62
his murder of Guan but “crime and corruption
under Western bourgeois influence,” a warning
case that indicates the party’s initiation of a politi-
cal campaign.
A reflective man and a poet, Chen comes to see
the similarities between himself and the object
of his investigation, a theme Qiu also develops in
his later novels. Behind their promising political
careers are the lonely hearts craving for love. The
cause of Guan’s death is her desperate effort to se-
cure a monogamous relationship with Wu, while
Chen’s amorous involvement with Ling is short
and fruitless. The personal and the political are
delicately interwoven in the social milieu of mod-
ern China.
While the plot is too transparent for a detective
story, the novel offers glimpses into classic Chinese
poetry beautifully translated and, though at times
anachronistically depicted, of life in Shanghai. The
novel is studied as a sociological text about social-
ism in transition.
Yan YingDepth Takes a Holiday:
Essays from Lesser Los Angeles
Sandra Tsing Loh (1996)
In Depth Takes a Holiday, SANDRA TSING LOH ex-
plores the ambitions, pretensions, and obsessions
of her fellow Los Angeles residents in the San Fer-
nando Valley. This collection of humorous essays,
a number of which originally appeared in her “The
Valley” column in Buzz magazine, established Loh
as a voice for her generation—specifically, for the
underemployed and underinsured creative under-
class coping with “genteel boho poverty” (4) in the
strip-mall suburbs of L.A. Reviewers have attrib-
uted the anthology’s best seller status to Loh’s wit,
her well-crafted prose, and her knack for satirizing
her own participation in the collective neurosis.
The book begins with an apologia, a tongue-
in-cheek defense of Los Angeles, “the nation’s cul-
tural scapegoat” (x). The 32 essays that follow are
divided into three sections, titled “Amongst the
Futon-Dwellers,” “Life in Suburbia,” and “Life in
the City.” Together, Loh’s pieces paint a comic pic-
ture of hype and hope, of the struggle to secure a
comfortable place in L.A.’s unstable caste system.
The futon-dwellers, as Loh reveals in the first
set of essays, are late baby boomers who are in fact
too late. They are highly educated young people,
schooled to yuppie tastes and expectations, who
find themselves in a deflated post-yuppie Califor-
nia economy. Those who refuse to work full time
in “the pantyhose-and-tie world” (13)—includ-
ing Loh, a performance artist—are reduced to
imitation: buying Ikea’s affordable “name-brand”
furnishings and Trader Joe’s Canadian Brie. They
know the joys of temping, of open-mike po-
etry readings, of imagining glamorous alterna-
tive lives in New York City. And they follow the
trends, whether in earrings or multiculturalism.
In the longest essay in this section, “Is This Ethnic
Enough for You?” Loh relates how, in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, her biracial (Chinese-German)
heritage makes her newly fashionable in artistic
circles, newly eligible for “fighting over gristly little
bits of grant money” (72).
The second group of essays, devoted to sub-
urban adventures, includes pieces on Nintendo
addiction, party avoidance, pseudo-camping,
take-out in Van Nuys—and the respective tempta-
tions of Club Med, Tahiti, and time-share prop-
erty on the “California Riviera.” Loh also addresses
selected suburban social interactions: attending a
perky Christian church service with her brother,
encountering a neighbor’s pit bull, and coping
with her eccentric Chinese father, who, although
he is 70, insists on hitchhiking across L.A. neigh-
borhoods because “driving is so wasteful” (139).
Throughout the essay, her tone is conversational
and energetic; in this section as well as the oth-
ers, her narratives are peppered with snippets of
wacky dialogue and twitchy stream of conscious-
ness. Italics, exclamation points, and reiteration
lend a sense of displaced drama to the ordinary
and everyday: “Sploosh! And then: Arf, arf, arf, arf,
arf! I’d continue to splash, splash, splash Joey as he
ran around the pool” (133).
In the third set of essays, Loh takes on the facets
of L.A. life that she has found particularly chal-
lenging: single womanhood and celebrity culture.
In addition to the obligatory dating horror stories,62 Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles