Loh to speak at Commencement

Writer, performer, musician, humorist Sandra Tsing Loh will be the guest speaker at the 111th annual Caltech commencement ceremony at 10 a.m., June 10, on the Beckman Mall.

“Caltech is a wonderfully unique academic institution whose legacy, aside from outstanding achievement in science, is a rich cultural history with more than its share of quirks and surprises,” Loh says. “I intend my comments to fully reflect that.”

Loh is a graduate of Caltech, where she received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1983 and where she was awarded the Institute’s highest honor bestowed upon graduates, the Distinguished Alumni Award, in 2001.

“We are pleased that Sandra is the first alumna to give the Caltech commencement address,” said Caltech president David Baltimore. “She will no doubt bring a refreshing sense of humor and unique perspective to the ceremony. As a graduate of the Institute she can relate to the great accomplishments of our students when they reach this milestone. The talent and perseverance that helped her graduate from Caltech have obviously held her in good stead in her diverse and successful career.”

That career has included offering insightful radio commentary locally and nationally, writing and performing one-woman shows, composing and performing music for film, creating traffic-stopping performance art, and writing for the New York Times, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue.

Loh has a national monthly radio commentary on the public-radio business program Marketplace. She has been a regular commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition and on Ira Glass’s This American Life. She also does a weekly commentary, The Loh Life, which has aired in Southern California on KPCC-FM 89.3 since 2004. She came to KPCC after the accidental airing of a profanity on Santa Monica-based KCRW-FM. The station management fired her, and the resulting flurry of media coverage kept the story in the public eye for several months. Although the station offered to rehire her, she chose to stay at KPCC instead.

Apropos of that experience, she recently acted in the stage performance Fired!, a series of comic monologues about losing a job, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It is being produced by L.A. Theatre Works and will air on NPR at a later date.

Loh has also been a solo performer and writer. Her latest one-woman show was Sugar Plum Fairy, performed in Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle in 2004. She also performed I Worry at the Kennedy Center.

Recently named a contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly, she is the author of the books A Year in Van Nuys, Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles, Aliens in America, and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, which is based on Loh’s solo off-Broadway show that ran in New York in the summer of 1996. She returned to the New York stage for Bad Sex With Bud Kemp, another solo show, in 1998.

Loh composed and performed on the score for Jessica Yu’s 1997 Oscar-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, and scored Yu’s documentary about the Living Museum on HBO.
She has appeared on tour in Aliens in America, her darkly comic semi-autobiographical tale of growing up middle-class Chinese-German in Southern California.

Loh began her career as a performance artist. In 1989, nearly a thousand people attended “Night of the Grunion,” in which Loh and the Topanga Symphony played a midnight concerto for spawning fish on a Malibu beach. In “Self Promotion” (March 1988), an assistant flung $1,000 in autographed dollar bills over her as she performed before a stampeding crowd. “Spontaneous Demographics” (September 1987) featured Loh playing a piano aboard a flatbed truck in a concert for rush-hour commuters on the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.

Loh’s family has been associated with Caltech for many years. Her father, Eugene Loh, earned a master’s degree in physics in 1953 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1954, and her brother Eugene received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1980.
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