Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Gr 9 Up–It’s 1954 San Francisco, and 17-year-old Lily Hu is the epitome of a “good Chinese girl”: She’s modest, respectful of her parents, and her most outlandish interest is rocket science. Then she finds a magazine ad for Tommy Andrews, male impersonator at the Telegraph Club, and everything changes. She befriends classmate Kathleen Miller, who’s into airplanes and knows about the Telegraph Club too, and all of her unspoken feelings begin tumbling out. The pair sneak out to the club, and Lily is both overwhelmed and thrilled as she is enveloped by the San Francisco lesbian scene. But the girls’ secret is dangerous; it threatens Lily’s oldest friendships and even her father’s citizenship status. Eventually, Lily must decide if owning her truth is worth everything she’s ever known. Lo’s historical novel is a meditative exploration of a young gay Chinese American girl in the 1950s. While there are many compelling tenets woven throughout Lily’s journey (racism, anti-Communism, her Chinese family’s relationship to their American identity), an abundance of detail weighs down the plot. The focus on world-building is at times heavy-handed, causing repetitiveness and rendering Lily and Kath’s relationship the slowest of burns. Lo’s prose comes alive when describing Lily’s blossoming awareness of desire; readers will be enthralled with her breathless, confusing experience of seeing the long-awaited Tommy Andrews and finally expressing her feelings for Kath. The ending is devastatingly realistic for its time, but an epilogue shimmers with a gloss of hope.