Last Night at the Telegraph Club

This is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s San Francisco. As teenagers my best friend and I shared a mutual hyperfixation with the Cold War. It beautifully explores that era, from the Space Race to the McCarthyism that targeted both queer Americans and Chinese Americans. My best friend now lives in San Francisco, and when I last went to visit her I treated myself to going on a little walking tour of some of the places mentioned in the novel, all around Chinatown and Russian Hill.

The desire Lily feels towards her butch friend is beautiful and stirring, and the… show more.

By inserting the book into a time when the very essence of the story is dangerous, the people are made to be in a situation where I was turning one page after the next to find out what would happen to them.

Each question that arose in my mind made me urgently attempt to find answers and the smile that came to my face at each happy moment felt amazing. The emotions that echoed through the book found their way into me and made me feel as if I was along for the ride as well right beside the characters.

This book’s cover, reviews, and awards drew me in, despite the very long queue for my library’s ten audiobooks.

The narrator, Emily Woo Zeller, captures the nuance of the story and characters very well. The tone and setting reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Mulholland Drive, without the David Lynch weirdness. There’s a sense of mystery and intrigue that’s captivating. There is queer BIPOC representation. I really enjoyed it.

Anyone who knows my own books knows I’m obsessed with shining a light on untold stories from queer history.

Malindo Lo has written one of the great queer historical novels with Last Night at the Telegraph Club. It’s a gorgeous love story that will transport you to 1950s San Francisco, and it’s gloriously intersectional in bringing you into the Chinese American experience just as deeply as it does into the lesbian experience.

Also, I love a work of art that makes me cry, and this one requires some tissues.

I’ve been reading Malinda Lo for over a decade, but this is my all-time favorite of hers. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is set in 1950s San Francisco, during the Red Scare, and has a coming-of-age plot with a Chinese American girl (Lily) falling in love with her white baby butch classmate (Kath). Lily wants to work in STEM, which is almost as impossible as her budding sapphic desires for an interracial relationship. The titular Telegraph Club is a lesbian bar where Lily and Kath find people like them—representation that’s still precious and revelatory, even 70 years later. 

This… show more.

I really enjoyed Lo’s writing and how she intersected the love and passion between two teenage girls (Lily, who is Chinese American and Kath, who is Caucasian), and the risks they take to be together. This is a historical novel set in 1954 and Lo artfully juxtaposes their growing desire alongside the oppression and harassment of queer people at the time. I found it captivating how Lily’s family and Chinese tradition impact the story, along with the constraints of living in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the ongoing red-baiting at the time. The illicit nature of same-sex desire added to the… show more.

Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare, this quietly powerful coming-of-age novel by Malinda Lo is guaranteed to astound. A confused and questioning Lily Hu is torn between her commitment to family, a new friendship that blossoms in unexpected ways, and her discovery of a tantalizing queer nightclub in her own neighborhood. This sapphic historical romance is full of beautiful prose, striking images, and a tenuous exploration of forbidden love.

A Chinese American teenager living in San Francisco’s China Town in the mid-fifties, Lily Hu has just begun to realize that she is a lesbian. She must struggle to keep this secret from her family, who want her to date a nice Chinese boy, and her childhood friend Shirley, who expects her to head the support group for her campaign for Miss China Town. But when a classmate introduces her to the Telegraph Club, she becomes enamored of Tommy Andrews, a “male impersonator,” and the secret becomes more and more difficult to keep. This honest, evocative novel brings a time… show more.

 This National Book Award winner takes place in the 1950s, and details one Chinese American girl’s journey to understanding her sexuality and herself at the height of the Red Scare and rampant homophobia. It’s literary and exquisite, and I think it should be a part of every reader’s collection. 

Did you know there were lesbian bars in San Francisco in the 1950s? I didn’t until fellow author and neighbor Malinda Lo wrote this beautiful romance about two girls in Chinatown during the red scare. While the heroine discovers a whole new world, so do we. And interspersed chapters help us understand where her parents are coming from.