As American as Chinese Strudel

By now, there are probably few artists--particularly minority artists--in Los Angeles who are not intimately familiar with the concept of “multiculturalism,” a topic of heated debate in the local arts world since about 1990.

For newcomers: This discussion revolves around the blank on the arts grant application that asks you to identify yourself by category--race, ethnic or religious affiliation, sexual orientation--and demands to know how your work serves that community before you can expect any kind of pathetically small public arts funding check to find its way to your mailbox.

But what do you write in the blank if you are a 37-year-old American woman of Chinese-German immigrant parentage who was raised in Malibu, lives in Van Nuys, looks sort of Latino and sounds sooo totally like a white Valley girl on the radio?

Sandra Tsing Loh is that person. In order to describe her ethnic background, she has adopted a phrase coined by a friend of hers, a scholar of Asian American studies who is of Korean-European descent and happens to look like a white, Midwestern farm woman: “radically indeterminate.”

And the radically indeterminate Loh points out that she has been regarded with suspicion more times than she can count by earnest “minority artist” discussion panels that don’t know quite what to do with her.

“In the late ‘80s, when I was first starting in the arts--performance art, music, all that kind of thing--I thought, multiculturalism is a great thing, because I’m Chinese-German, who could be more multicultural than me?” Loh observed with a laugh during a recent conversation.

“But then, in 1989, I realized I was not with it, because ‘multicultural’ means African American, Latino American or Asian American. And it means those people doing specific monologues about how white people oppress them.

“It is the structure to say: ‘Here I was, a young Asian American woman, lost and confused and ‘whitey’ was making me feel less than myself. Then, I go to China, find my roots, I realize who I am,’ ” Loh continues, her voice assuming the near-religious fervor common to such tales of self-discovery.

“Whereas I think it’s more complicated, growing up in Southern California, where you have some Chinese parts, some American parts, irrevocably mixed,” she said. “I think people who are mixed are the last ‘group,’ because nobody knows what to do with them at all.”

Now, Loh is addressing those questions, head-on and with humor, in her one-woman show “Aliens in America,” currently onstage at the Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood. The Tiffany was also the home of her other recent one-woman effort, “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp,” which came to Los Angeles last fall after a successful run at New York’s Second Stage Theatre.

“Aliens” has received critical acclaim in Los Angeles, and it was recently announced that it will open Nov. 29 for a month-and-a-half run at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Most Angelenos know Loh--performance artist, humorist, columnist, essayist, novelist, KCRW commentator--as the, like, voice of the much maligned San Fernando Valley (somehow, the strip malls and Starbucks coffee emporiums of the Westside are traditionally considered more culturally rich than the ones on the other side of the hill).

Loh has touched on her Chinese-German heritage, but has mainly concerned her work with the generic foibles of that mainstream L.A. suburban population that can proudly trace its roots as far back as the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

But now it’s time for Loh, as she puts it, to “pop out in all my colors,” to talk about her family’s ethnicity in a way that freely blends broad ethnic stereotypes with more subtle observations.

That honesty, she believes, is part of coming to terms with one’s “radically indeterminate” roots. Loh harks back to yet another “small, angry” minority panel, this one dealing with minority images in Hollywood: “There isn’t anybody in this room who doesn’t think that diversity in the media is a good thing--raise your hand, anybody who is not for it!” she exclaimed in describing the scene.

“We need positive images of Asian Americans, I’m basically for that, but I don’t know what it means exactly. I think perhaps in the last 10 years of political correctness, all ethnic people had to be depicted as well-spoken brain surgeons. And once you get a committee trying to decide what a ‘positive image’ is, you create characters that can’t possibly live.”

Loh’s “Aliens” is divided into three sections: Adulthood (present), Childhood (1969, the focus a harrowing family vacation to Ethiopia) and Adolescence (1981--a nerd turns cool during freshman year). It is in the Adulthood section that Loh most directly confronts the culture clash between her father and his two very American daughters in “My Father’s Chinese Wives.” The piece is a staged version of a story she wrote in 1995, now featured in the 1999 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

At age 70, Loh’s widower father stunned his two daughters by deciding to advertise for a Chinese bride. The first of two marriages ended badly. He is now estranged from wife No. 2, Zha Ping, but amicably so; both showed up for opening night of “Aliens” last month, as did Loh’s sister and assorted relatives, and everybody sat together. That’s family, L.A.-style.

Onstage, Loh is surrounded by flimsy towers of white Chinese-restaurant takeout cartons as she tells the story of the wives; each pointed reference to things Chinese is marked by Hollywood’s favorite cue of the Orient: the sound of a gong.

Speaking over a--gong!!!--Chinese chicken salad at a Sherman Oaks bistro, Loh says her new ethnic consciousness has a lot to do with age. In her 20s, she was “hip and cool, a person who didn’t want my family anywhere near me.” In her late 30s, however, she’s realized that family, in all its eccentric, ethnic glory, is her most important resource.

And that meant confronting the reality that her now 79-year-old Chinese father chose to “surprise” Loh by wearing a floor-length, blue satin Mandarin robe to the opening night of “Aliens in America.” Her father, by the way, loves the show--and Loh observes that he often deliberately acts “more Chinese” around strangers for effect, his own gleeful little piece of performance art.

What was most worrisome was not that this Chinese robe might be distracting in case, as Loh wryly puts it, “any of the audience’s attention should somehow fly, errantly, to me.” It was the knowledge that somewhere under all that satin might be lurking another symbol of Chinese tradition: a flash camera.

Yes, it’s true, Loh’s Chinese immigrant relatives carry cameras everywhere. They also bring Lucky grocery bags full of cookies and bruised fruit, packed for their three-hour bus ride to the theater, also conveniently ready for a noisy snack during Act 1 (Lucky bags must also be frisked for hidden cameras). That’s just the way it is.

David Schweizer, director of “Aliens” as well as “Bud Kemp,” encouraged Loh to take the ethnic humor over the top. “Make a character out of your father, this is not a documentary,” he advised Loh. “It tickled her, and me,” Schweizer said in an interview, “this idea of framing this whole sort of Occidental idea of what is Chinese--’I am just your crazy old Chinese father,’ Great Walls of China made of takeout food cartons--in a way that I hope is tongue-in-cheek, and hopefully elegant.

“We are not being polite; we are not stuck in that stranglehold of positive role models, blah blah blah,” Schweizer continued. “We are looking at the frailties, the foibles, the blindnesses and the triumphs of a cultural mishmash that somehow forged its way onto the landscape and remained a family, somehow.”

While Loh is taking a giant step beyond multiculturalism onstage, however, she acknowledges that Hollywood may not be quite ready to go with her.

Recently, Loh met with excited television executives about creating a new sitcom. They liked her voice as they heard it onstage: hip, urban, edgy. But they didn’t want her to appear in the sitcom. They wanted her to write in that hip, urban, edgy voice for the stars of the show: a pair of 22-year-old blond twins.

Loh turned down the offer. *

“ALIENS IN AMERICA,” Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 3 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 3. Prices: $25-$32.50. Phone: (310) 289-2999.