the people who never make the party list. The valet parker spits on their car before they can’t even quite get in. There’s the sense of being an outsider, the sense that everyone in L.A. is at some fabulous party, and the parade is passing by and you’re left behind. Those are my people.”

Buzz Editor in Chief Allan Mayer says he was captivated by Loh’s nutty Valley view, so he offered her the counterpoint to Holly Palance’s column, “The Hills”--of Beverly, that is. He says her take on the Valley was bereft of cliches--it “certainly had nothing to do with the Valley-girl, surfer-boy, inane, ‘Fast-Times-at-Ridgemont-High’ kind of Valley. It was the real Valley.”

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Today Loh is leading a safari in search of “the real Valley,” which she has proposed renaming SFV (along the lines of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s image update with KFC). Our starting point is the High Middle Valley, Van Nuys, where Loh lives now in a cozy house. We are heading to the Deep Valley, where Loh landed when she fell in love with studio musician Mike Miller (that’s the guy she married).

“He was from Sioux Falls, S.D., and all the musicians I knew lived in the Valley,” she muses, driving past a heart-shaped sign for Cupid’s Hot Dogs, a little touch of romance on Victory Boulevard. “They feel, ‘Well, for all the money I’m making I could have my garage studio and my dogs.’ And basically in the Valley you’ll get a swimming pool. It may be a swimming pool ringed by cement and a chain-link fence but you’ll be swimming.”

As Loh cruises down Victory, a stray car part flaps lazily on her sunroof. She ponders the low-slung vista flying by and points to the brown and tan houses that look like giant Monopoly pieces.

“There’s where you get a lot of the sad little garage sales--that I believe are a linchpin of my book--of the little wrinkled T-shirts flung onto a lawn and sort-of-dinette things that are falling apart and rows of old tennis shoes that no one would think of buying,” says Loh, in a stream of convivial consciousness. “Sometimes they’re along Victory, which is why I think Victory is sort of an ironic name.”

We press on.

Loh comes by her Southern California expertise honestly. She was born in Newport Beach and mostly raised in Malibu, except for a pre-pubescence spent in Egypt and Brazil. Her parents wanted to see the world, so her father got jobs teaching university physics and took the kids on some rather stressful vacations.

“We were trying to take a summer vacation in Ethiopia and were held up by terrorists because we got off on the wrong the bus,” she says. “That was typical of the summer.” That story eventually became part of a monologue when she turned to performing.

But first Loh and her two siblings grappled with their father’s insistence that they have something to fall back on. “He was really convinced that if we didn’t become an engineer--specifically in my case an aerospace engineer--that we would starve.”

Loh’s father had come from Shanghai 40 years ago. In China, science was regarded as an inexhaustible fount of jobs--so Loh went to Caltech, where she got a bachelor of science in physics and literature. But Loh decided that her future in physics was going to be “really, really miserable,” so she entered USC, where she got a master’s in English in 1983.

There she studied with novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle, who remains a fan. “I think [her book] is great,” he says. “It’s unique. There’s not much like it around right now, the short, punchy essay. In the way of many great comic writers, she’s able to put herself as narrator in these awkward situations and drain every last vestige of misery, horror and embarrassment out of them.”

We are heading west on the 101, in search of her onetime headquarters for misery, horror and embarrassment, Miller’s old digs. We are living her book as we pass the freeway signs: “The offramps for Reseda, Tarzana and Winnetka ring out like a kind of lonesome cowboy refrain.”

Our destination is memorialized in the book under a chapter delicately titled “White Trash.” We pull onto Winnetka Avenue in Canoga Park, lined with ticky-tacky houses of stucco and “sunburst” linoleum. Loh points to her former resting place. It squats beigely on the street, three doors down from a Pacific Bell office, barely displaying its greatest amenity on the other side of a fence--the pool.

“We used to have friends who would hop the fence, studio musicians, who would jump into the pool and be flailing around, so it was like a not-very-good beach party movie where nobody looks like a beach babe. Everybody is sort of pale with stringy hair and a little bit out of shape.”

This was not the stuff of which Westside dreams are made. “We had the sense that just maybe we’d drifted too far from civilization’s moorings,” she writes. “Living so far from La Brea, maybe we were becoming Valley trailer-park people.”

Not that you could tell from any of her various job descriptions. In her first adult incarnation, Loh decided to try her hand at performance art. In 1987’s “Spontaneous Demographics,” the classically trained pianist entertained motorists on the Harbor Freeway with a heavily amplified concert of her music. She performed on a Steinway concert grand atop the adjacent Citicorp Plaza parking facility.

In 1989’s “Night of the Grunion,” she hired the 35-piece Topanga Symphony to serenade the fish at midnight at the Surfrider Beach in Malibu. The 15-minute piece cost her $5,500.

Loh’s work drew attention, but not the kind she was looking for. Instead of being covered by High Performance magazine, she was getting write-ups in the National Enquirer. Her art had literally become a joke--Johnny Carson was using it in his monologue. “I was becoming one of those wacky news items, like the racing pig from Iowa, the bra museum in Newport Beach.”

Loh had been pursuing a doctorate in English at USC, but in 1990 she dropped out, deciding her heart wasn’t in scholarly writing. The performance art thing was draining her budget and spirits. “I thought I would actually build some sort of career where money comes in as opposed to go out,” she says, “so I picked the incredibly dependable, lucrative field of freelance writing.”

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Loh’s early magazine pieces included one for Buzz that reflected her frustrations as a performance artist. The buzzword in arts funding circles, as elsewhere, was “multicultural,” and with a Chinese father and German mother her family qualified. The only problem was that her work didn’t.

“I was doing sort of a late ‘80s post-Laurie Anderson, commenting-on-the-media thing, which wasn’t in vogue at all. It was all victim, multicultural whiny whatever. . . . I thought I was sort of an avant-garde performance art person but I found out that really wasn’t true. I always maintained that had I done something about my Chinese oppressed women’s background, I would have fit right in and been a huge success.”

In “Is This Ethnic Enough for You?” a scathing, controversial piece about L.A.’s arts bankrolling bureaucracy included in the book, Loh skewered the Cultural Affairs Department for politically correct funding practices. In one case, a local orchestra known for performing works by African American and Japanese composers felt compelled to buttress its plea for money by noting that it played the work of “Mendelssohn, who has a Jewish heritage.”

“Claiming that Mendelssohn is not Euorcentric [sic],” the grant panel responded, “is stretching it.”

Loh describes the multicultural performance of choice as going something like this: “ ‘I’m an ethnic person standing in front of you mostly white people in the theater, telling you the poignant story of my life for which you paid $10, and somehow the whole story’s going to be your fault.’ In my case, stories usually don’t blame white people. I try not to blame anybody. That’s where I’m trying to be progressive.”

Don’t call her neoconservative. Call her fresh!

But Loh eventually made her heritage pay off. In 1985, she added her middle name, Tsing, to the otherwise unmelodic Sandra Loh. And when she turned from nutty performance art to monologues--deciding that she would tell her own story rather than leaving it to the wacky-news commentators who’d misread her work--she drew on her life, as whimsically as she writes her columns.

“I really had no acceptance until I started doing pieces like ‘My Father’s Chinese Wives,’ ” about her father’s misadventures with mail-order romance. “I made sure ‘Chinese’ was in the title. Because I have Sandra Tsing Loh, ‘My Father’s Chinese Wives,’ Women’s Theater Festival, get me in Asians, I’m one of you. I mean it was really demographic marketing, oh my God, to try and get in.”

Still, Loh’s audience is more inclusive than that. “My Father’s Chinese Wives” is part of a longer theater piece, “Aliens in America,” that begins a five-week run at New York’s Second Stage Theater in June. She has also performed her work in occasional commentaries for National Public Radio.

Next year, Riverhead is publishing Loh’s first novel, which has the working title “Downtown.” “It’s kind of like my ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ but much smaller and less well researched. It’s like a social novel but realistic and also comic.”

And as Loh’s blooming career rides off into the sunset, she still finds her greatest inspiration outside her front door--even though Harlan Ellison, who had first dibs on the Valley column, dismissed the assignment as boring. In fact, Loh is so attached to the old, unimproved Valley that she scoffs at the forces who would have it secede. “Then we can always remain the downtrodden country mouse to L.A.’s city mouse,” she says, “and that’s always grist for my mill.”

Look at it this way, says Loh, sailing by yet another Cupid’s Hot Dog stand, her long black hair snapping smartly in the breeze. “Those hot dogs are everywhere. Because there’s nothing here, you have to use your creative imagination to make it interesting. That’s a better assignment for a writer than if you live in a fabulous place.”