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Mother on Fire
by Sandra Tsing Loh
Crown, HK$184
Sandra Tsing Loh  is the funniest female humorist in America. Her iconoclastic, high-stepping, modern  take on punctuation, amplified stupefaction and absurdist contextualisation results in riffs so hilarious that they rival the best of David Sedaris.
The difference? Where Sedaris is a miniaturist and measured in tone, Tsing Loh is an alarmist, ever incredulous at the cues she has missed in the course of an ordinary life. 'I guess you could say I started my career planning to be the next Amy Tan,' she explains, 'unaware that decades later there would still be an Amy Tan.'
Tsing Loh's fifth book, Mother on Fire, is a glorious fever-dream of a memoir about marriage, middle age, late motherhood, the (joyful) puncturing of artistic ambition, the difficulties of finding a good preschool and the use of panic attacks as 'booster rockets'.
'This  is a story about the year I exploded into flames,' she begins. Less a maturing than 'a kind of extraordinary goldening', her 40s were envisaged as 'a leavened time of life when the artist travels around the country accepting lifetime awards and honorary medals'.
Instead, she meditates on the ineffable mediocrity of existence in the middle of the night while taking a sip of 'warmish, even brackish, water out of a cartoon jelly glass' and staring at 'that unsorted pile of laundry, heaped like a dark hunchback on my dresser'.
Ever more distant from a youth in which she drank 'tequila mixed with frozen limeade, popped hallucinogenic mushrooms and ate octopus hand-scooped out of murky lukewarm water by toothless Mexican octogenarians pushing battered, unrefrigerated wooden carts', Tsing Loh is now the mother of two little girls, happily married to her 'good-for-nothing' husband and living in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys.
The secret of her longevity with Mike, the session musician who has shared her life for 18 years?  Unlike couples who do everything together, they do nothing together ('We can't even bear to grocery shop together!'). Even Brad Pitt no longer holds  any appeal as a fantasy ('always trooping somewhere, saving  Africa or something, hamstrung every which way by multiple  Baby Bjorns').
After exploring issues ranging from her Chinese father's  yen for naked handstands on the beach to the 'rolling mildewed chariot of typhus' that is her minivan, Mother on Fire reaches a shimmering crescendo. 'I am bored to death with this life of consuming,' she rails. 'I'm tired of being an obedient participant in this, the high-water period of feminism's Conde Nast-icisation ... I am now thoroughly exfoliated. I have run out of product to spray into my hair!'
Instead, she falls asleep in the sun with her daughters,  to the 'warm thump of the dryer and the smell, thanks to my salt-of-the-earth husband, of baking bread'.



Mother on Fire