Throughout the world, ten years older than we are now, in between marriages, my father traveled alone but always found people with whom to eat, laugh, lift a glass. The younger—and blonder—and bustier, the better. In bathing suits, in beaches, under twinkling lights.
I point out to Charlie the continual preponderance, in photo after photo, of red plastic Solo “party” cups scattered across the scene. Big ones. I suggest that, along with champagne, we should offer margaritas in the red Solo cups that adorned so many of my father’s ad hoc festive occasions.
The Malibu band Boy Hits Car—the stars of the This American Life piece about my father—reaches out. I ask whether they would agree to reprise their grunge rock song “Mr. Loh” on our back porch at sunset. In my mind these surf dudes are still twentysomethings, although my sister points out that Boy Hits Car must be, like us, approaching their sixties.
I am getting excited. My next idea is that as a backdrop we should string up Tibetan prayer flags interlaced with board shorts—the sorts of big colorful beach shorts that male body surfers wear. At the Third Eye Bookstore, I buy out their entire stock of Tibetan flags. This being Southern California, Goodwill has a ton of truly psychedelic board shorts, from two to four dollars each. I buy 97 pairs, for what I’ve decided I will call, in deference to my father’s 97 years, “the traditional 97 board-short salute.”
And I then decide that at the end of the song, as a rock ’n’ roll tribute, we should all hold up lighters! I google local suppliers that create custom lighters. I scan a photo of my dad in a leopard Speedo. The guy sends me the proof. The picture is small, the resolution poor, the font is . . . ornate gold cursive? It looks gangsta. But appropriate?
THE GUEST LIST IS, weirdly, ninety-seven strong. Everyone comes on time.
Andie, Julia, Marilyn.
Some Malibu school chums.
Zhuping, my dad’s long-suffering second Chinese wife, with her new husband Steve. Charlie’s Gentlemen Callers, in suit jackets.
And there are children, not just our cousin’s son’s Chi-Latino triplets, but so many other children.
Everyone has brought anything and everything chocolate, as asked.
We first sing “Danny Boy” together, in deference to so many who have died, whom we lost.
DANNY BOY
Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer’s gone and all the roses falling,
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,
Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
Then come the eulogies. My brother is up first. In an homage to our father, he begins by stripping—taking off his tie, shirt, and pants . . . getting down to a tiny black Speedo. Everyone screams. Although he is not our dad, my fifty-eight-year-old brother is in pretty good shape.
My brother gives a pretty tough and honest speech.
“My father was eccentric, which is something you learn to deal with as a child. He was also angry, what you might term today emotionally abusive. Yet here the three of us are today. We’ve had happy lives. How do you explain it? Well, my father would say most of the credit goes to our mom. So our legacy is not something we leave on our own—it’s a combination of those around us.”
Next up is Cousin Zhe, serious in his big trifocal glasses.
“Life was so hard in China, and then your dad insisted on visiting! He never asked, just came! My father spent two months’ salary just entertaining your dad. It was terrible. We never recovered.” Zhe sits down.
Now comes Tiger Aunt Kaitlin. As the five grandchildren look on, her speech somehow amazingly comes to . . .
“Here’s the message to take from our father’s life on this day. Don’t fear anything! Embrace your life! Go travel! Try everything! You will never regret it!”
I am amazed. Tiger Aunt just did this whole “When they go low, we go high” Michelle Obama thing.
She has transformed the whole idea of my father into a stirring, inspirational, full- throated exhortation for us all to seize the world.
Sally raises her hand, speaks shyly. “The other day, I was walking home by my old preschool. I thought about grandpa dying. Which was a bit of a nonevent. He was just so old. But then I realized that just as preschool was over, now grandpa was over.”
Her thirteen-year-old eyes widen, in wonder. “They were now in The Past.”
Thomas presents an extensive video montage to show what my dad’s daily life actually was like in the last few years. There is Thomas, feeding my dad, bathing him, clipping his toenails, dressing him up in snazzy costumes—fedora, blazer, red turtleneck, white tennis sweater, sporty Dodgers hoodie.
There are montages of Thomas carrying a kind of celebratory plaque of my father to the beach, weeping, getting on the RTD bus with it.
There is Thomas, standing at the Pacific, wind riffling through his hair, crying. I remembered a story that Thomas had actually held political office back in the Philippines, but got chased out in some sort of coup. He is very charismatic and soulful, his eyes full of tears, almost like a Bollywood star. Orchestral music swells.
The coup de grâce is when Thomas finally goes to the morgue and they pull my father out of the drawer. There is dramatic slow-motion video of Thomas flung over my father, weeping, like a pietà.
“Wow,” Tex murmurs, “best memorial ever.”
IT’S NOW SUNSET. We head to the deck. Ninety-seven board shorts and innumerable Tibetan prayer flags flutter. The children have found the Party Store bag of shitty Mardi Gras beads, and are flinging them into the trees. The cheap flimsy strands loop and twirl and sparkle.
“It’s the Krewe of Mr. Loh,” Bradford says wonderingly.
On guitars, Boy Hits Car croons their brooding homage against the fading sun.
“MR. LOH”
by Boy Hits Car
As I can see the ocean breaking
The ocean breaks on herself
It will remind me that all the shit I’m feeling
Will soon be, will be alright, it’s gonna be alright
Mr. Loh, he finds the water
And it seems to wash this place off
As the dolphins jump and play
He speaks to us in the sand
Do you know the meaning of life
Or are you just a simple man?
And then he swims away
Then he swims away
Mr. Loh, will you speak to me?
You’re the only one I understand
Mr. Loh, will you sing to me?
You’re the only one who makes sense
Mr. Loh’s not afraid to be naked
But some men fall from grace
They’re not secure with themselves
He doesn’t measure people
By things we consider important
Can’t seem to comprehend today
So he swims away, he swims away
Come back
Mr. Loh, will you speak to me?
You’re the only one I understand
Mr. Loh, will you sing to me?
You’re the only one who makes sense
Mr. Loh dialogue (done by my brother)
Contact with nature, now that’s very important
All in society is so busy, busy, busy, busy
Not much time
Talk to yourself or talk to the nature
As long as I can see the ocean break on herself
As the dolphins jump and play
It will remind me, that all the shit I’m feeling
Will soon be alright
Mr. Loh, will you speak to me?
You’re the only one I understand
Mr. Loh, will you sing to me?
You’re the only one who makes sense
Oh Mr. Loh, oh Mr. Loh
This is gonna be alright
Lighters go up. All of the children, ten and under, appear to have three lighters each.
The memorial is over.
We feast on Zankou Chicken. And chocolate, so much chocolate. For today, Mr. Loh’s clan is all here.
Sam, who after his straight-A stint at community college, will get scholarship offers from UC Berkeley, UCLA, and on. After interviewing forty engineers, over Charlie’s cries of “Berkeley! Berkeley! Berkeley!” Sam deduces that the best engineering school is Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
He will proceed to become the unofficial den father of Mr. Loh’s five one-quarter-Chinese grandchildren, making Google schedule alerts for Hannah and Wayne to complete for their college applications, every single one of which they miss. Tales for other days.
The Chi-Latino triplets are crowded into the massage chair. Hannah is tickling them.
Sabrina, “the Palace Cat,” is sporting a small new tattoo on her ankle. It is the Dewey decimal system number for the fantasy section.
“Is that kid having . . . alcoholic punch?” Charlie asks, as a tot goes by with a red Solo cup.
“We get them started early,” I say.
We laugh, hug each other, shake our shoulders out. Charlie is as much our family as any. Perhaps he, too, may be considered honorary part Chinese.
Two roads indeed diverged in a wood, many more fan out beyond.
One inadvertent protection for Mr. Loh’s grandchildren: In California, Prop 13 keeps his Malibu property taxes superlow. At the expense of their public schools, but . . . If not a silver, at least a pewter, lining.
In the falling light, I see mementos of The Past, hunkering on the edges of the deck.
Sally’s old red trike.
Our old Swiffer, of the Upstairs, Downstairs days. Hannah’s blue IKEA student chair with the wobbly leg. The white tin “lice” bowl.
And I think for a moment, about the humble louse. The kinder, gentler pest. They don’t sprout wings and fly around your head like bats. They’re just quietly trying to get by. They don’t have faces. They don’t do much but itch.
On the one hand, the lice taught us science, because when we had them we soon learned the life cycle—eggs, nits, male and female, the physics of hair shafts.
But amid the frenzied hubbub of daily life, homework, projects, activities, lessons, the lice created some of our most beautiful time together. When else in childhood would I have taken hours and hours to comb through my daughters’ hair? The boredom, the card games, joy of counting the dead bugs in the white tin.
Ah, well. For today, here are tipsy four-year-olds who got into the margarita punch, savoring their first Bic lighters.
Waving them, cackling, in the dark.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK MARKS my twenty-fifth anniversary (a quarter century!) of writing publicly about my life. Over that time, I’ve moved exactly twenty miles, from Van Nuys to Pasadena, gone up a pants size or two (depending on stretch of material), married, divorced, moved from fake glasses into real ones. Friends have come and gone, and editors, theaters, and magazines. (I remember, in my early thirties, Clay Felker barking over the phone, “Sandra! What’s hot in Los Angeles?,” and literally having no clue: that one was for M Inc.) Things writers used to complain about are now the past’s gold standard. Monthly Buzz magazine lunches at Maple Drive—Maple Drive!—had tricky parking. Oh how we’d complain, over $1.50 coffees, about the editors at our alternative weeklies. There were alternative weeklies. The late Jonathan Gold was my first (music) editor. I knew the late Andrew before there was a Breitbart.
So, in a perhaps quasi-Asian way, as I acknowledge a ghost world, I also thank folks and institutions that are still present. KCRW and then KPCC gave my weekly radio series, The Loh Life, twenty years, which grew the heart of this book’s material. This American Life also resonates here (my father!): I thank Ira Glass. I wish I’d written a bit faster for David Wallace-Wells. I can’t believe that Adam Shulman (Left Coast—twenty-five years) and Sloan Harris (Right Coast—thirty years) are still my agents, or whatever important packaging managing partner thing they are now. I’m so lucky today to write for Jill Bialosky.
Now to the tricky part (as though that Breitbart reference wasn’t tricky enough—but he was funny and wore rubber pool sandals to my late friend Cathy Seipp’s parties, that’s all I knew then, I swear!). Acknowledgments can be where you messily try to sort your “thanks” out. But it’s impossible to do it right. You want to note a witty thing someone said, but that person asks you not to mention their signature Top-Siders, so you change that detail, putting them in Crocs, without remembering that someone else wore Crocs, and the original speaker (who has since changed his/her/their mind) would never wear Crocs, and now both people are furious (via a rapidly-unspooling group text message with many emoticons). Even when you try to ensure that you always come off the worst (because that is truth), you don’t always succeed.
So there are many people whose hilarity and humanity I would like to acknowledge but who, for various reasons, I can’t. I honor them, at home, in private, before my Dr. Loh shrine (another long story). I can say that I have some very amusing Facebook friends (who care about both their real and fake teeth). There is, always, my lovely Peggy, with both her moral integrity and her Native American jewelry. As great soundboards in my ongoing puzzling over “Asian-Americanness,” I thank wise and witty Kip Fulbeck and Alice Tuan. My life has been brightened by my two (two!) age-appropriate Pokémon Go friends, Athenaskana and TheHedonist—we’ve traded Pokémon gifts while I visited the Huntington Gardens to, er, “write” (my Pokémon name is AngryOldLady). A salute to Anna Hubler, Richard Roat, Wendy Mogel. Model couples: Maggie and Barry, Irene and Ken, Beverly and Marc (who has a beautiful colon). I’m lucky to know some hella smart and amusing women: Caroline Aaron, Anny Celsi, Danette Christine, Samantha Dunn, Murielle Hamilton, Shannon Holt, Gina Kronstadt, Irene Lacher, Susan Marder, Deb Vogel. Ink-stained wretches Erika Schickel, and I cry and write in the Dena’s, where, sadly, today the coffee is much more than $1.50. Hilarious dudes, and they know why: Dan Akst, Bart Delorenzo, the Rogers, Neill and Trilling, Carlos (Car-los!) Rodriguez, Max Schwartz, Dave Shulman, David Schweizer and our deep philosophical carb conversations, which should become their own modern opera, and Jim Turner (we will always have the produce aisle at the Glendale Costco, but the massage chair is mine).
I thank Frier McCollister, a true flaneur and boulevardier of the old school.
I thank Madeline Peng Miller and Tsing Miller for their brilliance and heart.
I thank Jacobsen Paul Loh, a stellar guy.
And—check out this turn—I never would have have anticipated this—I thank Malibu. Not just the Malibu West Beach Club and the grunge band Boy Hits Car (thanks, Cregg Rondell!), who gave my strange Chinese father such a happy home. I mean what we call Old Malibu—I still have some great f@#$ing friends . . . from middle and high school! Jennifer Field, Karen Foster, Jim Lorick, Susan Sachs! Even as adolescents, boarding the school bus (the ride took hours), enduring bizarre counselors, running timed miles (did we?), there was always the lifted eyebrow above the viola case, as a skateboarder slammed into one: “You are not alone.”
And that’s where we end: kindness in childhood. An earlier memoir, Mother on Fire, charted my worry at my first child’s starting kindergarten in public school in Los Angeles—and by that I mean “the hood,” Van Nuys. Fifteen years later, as my kids enter college, I honor their truly wonde
rful Valley schools, full of so much joy, curiosity, and rigor: Valley Alternative Magnet (and Ellen Rubin), Carlos Lauchu’s “Ventura Hogwarts,” and Van Nuys High (Randy Olea). And of course, Yamillah, one of life’s unsung heroines, who, even at age six, was good people. Never change.
ALSO BY SANDRA TSING LOH
The Madwoman in the Volvo
Mother on Fire
A Year in Van Nuys
Aliens in America
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now
Depth Takes a Holiday
Names and other potentially identifying characteristics of people and places mentioned in this book have been changed.
Copyright © 2020 by Sandra Tsing Loh
All rights reserved
First Edition
The lyrics/words to “Mr. Loh” by Boy Hits Car are taken from the book Brief Accounts of Consciousness by Cregg Rondell.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Jacket design by: Zoe Norvell
Jacket photographs: Sara Fox
Book design by Ellen Cipriano
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Loh, Sandra Tsing, author.
Title: The madwoman and the Roomba : my year of domestic mayhem / Sandra Tsing Loh.
Description: First edition. | New York, N.Y. : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019052108 | ISBN 9780393249200 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393249217 (epub)
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