Synopsis:

A story of love and duty set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Red Scare.

“That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Review:

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo was such a wonderful read filled with a huge sweep of emotions.

The story focuses on the coming of age and the coming out of a young Chinese American girl in 1950s San Fransisco – a time and place where being queer was not tolerated, with the red scare and bar raids both explored through the book. Malinda Lo approached these things with care, and gradually unfolded the drama for us, rather than throwing us right into it.

Lily is our central character and she has always known that she is different somehow. She seeks out people and things that represent how she feels, and that is how she comes across the Telegraph Club.

“She realized, with a jolt, that the city must be peppered with women who frequented the Telegraph or similar clubs; women who watched performers like Tommy Andrews, made friends with each other, made girlfriends with each other. At each intersection she cast skittish glances at the women waiting for the light to change, wondering if she was one of them too, or her, or her.”

The way Lo has written Lily gradually discovering and coming to accept who she is, is absolutely wonderful. Lily is incredibly introspective and her internal thoughts and the way she overcame her nervousness to allow herself to fully explore the person she wanted to be was great to read. Her relationship with Kath too was lovely, so awkward and sweet and very realistic.

All of this was delivered with writing so vivid and cinematic that the scenery melted off the page and into my room so that I too was there, in the Telegraph Club, on Ocean Beach, in Chinatown… Malinda Lo also wrote the perspective of a teenager on the brink of adulthood so well, with Lily feeling like she needs to break away from the strictness of home while still being stuck beneath its roof.