High school senior Lily Hu lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1954 with her medical professional parents; she behaves obediently and dreams of working at the Jet Propulsion Lab like her. 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),

 

High school senior Lily Hu lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1954 with her medical professional parents; she behaves obediently and dreams of working at the Jet Propulsion Lab like her aunt Judy.

 

From Book Browse
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/btb/index.cfm/book_number/4215/last-night-at-the-telegraph-club#btb

In Last Night at the Telegraph Club, some of the pressure that Lily faces in her family life is related to their precarious situation as immigrants, specifically as Chinese immigrants in the aftermath of the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism. Chinese immigrants have a long, often obscured history in the United States, which includes several exclusion acts that were essentially part of a strategy to keep U.S. immigration, and the country’s citizenry, of white, European descent. Despite the gradual repeal of these measures, Sinophobia, or Anti-Chinese sentiment and racism, was prevalent in the U.S. at the time the book is set, and it still persists today, as has been made more openly apparent by some of the national discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy became a prominent voice of anti-communist sentiment as the Cold War persisted. His Red Scare tactics included assertions that the U.S. had been infiltrated by foreign agents who intended to subvert both the fabric of society and the federal government. Accusations flew, with government representatives, Hollywood elite and ordinary citizens alike being reported as communists or communist sympathizers. Individuals from communist or communist-leaning countries, such as China, were considered especially suspect. However, the idea that East Asian cultures posed an existential threat to “Western” ways of life — often called “the yellow peril” — had been part of the American imaginary since the 19th century.

This is the situation Lily’s family would have been facing. When her father’s citizenship papers are confiscated by the FBI, Lily’s mother remarks, “They are looking for scapegoats…They’re using these investigations as an excuse to deport Chinese.”