How to Live by Henry Alford

Author:Henry Alford [ALFORD, HENRY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780446544405
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

SANDRA AND HER TWO SIBLINGS’ MOTHER was German and died of Alzheimer’s when Loh was sixty. Ten years later, Loh decided to find a new wife—specifically, a Chinese wife.

I asked him, “Why did you decide to remarry at seventy?”

“When you’re young, your sexual drive is strong. I’m outgoing. So it’s a very natural thing. Ingmar Bergman married many times. Doris Lessing married twice. I can’t compare myself with these famous people, but we are all outgoing.”

“And why specifically a Chinese wife?” I asked.

“It’s like music,” the amateur opera singer told me. “The German wife was in the key of G. German, G. I wanted to marry in my home key—C, Chinese. I’ve returned to China nine times, most times to try to find a woman.”

If Loh’s hitchhiking and penny-pinching and odd ways were difficult, if not traumatic, to his children when they were growing up—Sandra’s sister was estranged from her father for eight years—his search for a new wife was near impossible. In her comic monologue Aliens in America, Sandra recounts the process of her father—whom she refers to in the piece as “Old Dragon Whiskers” and “the wily mandarin”—searching for a new mate at a time in his life when she says he was “starting to look more and more like somebody’s gardener.” Forged in fury but written with the clarity of reflected-upon rage, the piece is Sandra’s finest work and can be said to have launched her career. It aired on This American Life, and the section titled “My Father’s Chinese Wives” won a Pushcart Prize.

Early in the monologue, Sandra’s sister posits her own theory about why their father was looking for a Chinese wife:

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