Author/raconteur/performance artist/science freak/chronicler/observer and Caltech alum Sandra Tsing Loh, is mowing down a lettuce-intensive mozzarella caprese wrap at a busy, loud Urth Caffe, as if the sandwich is trying to escape.
We’re here to chat about her upcoming talk with Bookish co-host Samantha Dunn about Loh’s book, The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem, at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium Thursday, October 20.
But there’s a lot of mozzarella to go through, and almost as much backstory, so let’s move forward, shall we?
The book, which documents a year in the life of Loh, her partner, and her two teenagers living in a ramshackle Craftsman-ish house in Pasadena, is ostensibly a followup to her now legendary-in-small-circles 2014 bestseller, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. But it isn’t, really.
As she explained, after being reassured there was no lettuce in her teeth, “I kind of thought that ‘Volvo’ was gonna be a one-off. But my editor at Norton, who really wanted the second book, saw it as sort of a continuation. And so it took a while to think about what it would be exactly.
“She really wanted me to write about what I’ve been doing on radio for almost 20 years, about the small things of life,” she continued, “Like, we listen to the news and we talk about big wars, and China, and all that kind of stuff. But in fact, what we’ve just really experienced in a day is just, you know, parking over there, or waiting in line at the bank.
“And I remember,” she continued, “when I was writing the Madwoman in the Volvo about menopausal depression and menopause, that all of that is kind of really hard to talk about, and just incorporate into daily conversation.”
As Loh explained, “(My editor) wanted the small things of life, the minutiæ of things for me to report on it, like, for me, I’m 60, so a very small example, one of many, is when you go to a spa or a hotel and then you’re trying to take a shower, and then the bottles are this small, and then it says in really tiny letters if it’s shampoo or conditioner or body wash.
“And so now, it’s kind of like, ‘I haven’t taken my glasses into the shower, so I am looking and there’s no way. I’m wet, I can’t step out to get my glasses. Why don’t you just put a big ‘S’ or a big ‘C’ there? So those are the things that become parts of our life.”
The book was written before Pandemica, which she addresses with an epilogue in the book, and the range of tales capture a life that we had all seemed to be rushing through without knowing, until the Universe said, “Yeah, hang on for a bit, I mean two years, would ya?”
“We’ve all been through a two-and-a-half year experience of quarantine together,” she considered, “and I think it’s gonna take time, like another two years until we figure out if we’re still normal or how we’ve changed, or whatever.”
What loomed large in our conversation, however, was the notion that, despite Loh’s resume of accomplishments—which included being the first Caltech alum to address a Caltech graduating class, a gleaming handful of captivating books and performances, a presence on NPR over the last twenty years or so that has given her iconic status in Southern California, not to mention her “viral” classical piano performance on an overpass, playing to motorists on the Harbor Freeway in 1984—she can still feel like the young quirky, out-of-place high school and college student who didn’t become the aerospace engineer after graduation that her Shanghai-born aerospace engineer father wanted her to become.
‘He wanted us to study science, the harder the better,” she said.
“I was literally thinking,” she recalled, “It’s my senior year, okay, and then I’ll get my Ph.D. in physics and then I’ll be done, and then I can cross that off my list so that I could go on with my life. And that’s how ingrained it was in me. But going on, going on with your life meant doing something else.”
And she bemoaned her science focus.
“I remember like going through catalogs, going, “Why didn’t I get to study theater?’” she said.
When her GRE score later that year turned out to be in the .07 percentile—which she didn’t have to be a scientist to figure out—she shoved science into a back pocket and pursued the arts with a vengeance, launching an enviable artistic career that even eventually managed to finally include the scientific with her longtime radio show, “the Loh Down on Science” which has run on KPPC, since 2005.
And her late aerospace engineer dad once came to one of her shows in a traditional Chinese tunic suit, which he had never worn before and sat in the front row, leading the applause.
Sandra Tsing Loh will discuss her book The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem with Samantha Dunn at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, Thursday, October 20 at 7 p.m.
Visit events.caltech.edu Registration is required for this event: link here
