Last Night at the Telegraph Club

I’ve been on the library waitlist for Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club for ages, and finally got it last week.

I chose this one as my PopSugar Reading Challenge for a Sapphic story, although it could also be a book about a secret.  Last Night at the Telegraph Club really is a  romantic Sapphic story, but there are also other storylines in this novel about family, ambition, and culture.

The assumption from everyone is that girls grow up, get married, and have children, and teenage Lily gets that assumption both from her Chinese family and from everyday life in the American fifties. Lily already didn’t quite fit, with her academic ambitions and her interest in space, but discovering her feelings for Kath mean she will never have the life her parents expect her to have.

1950s Chinatown is a difficult place to be queer. Sure, San Francisco might be a bit more queer-friendly than other cities at the time, but police raids are part of gay nightlife. The love story was so tense, because there was real affection and chemistry between Lily and Kath, but I also knew their relationship would put them in danger.

The story looks at bonds between friends, too, as Lily begins to question her relationships with other Chinatown girls. Lily’s been besties with Shirley since they were little but now Lily begins to push on her expected role. She enjoys scifi and space stories, and has her own college ambitions, and that no longer meshes with what Shirley wants from their senior year.   Shirley’s not a flat character, either, with her own secret romance and her dreams of Miss Chinatown.

Flashback scenes explain how Lily’s family came to be. Readers see how her parents met, and how, despite plans to return to China, they ended up as naturalized Americans. This helps show the family expectations and requirements for Lily. Her family’s status, although fully legal, is precarious in the American witchhunt for communists. I liked seeing Lily’s Aunt Judy’s background, and this came back near the end of the book.  It would have been too strange for a Chinese-American woman in the 1950s to just accept a queer niece, but it would also have been too strange to upset the closeness between aunt and niece.

Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot. The  vivid characters worked for me.  I enjoyed the blend of familiar (Chinese New Year, Arthur C Clarke novels, etc.) and completely unfamiliar in this story.