Head of the Class: Finding the Right School for Your Child

Ariel Swartley:

For 20 years Sandra Tsing Loh has taken satirical shots at Los Angeles and her own growing pains without making the tiresome error, committed by nonnative observers from Joan Didion to Caitlin Flanagan, of conflating the two. Her aim is generally dead-on; her gun emplacement is even better. We not only can read the Malibu-raised Loh in The Atlantic Monthly, where she's a contributing editor, on her Los Angeles Times blog, and in comic memoirs like A Year in Van Nuys. We can also hear her on KPCC and see her turn her elegant Chinese German face to Silly Putty in performance pieces.

Whatever the target--eye bags, ethnicity, envy, Christmas--Loh's a linguistic Muhammad Ali, floating and stinging at a pace that would drive a hummingbird to wing splints. At times her approach has left some of her frailer subjects exhausted along with her audience. With Mother on Fire (Crown, 320 pages, $23), her new memoir expanding on the one-woman show of the same name that debuted in 2005, she's taken on an issue scary enough to warrant her biggest guns: getting your child an education.

How harrowing, you tax-gouged nonparents may wonder, can this be? In my experience the trauma of a difficult birth is nothing compared with the scars of being polite to a teacher who has forbidden a second grader to look at a book that intrigues her "because it's too hard." These don't fade even after said child has obtained a graduate degree. Schooling, in short, pushes buttons. In Los Angeles, it's also tied to a full range of inflammatory issues, from immigration to celebrity.

Clusty Search: Sandra Tsing Lo.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 4, 2008 9:45 AM
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