Asian-American “is a weird term invented by the Census Bureau to group together people who don’t have all that much in common,” says Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and monologuist best known for her wickedly funny commentaries on National Public Radio. “In some cases, we’re talking about Americans, say from India and Pakistan, whose old countries are at war with each other. And how does the label apply to someone like me, whose father came from China and mother from Germany? When I visited Shanghai with my family, people looked at me oddly, probably thinking I was a half-breed or Hispanic but not quite one of them. And I saw pretty much the same reaction when we stayed at my mother’s hometown in Germany. At least here, in southern California where I live, I’m accepted just as I am, an ethnically mixed American.”
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Yet Loh has accepted an invitation to participate in “Asians and Asian Americans in Hollywood: Then and Now,” a panel discussion that’s part of a festival presented next week by Columbia College’s Center for Asian Arts and Media. “I’ve done this sort of thing too often,” she says. “The discussion, usually involving the same set of activists and academics, follows more or less the same pattern: ‘Aren’t Hollywood and the media terribly backward, using poor, shallow, awful stereotypes? We demand positive portrayals.’ We pat each other on the back and say ‘Hey, let’s do lunch.’ Much is talked about, but very little ever gets done. So I’m skeptical of this new round of discussion going anywhere.”
Around that time, in the late 80s, she took up writing, contributing short pieces to the LA Weekly. “Freewheeling stuff, like blurbs on the best restaurant under a freeway, next to a ramp,” she says. “Because I belonged to an avant-garde composers collective”–she’s scored some of Oscar-winning documentarian Jessica Yu’s films–“they asked me to write music reviews.” Cultural commentaries in magazines that came and went “like Hollywood starlets” soon followed. Her “Valley” column in Buzz was a forum from which she chronicled the lifestyle and angst of thirtysomethings in LA–“the ecofriendly, culturally sensitive, insuranceless set that drinks Starbucks coffee and longs for copper pots,” she says. One reviewer dubbed her “the acerbic queen of the Crate & Barrel crowd.”
