Ask Sandra Tsing Loh her favorite things about being a mother and you can literally see her brown eyes spin in their sockets, the answer's so complex. It's provided her clarity, rearranged her priorities, and given her more time for napping. Of course, she's not enjoying nap time at this very moment, as she sits on a friend's deck in West Seattle, with a view so unencumbered, you want to make some crack that the landmass peeking out of the distance must be Russia.
"Does everyone in Seattle have a view like this?" she asks.
I assure her they don't.
But then again, many people don't have the manic, at times, hysterical worldview Loh displays. For some time now, she's been venting steam as a public radio commentator, with shows like "The Loh Down," and as a contributing editor for The Atlantic. But right now, Loh's in the throes of a book tour for Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story about Parenting (Crown Publishers, $23). The book, a mom-oir of the year she spent fretting -- and sometimes wailing -- about how in the hell she could get her kids into a private school she and her hubby could afford, is a crazed, comedic monologue. Though one with bite: While on the surface, Mother charts the antics some parents will go to to get that last spot in the "best" school, at its core, it's a scathing critique of how the moneyed class, knowingly or not, is making sure that more than a few children get left behind.
So, perched on that deck, Loh holds forth, her arms constantly animated, her face going all Play-Doh-y as it rushes from one expression to the next, her throaty voice careening into topics like an out-of-control bumper car: perimenopause, the Democrats, Sarah Palin, Volvo-driving moms. Oh. And the time she said the "F" word on the air.
Is there something about motherhood that leads one to being "on fire"?
Well... Yes! And who knows? It may be hormonal, it may be I'm 46, you know, the perimenopausal time of life: I feel things really deeply, and I feel injustice really hard, so it's all I can do to stop weeping and lecturing the whole room. And probably it brings up those hormones: the mother-bear, attack-dog hormones.
I think also for myself, I was a freaky, weird-looking child as opposed to the beauty queens -- so I had to become funny and creative and an artist. So the artist was like your freak flag of "This is what we have that's groovy that those people don't have." But then when I started looking into schools, only really expensive private schools had that cool art. So it felt like art was being hoarded by the people who have the most money, and that made me just [she growls] "RRRR." Stuff like art and writing and literature and music, every single child should have that, you know. They shouldn't have to be a lawyer's or periodontist's child to go the fancy school on the hill with all the cool stuff. So all those themes came to me a lot, and it's, as you can see, very hormonal [laughs].
How about you describe what people think about the L.A. Unified School District.
OK. I'm a Democrat. I live in California, with many other Democrats. Well, I'm a public school Democrat, a street-level Democrat. I seem to have some vague, genetic memory of days where the Democrats were the "good people." You know: they fought on the streets for important things. But I have friends in L.A., who I'm going to call the Indigo Democrats, because they're just so fluttery and they feeeel things and there's a lot of "food allergies." They're like, "Public school is like government, it's like 'The Borg,' it's like the whole Bush-corporate-whatever-military complex." And I got so wound up in that, I felt, "Well, to send your kids to public school: that lets Bush win!" And then when you finally walk in, it's like, "Oh my god, there are children there. They need us. They're us!" We can't let the government and Bush command that.
So in L.A., they go, "L.A. Unified: 750,000 students are in there. It's so big, nobody goes." What about those 750,000 kids? I mean, they're going. Or they point to a high school and go, "That high school: I don't want to send my kid there," and they spit it out. [She feigns spitting.] Blleeeck. But there are 4,000 children in that building, so are we just writing them off because of something that Bush did? So I think it's a lazy habit, for the frail, sensitive, lactose-intolerant, artistic Democrat to do this kind of [putting back of hand to head in mock despair] Camille-on-the-forehead thing, that they can't stand to go to the DMV because the fluorescent lights are so ugly and it's going to make them have headaches. It's like, we've gotta fight for these institutions. It's my theory of government that it's not necessarily an evil monster trying to kill us. We just need to learn the rules, engage a little bit better, make it easier for other people to be engaged with our democracy.
How was it when you went to visit the private schools?
In L.A., a private school, it's basically a for-profit organization. The customer's the parent. Some of [those schools], it's like visiting a beautiful spa: The building is charming, it smells good, the right herbal teas are there for you, they say the things they know will calm the beast of the parent. They test all the children -- or they fake-test them in one room, while in the back, the people are swiping the parents' credit card to make sure their credit reports are OK. So I think the problem can be [they're] selling a lot of humanistic values. But if it's $20,000 a year for [children] to learn to be enlightened citizens, that means shit. Unless that poor kid on the bus can have it, it just doesn't mean anything. And I think that's very-- [stops talking, gazes at the table, to a magazine I brought] -- Ugh, I can't even look at The Atlantic, because this political season everybody's going, "Whaaaa????" -- I'm a very upset Democrat right now. We won't go there. Or maybe we will go there.
We'll get there in a sec.
OK, good. So anyway... I actually forget where I -- Oh. Public schools. There're actually a fair amount of things that public schools do very well. You'd never read about it on the news, because on the news it's always about bombings and shootings and killings. Public schools, they're really bad about advertising themselves, they're really horrible at customer service. They've gotta get better and not treat you -- a parent -- like a felon when you walk in.
So you're an upset Democrat. What's upsetting you?
[Sighs.] OK. I'm an upset Democrat, and an upset feminist -- I'm upset about everything. And, of course, Sarah Palin is like these pit bulls that just [growls again] "urrrRRR." But I feel horrible that the Republicans got the "rebel lady," the rebel lady taking down big government -- even if she's just saying that -- that that's on the Republican side. That is very depressing to me. And, if you look at public education as an issue, which I do, Barack Obama's kids do not go to public school. They go to a really expensive private school in Chicago, the University of Chicago Lab School: $20,000 a year. Biden's kids all went to Archmere Preparatory Academy in the East, very fancy and the public school bussed them. Of course, John McCain is worst of all, because the biggest [donations given by] his foundation -- half a million -- are for the private school his children went to. So he's terrible too.
But then Sarah Palin, the "craaazy lady," sends her kids to Iditarod Elementary. And I Googled it: It's half poor kids, and many of the white kids are Russians and Russian-spea -- it makes me sick! It makes me sick that this kind of, what I consider "street cred," has been taken over by the Republicans, because I think it's a huge split in this country between the private- and the public-school kids. And I just wish the Democr-- that we had the lead on this, even in our Democratic politicians' personal lives. Barack Obama: they live in Chicago, they could have lived anywhere. They just couldn't live in a nice public school district and send their kids to public school. So I think the Democrats and the Republicans, unfortunately, are closer in a way as parties -- just different dressings around them. I'm very depressed.
What kind of school did you go to?
I grew up in Malibu, California, so our family was the "Poor of Malibu." My father's a scientist, a Chinese scientist. So [I] went to school with all these celebrities: nightmare. Every middle school's a nightmare. And then I went to Santa Monica High School. I think it had like 4,000 kids. Huuuge! We were super-mixed.
Where are your kids going to school?
They go to Valley Alternative Magnet, it's in Van Nuys. It's a very, very tiny K-12 magnet school. And they didn't have to test "gifted" [to get] into it: It's just by nature of where we live. And it's like 58 percent free and reduced lunch: It's a mostly poor school and it's very brown. So my daughter is the only blonde in her class of 20, it's a third English-learners. But I think it's a terrific school, the teachers are great. It looks super-ugly, it's like, "We have no auditorium, but just like this cracked asphalt outside," but there's a lot of heart in the school. And I'm the PTA secretary.
So The Atlantic: You had a piece in there reviewing a book by [famed educator] Jonathan Kozol, after you'd interviewed him on the radio.
Well, I have long been a crying, weeping, perimenopausal fan of Jonathan Kozol, because of what he's talking about -- racial segregation in today's U.S. public schools is the same as it was in the pre-Civil Rights South. So I found his work amazing because he was saying these true things, and especially talking about the potential of young kids of color not getting their chance, or having their enthusiasm dimmed over the years.
So when I met him, I was really excited because I feel like I'm a very new movement of middle-class moms that would usually be thought of as those suburban, Volvo-driving mini-mansion gated community moms who go hide in the suburbs: But the thing is today, we can't afford the suburbs anymore -- I mean, there's no middle class anymore. In L.A., the good school districts' houses start at $1.2 million. So there's no option, except to actually go back to your corner urban school.
So I thought he would be just delighted at this news that we, the cavalry, had come: It was middle-class educated moms who couldn't afford to buy out of the system, who were opting in and trying to lift all the boats now. And he didn't want to hear it. He was still doing the '60s Civil Rights model of "It will only change when we march on Washington and when a religious leader from the pulpit exhorts the masses to rise up." And I'm going, "Ordinary moms are doing it on the streets, give us some credit." And he just would not listen to it. Maybe he's just been fighting the battle too many decades. I think he is very exhausted by sort of affluent, educated parents who had been opting out, that maybe he just gave. I just had this incredible fantasy of our fantastic day together. And it didn't happen.
But you also have done a few other things on the radio [laughs].
I have, I have, I have. I was fired.
How did that go down?
Well, apparently, you just have to say the word "fuck!"
The thing is, I speak really quickly, and sometimes an expletive -- not all the time, maybe once a year, maybe once every two years -- an expletive expresses something, or is called for. That doesn't mean I'm even going to use it on the air. At that time, a musical deejay guy, I would leave a script for him, and everything was marked where to bleep before it went on the radio. But this time he just forgot to bleep something -- it was "fucking" -- so it ran on the air once, in my new fantastic spot of 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. And it ran again at 9:30, cuz no one heard it! So it ran twice. I was fired the next day. But that was around the same time that Janet Jackson's boob had happened, so you would just see my firing everywhere, on Larry King. So I became a First Amendment hero, a Lenny Bruce kind of figure, which was kind of absurd, because I wasn't really standing up for anybody's rights to say "fuck" on the radio: It had been a mistake and it was sort of embarrassing. It was unintended. But First Amendment issues are very, very sexy, compared to public schools, which no one thinks is sexy. [But] I was offered my job back and I'm on another radio station.
So Democrats, the party that is supposed to lift people up: When did you first have an understanding of class?
Like I said, Malibu Junior High School. Clearly, in Malibu, I just could tell. There were the beach people, and there was you, in your immigrant dad's falling down horrible house. It's different the way money is in every city: L.A. is a Hollywood town, Detroit is a car town, and maybe Seattle is a, you know, Bill Gatesy town.
But when the school thing hit, that's when it went off like a nuclear bomb in my life, where I realized it really is a huge lie and some people go into the fabulous leafy suburban public school districts, or go to private schools, and then the rest of you are flung into the inner city. I mean, it was a stark, stark difference, because to rise up this mountain, now you're going to be a family who was paying zero dollars a year who winds up paying $50,000 a year, so two little girls can go to kindergarten. I mean, it is such a giant leap. And I really became aware of that with the school thing. And it's not working. Do you think it's working? It's not working.