Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended by one of my kids. Since I do try to read stuff they like, I gave this one a shot, despite the fact that it is not a genre that I read. 

 

Specifically, this book is a YA romance. And also historical fiction. I should add that it is a lesbian romance involving a Chinese-American girl, and set in 1950s San Francisco, during the height of the Red Scare - and the Lavender Scare. 

 

Actually, though, I found myself enjoying the book. Sure, it’s high school, so big emotions and not always the most subtle writing. But it did have well-researched cultural details, some historical characters, and the author’s own family history as inspiration. I would rate it as better than average. 

 

The author clearly did her research about everything from the deportation of one of the Chinese-American founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to the gay nightlife of San Francisco in the 1950s. 

 

The story is about Lily Hu, 17 year old high school senior, with aspirations to join JPL and design rockets. No, this isn’t unrealistic: women were involved with JPL from the start, and were the original computer programmers. In the notes at the end, the author gives the historical background for the various elements of the book. 

 

Lily falls in love with a white girl, Kath, who goes with her to the Telegraph Club, a fictional lesbian bar patterned after historical gay bars of the time. 

 

This leads to a series of events, from Lily’s falling-out with her longtime friend Shirley (who is, in the way of high school queen bees, a bit possessive) to her outing to her traditional family. 

 

I kind of hesitate to give more of the plot than that, because it’s that kind of a book: you want to read it to find out what happens. 

 

There are a plethora of fascinating characters. The high school kids don’t fit easy stereotypes, and all seem normally insecure and struggling to figure out who they are and what they want their futures to be. 

 

There are a number of members of the local lesbian community, from male impersonator Tommy Andrews (based on a real-life person), to other young women who gravitate toward the safe spaces in a hostile culture. The impersonation thing was apparently popular for a while - and was done by heterosexual people as well, before it eventually became associated with LGBTQ culture. 

 

The adults in Lily’s family aren’t great, I will admit, but they also aren’t villains or caricatures. They are all-too-typical traditional parents who don’t want to admit they have a “deviant” child. Kind of like my own parents, unfortunately. The aunt, while she doesn’t really understand, does appear to be more helpful. 

 

The book also weaves in the line that Chinese-Americans had to walk in that difficult era. The first race-based immigration restriction was the Chinese Exclusion Act. Then, during World War Two, the Chinese were our allies. But after the communists won the civil war, Chinese-Americans were viewed with suspicion. In fact, the co-founder of JPL was deported, then became the “father of Chinese rocketry.” It’s a sad and sordid history.

 

Within the book, the casual racism, even within the LGBTQ community, is explored in what I thought was a thoughtful way. Again, people are complicated, and have blind spots. 

 

I also enjoyed the various places in San Francisco. I recently got to see the ruins of the Sutro Baths and read about that history. At the time the book was set, these were in decline, but not gone. The author captured a certain feel of the city and the time setting quite well. 

 

The book also deserves credit for avoiding anachronisms. All too often, particularly in YA literature, modern terms, modern ways of thinking, and modern perspectives are imported into older times, making the characters feel unrealistic. 

 

Not so in this book. Lo carefully uses the phrases, the ideas, the internal drama, that actually work for the 1950s. Again, she spent time reading writings from the LGBTQ community of the time, which really helped with her feel. It was totally believable that a traditionally raised Chinese-American girl would struggle with her sexuality and find herself drawn to an underground community the way the book describes it. 

 

In this sense, too, the book is a reminder that LGBTQ people have always existed, in every time, place, and culture. In some of those, they were able to live as themselves without persecution, in others, not so much. 

 

There is a bit of relatively minor (and again, realistic) sex in the book, that feels very much like the kind of tentative exploration kids of that age would do. The buildup is also very realistic, very sweet, and wholesome - almost naive in the way so many of us were at that age.

 

There are some minor weaknesses to the book, at least for me. These are common to YA literature in general, of course. Some of the emotional stuff was a bit simplistic. I’m not really into the high school drama stuff, so a few parts felt like they lagged. But I am going to put these down to me, not any actual flaw to the book. Looking back, it really is well written for the genre. 

 

I want to mention one particular line, just because of its personal connection to me. Lily has fled from her home, and ended up with Lana, Tommy’s partner. 

 

Ultimately, there is the problem of what the way forward will be with Lily’s parents. Lana has an insight that I think is excellent. 

 

“She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.”

 

That is the crux of things. And yes, I can honestly say that my kids aren’t what I expected too. The question for all of us parents is what we do with that fact. Will we learn the lesson, and love our children for who they are, not what we imagined they would be? 

 

Or, like my parents chose to do with me (and my wife and kids), keep trying to “fix” the “defective” child? 

 

The book ends without a real resolution to this issue - it is about a specific time in Lily’s life, not her entire story. We have to guess at whether Lily and her parents will come to an understanding or not. There is a hint that her father might be open to it, but it is less clear about her mother. 

 

I wasn’t able to find much online about the author’s own experiences, other than what she shares in the book. Her grandmother was white, and her grandparents got stuck in China for decades after the communist revolution. She was born in China, but came to the US as a child. 

 

Malinda wasn’t her given name, but one she personally chose as a child after she found Americans couldn’t pronounce her Chinese name. 

 

She is lesbian, married to a woman, but nothing I have been able to find indicates whether her parents or other relatives are accepting of her - she talks a lot more about their insistence she get a “real job” rather than write than about her sexuality. I know that for most LGBTQ people, even now, family tends to be complicated. My hope is for my own kids that they know they are accepted and embraced for who they are, not who I imagined they would be. 

 

One final thought: this book is top five for challenged and banned books in school, so if you like to seek out the books that the bigots hate, this is a great choice. 

 

Oh, and Lo has an interesting blog, which you might check out as well.