Sandra Tsing Loh

Sandra Tsing Loh (, born February 11, 1962) is an American writer, actress, radio personality, and former professor of art at the University of California, Irvine.

Life and career

Loh is the younger daughter of a Chinese father and a German mother. She was raised in Malibu, Southern California, and after attending Malibu Park Junior High School was bused South to Santa Monica High School, where she was active in the computer-and-engineering-related "Olive Starlight Orchestra" and founded the performance-arts group and civic volunteer organization "Young Bureaucrats, Of Course (YBOC)". She also played violin in the Samohi school orchestra.

Loh graduated from Caltech with a BS in Physics; she returned in 2005 to deliver its commencement speech. She is also a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her early career as a performance artist included a piano concert on a freeway overpass in Downtown Los Angeles, and one in which she distributed hundreds of one-dollar-bills. She went on to perform a number of well-received autobiographical one-woman shows, in which she developed a particular form of observational humor.

A writer for the publication ''Asian American Playwrights'' called Loh "a multifaceted artist'". Her piano recordings of her original compositions that were made during the late 1980s were labeled "a cross between Art Tatum and Francis Poulenc". A writer for ''The New York Times'' called Loh "perpetual darling of the ever-beleaguered Los Angeles intelligentsia and constant candidate for that publishers' holy grail, the female David Sedaris".
Loh gained some national notoriety when KCRW canceled her weekly radio commentary, ''The Loh Life'', after an engineer neglected to bleep her on-air utterance of the word "fuck" during a segment on knitting that aired on 22 February 2004. ''The Loh Life'' was soon after picked up by the other Los Angeles NPR affiliate, KPCC. She is also the host of ''The Loh Down on Science,'' a daily science oriented radio show, and was a regular commentator on NPR's ''Morning Edition'', PRI's ''This American Life'', American Public Media's ''Marketplace'', and other public radio programs. She has some versatility as a radio personality in that many of her programs, some of which air at the same time, are aimed at a different radio audience. As an example, Loh would use humor to publicize a recent but serious scientific discovery on ''The Loh Down on Science'' series while she would make a humorous comment on a current business topic on her segment on ''Marketplace''.

Loh is the author of several books, including the semi-autobiographical ''A Year in Van Nuys''. She has also written reviews of books about parenting, feminism, and several other topics for ''The Atlantic'', where she is a regular contributor. Loh appeared in yet another one-woman show, "Mother on Fire," at the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles between October 2005 and March 2006. She made a brief cameo appearance in the 2006 film ''Unaccompanied Minors''. She is featured in the book ''Part Asian, 100% Hapa'' by artist Kip Fulbeck.

In reviewing Loh's 2008 book ''Mother on Fire'' for the ''New York Times Sunday Book Review'', Pamela Paul

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