‘Depth’ scrutinizes Southland shallowness

Thursday, April 11, 1996

Tsing Loh discusses, signs latest book in KerckhoffBy Jason
Packman

Daily Bruin Contributor

Outsiders seem to have never had a high opinion of Los Angeles.
Shallow, vein, and self-absorbed are some of the kinder words
attributed to Angelenos.

Sandra Tsing Loh, who will be signing and reading from her first
collection of essays this afternoon in the Kerckhoff Art Gallery,
writes about where she has lived all her adult life, that part of
the southland that is as far away from the glitzy stereotypical
L.A. as Branson, Mo. ­ the San Fernando Valley.

According to Tsing Loh, that doesn’t make people there any less
shallow, as her title of her book, "Depth Takes a Holiday,"
suggests.

"Its kind of tongue-in-cheek about how shallow we are," the
34-year-old writer says. "But, the other way of interpreting it is
that we are deep, and we are going to take a holiday from it. We
are going to have fun with our deepness. That’s how I try to
interpret it."

Many of the essays in her book come from her column in Buzz
Magazine, entitled, appropriately enough, "The Valley." Her column
satirically details the day-to-day life of 20- and
30-somethings.

"We’re just emerging from years of college only to learn that
that there are no jobs available for people with our advanced
qualifications. While we still have yuppie tastes, our economic
decade is the ’90s, a decade in which the silicone implants of the
economy have been removed, in which the management pyramid is
flattening," she writes in one her essays, entitled, "IKEA! Cry of
a Lost Generation."

Her columns reflect a lower middle class malaise and an
anti-Buzz view of her native city, counter to that magazine’s image
of stories of the rich and the famous, flanked by ads for BMWs and
Evian water.

"My friends, they pick up Buzz sometimes and they feel
threatened by it. It seems really Hollywood and trendy," she says.
"Sometimes I pick it up and feel that way, too."

That Buzz Magazine picked someone like Tsing Loh to write its
Valley column was as surprising to her as it probably was to her
friends. The column was originally supposed to be written by
multi-award wining author Harlan Ellison.

"Harlan Ellison lives in the Valley, but he didn’t want to write
a column about it because he thought it was really boring, and it
is," she says. "I don’t know why I would have gotten it except that
probably I was the only person that any of the people at Buzz knew
who lived in the Valley, because they are such a fashionable
group."

As she was working her way through the writing trenches, she got
her first break as a writer through L.A. Times columnist Jonathan
Gold, who was doing some editing at the L.A. Weekly. She met Gold
while a member of the Independent Composers Association, a circle
of avant guard artists at USC. He gave Tsing Loh her start in
writing in that publication’s yearly, "Best of LA" issue.

"I would do these performance art events or performance art
music which was a big mind blower for me, and I got to be an avant
guard person," she says. "even though anyone can be an avant guard
person, because there is no pay involved or anything."

During her time with the Independent Composers Association, she
did several performance art pieces. These performances were at
times physically demanding, like her ironically titled, "Self
Promotion."

"I did a three minute piano piece, and then I had an assistant
drop 1,000 one dollar bills at the climax of the piece and the
public was let known about it," she says.

"For me, it was a morality tale about how, as an artist you can
pay people to come and see you if you are that desperate for an
audience, but they will trample you at the end, grabbing for the
money. Which is exactly what they did."

As she moved towards 30, being trampled by people or giving a
command performance on her piano on the shoulder of the Harbor
Freeway during rush hour didn’t excite her as they once did. She
decided to move her satiric ideas towards less physically demanding
mediums.

"These performance ideas were Jonathan Swiftian satiric kind of
sociological commentary," she says. "Some of my ideas (in my
writing) are satiric, but at least I don’t have to do them."

With her column and book contract, she can now afford to live
off her writing alone. With a very casual, personal writing style
that has gained her a sizable following of people who feel that
"they know me and I know them," she does have concerns of moving
away from her readers, whom she calls "the unwashed people of
LA."

"There was a time about five years ago that I was really poor,
where I was truly poor. Where … at Carl’s Jr. I had to go for the
$1.79 fish sandwich as opposed to the $3.49 western bacon
cheeseburger," she says. "So, I know what being really poor is and
that is what my writing originally came out of."

That her writing still speaks about this time in her life is
reflected in how much her audience still intertwines the character
Sandra Tsing Loh of the column with the real life Sandra Tsing
Loh.

"One time I did a column about writing and about how hard it is
to be a writer. Those were real experiences, and the good part was
that at the same moment that I was writing, that part of me was
aware that I am a lucky writer because I make my money doing this,"
she says.

"I got some letters from readers who assumed that it was much
more woes and they were going, ‘Maybe I have an agent you can write
for.’"

Tsing Loh, though, already has an agent, an ICM literary agent
in New York.

"It is sort of a tricky line to watch. But, I don’t feel that in
my column it would be appropriate to crow about having an ICM
agent. That’s not what I write. (What I write) is true to the
emotions of a certain character,"

Tsing Loh, however, is writing satire, not autobiography. And,
being a satirist isn’t the easiest job for a writer.

"I love reading humor," she says. "Especially other peoples’,
when I know I haven’t had to write it."

EVENT: Sandra Tsing Loh will be reading from and signing her new
book, "Depth Takes a Holiday," at the Kerckhoff Art Gallery today
at 3:30 p.m.