Fog rolling in off the Pacific! Illicit kisses in smoky clubs! Steamed buns filled with jammy pork and spices!
What can I say about Last Night at the Telegraph Club that Malinda Lo didn’t already say with total confidence and care when she wrote the book?
She felt as if speaking would ruin everything-then they’d have to put a name to this feeling between them, this rapidly growing heat and longing that made the sliver of air between their bodies charged with electricity. She could swear she felt the air humming.
Whew!
Malinda Lo brings to life the story of Lily Hu and her family with both ease and acidity. She does not shy away from the details of how it feels to be a young woman, what it means to be a child of a strong and persecuted community, and how it feels to ride the wave of newfound teenage freedom to try to bring truth to both yourself and your family.
Lily is 17, a daughter to serious but loving parents, a big sister to little brothers who idolize her, and best frenemies with the popular and beautiful Shirley, another daughter of Chinatown. Lily has dreams; she spends her school days working hard as one of two girls in her math class, hoping to go to a good school and work at the newly-minted Jet Propulsion Lab. Her head is in the stars, but she’s no space cadet. She’s been rolling along in the status quo for so long that when another student, Kathleen, says that Lily’s dream of going to space is cool – not weird, not impossible, not crazy- her dutiful daughter bubble explodes like a firecracker. Kathleen is far more than a classmate. Her friends call her “Kath”, she lets Lily know, as the two inch closer and closer to forbidden romance amongst the fluorescent lights of nightclubs and tourist traps.
I am a cis, white, queer lady here in the year 2022- I cannot speak with any authority about the experience of being Chinese-American, nor can I speak to the experience of having to keep my love secret, but just because a book was not “written for me” does not mean that I could not laugh, love, and learn a LOT about the experiences of being a queer Chinese-American teen in Mid-Century San Francisco! Something that resonated with me immediately was Lily’s observations of grown men in her world ogling young girls with abandon.
One grinned at an other, and there was something off-putting about the expression on his face. He made an odd gesture with his left hand, as if he were squeezing something, and the other man chuckled. Lily dropped her gaze to her fried chicken, and the bone of the drumstick reminded her of the girl in black’s Achilles tendon, rubbed red from the hard edge of her shoe.
Lily’s friends and family are frequently on her case about the dangerous of the world: Communist sympathizers, being seen with the “wrong crowd”, forgetting where she came from- but they are willfully naïve of the real and present dangers of grown men leering (and more) at young women.
Clocking in at just over 400 pages, this is no breezy read. Difficult topics are dissected, the time-line jumps around, and we get a few intimate peeks into the life of Lily’s father, mother, and aunt- but there is still a good deal of dead space hogging up what could be more crackle and glow. The pacing felt deliberately stifling, and often found myself reading because I “had to” as opposed to because I “wanted” or “needed” to. This tale could easily trim 100 pages and still hit as hard and as deeply. Lo knows her way around the crackle of dialogue and the smoke of interior turmoil, but every jaunt around the city (which there are many) is bogged down with repetitive street-naming and store-front describing. I wish there was more room for the young lovers, their friends, and their families and less time spent re-hashing a Time Out: San Francisco travel guide.
I don’t know if I would have picked this book up on my own were it not for Cannon Book Club, but I am glad to have spent time with Lily and I cannot wait to see where Book Club discussion leads!
