Last Night at the Telegraph Club

by Malinda Lo

  “Hello,” Kath said softly.

  “Hello,” Lily replied. They were separated by only a few feet now, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to greet her. Shaking hands seemed ridiculous, and she couldn’t kiss her on the cheek as if they were merely friends.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Kath said somewhat formally, and pulled out a chair.

  “Thank you.” Lily sat down, and Kath’s hand touched her shoulder very briefly before she went back to her seat on the other side of the table.

  Kath was wearing a collared shirt and trousers, and she had gotten herself a haircut—recently, Lily guessed, because it was trimmed so close against her neck. Kath still had the same delicately shaped mouth, the same long-lashed blue eyes. She smiled at Lily, and the longer they looked at each other, the deeper her smile went.

  “It’s really good to see you,” Kath said in her straightforward way, but Lily understood the heartfelt weight of her words.

  Lily couldn’t stop smiling either. “It’s really good to see you, too.”

  “How was your trip?”

  “It was fine. It’s not very interesting.”

  “I haven’t seen you in over a year,” Kath said. “Everything you say is interesting.”

  Lily’s eyes grew hot. She looked down at the wooden table and saw that there were already two glasses of beer there. “Did you buy these?”

  “Yes. If you want something else, I’ll go to the bar.”

  “Oh no. This is fine.” Lily picked up her glass, and Kath did the same, and they gently knocked them together.

  “Happy New Year,” Kath said.

  “Kung hei faat ts’oi,” Lily responded, and they both took a sip from their beers.

  “I’m serious,” Kath said. “I want to know how you are.”

  Lily was so nervous all of a sudden, as if she had forgotten how to talk to Kath. They had shared a lot in letters over the past year—maybe she had shared too much—but writing something down was different from meeting face to face. And Kath had always been more reserved in her letters. Perhaps she hadn’t told Lily everything. What if she had met someone else? It had been a long time, and they didn’t live in the same city anymore. They’d never made any promises to each other. Nothing was certain about the future.

  Kath scooted her chair around the table so that her back was to the door and she was closer to Lily. A moment later Lily felt Kath’s hand reach for hers under the table, lacing their fingers together as if to hold her still, right here, right now. This was certain.

  “Lily,” Kath said softly. “Tell me everything.”

  * * *

  —

  They talked for almost two hours. They already knew the basic details of their lives, but saying them out loud made things real. Lily had finished high school last spring and spent the summer doing fill-in secretarial work at the Jet Propulsion Lab, before starting college at UCLA in the fall. She lived in an apartment in Westwood now, with another Chinese girl, and she was studying math. She told Kath about a new class she had just started on programmable computers, which Aunt Judy thought would become important in the future.

  Kath had moved to Berkeley last spring, temporarily living with Jean, but had since found an apartment in Oakland. She lived with two other gay girls; one was at Cal and the other was a mechanic. Kath had found a job working at a tiny airport in Oakland and was about to start flying lessons. She finally got her high school diploma in December, finishing it by correspondence with the help of Miss Weiland.

  “Are you going to go to Cal now?” Lily asked.

  “Maybe. I’m too late for this semester, but maybe in the fall.”

  “What about UCLA? Some really smart people go there.”

  Kath laughed. “I’ll think about it. But . . . I don’t want to give up my job. I need the money, and I just convinced my boss to train me to fix the airplanes. It’s exactly what I want.”

  Lily felt a little bolder now. “It’s not everything you want, is it?”

  Kath smiled. “No, it’s not.”

  Lily went warm all over and glanced over her shoulder at the other patrons of the bar. It had filled up since she arrived, and she wondered what time it was. She reluctantly looked at her watch. “Oh no,” she said, “I have to go. I’m going to be late for dinner.” She stood up, already imagining her mother’s curious look and the lie she’d have to tell her.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Kath said, standing as well.

  “I don’t want to go,” Lily admitted.

  “I don’t want you to go either.”

  At that moment a man laughed very loudly down at the other end of the bar, and they were reminded once more of where they were. Kath said nothing more, but she helped Lily into her coat before putting on her own. They walked quickly and silently past the other patrons, who barely noticed them leaving.

  Kath held the door open for her, and Lily stepped out into the city and saw that night had fallen while they were talking. The lights were on all along Columbus Avenue, and she smelled the distinct cool scent of the fog rolling in. She felt Kath’s hand on her back, nudging her over into Adler Place, the narrow street between Vesuvio’s and the next building. The other end of Adler Place opened onto Grant Avenue, and Lily saw the Chinatown streetlamps glowing in the distance.

  “Come out with me tomorrow night,” Kath said, drawing close to her.

  Lily backed away into the shadow of the building, past the light that spilled out of Vesuvio’s windows, and Kath followed. “I can’t go tomorrow,” Lily said. “It’s the New Year parade.”

  “What about the night after?”

  “Monday night?”

  “Yes, Monday.”

  “Where?” Lily asked.

  Kath was right in front of her now, but there was still a foot of space between them. Lily wanted to reach out and touch her, but she held herself back. The traffic on Columbus was barely twenty feet to their right.

  “There’s a place called the Paper Doll, on Union Street west of Grant,” Kath said. “We can have dinner there. I can get there by eight o’clock.”

  “All right, I’ll meet you there.”

  Lily didn’t know what sort of excuse she’d give her parents, but right now, with Kath so close to her, she didn’t care. She glanced at the lights of Columbus Avenue again, and before she could second-guess herself, she took Kath’s hand and pulled her farther into Adler Place. The shadows weren’t quite dark enough to hide them, but Lily had come so far—hundreds of miles from Los Angeles—and she wouldn’t allow the last few inches to be insurmountable.

  “Careful,” Kath said softly.

  But she didn’t resist when Lily pulled Kath into a hug, and after a second’s hesitation, Kath hugged her back. Lily buried her face in Kath’s neck for one breathless moment. If she closed her eyes she might fix this in her memory always: the pulse in Kath’s throat; the warmth of her body; the scent of her skin.

  “I love you,” Lily whispered.

  A catch in Kath’s breath; the ripple of it moving from her body to Lily’s.

  Kath drew back just enough to kiss her quickly. “I love you too.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” Lily said, and then she hurried away down the dark street. At the end of it, right before she stepped onto Grant Avenue, she looked back to see if Kath was still there—and she was.

  She was standing in the middle of Adler Place, and when she saw Lily turn, she raised her hand in a wave. Monday.

  Lily’s heart lifted, and she waved back, and then she stepped into Chinatown. Grant Avenue was hung with red-and-gold banners welcoming the Year of the Monkey. A group of children on the corner were lighting clusters of illegal handheld sparklers. Lily raised her fingers to her lips as if to touch the last trace of Kath’s mouth on hers. She felt a queer giddiness overtaking her, as if her body might float up fr
om the ground because she was so buoyant with this lightness, this love.

  —1954

  The U.S. Senate condemns Joseph McCarthy.

  —1955

  Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien is deported from the United States and returns to China.

  —Feb. 11, 1956

  LILY meets Kath at Vesuvio Café in San Francisco.

  The Immigration and Naturalization Service launches the Chinese Confession Program, encouraging Chinese to voluntarily confess if they immigrated to the United States illegally, leading to widespread fear of deportation within the Chinese American community.

  —1957

  The U.S.S.R. launches Sputnik 1 into orbit.

  Kath obtains her pilot’s license.

  —1958

  United States launches Explorer 1, a satellite built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into orbit.

  —1959

  Lily graduates from the University of California–Los Angeles and begins working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Lily Hu’s story was inspired by two books. In Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt introduces us to the female computers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab starting in the 1940s, including Chinese American immigrant Helen Ling, who went on to become an engineer at JPL and hired many more women to work there. In Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, Nan Alamilla Boyd notes almost casually, “San Francisco native Merle Woo remembers that lesbians of color often frequented Forbidden City [nightclub] in the 1950s.” Both books gave me glimpses into Asian American history that has too often fallen through the cracks, and I wondered what life might have been like for a queer Asian American girl who dreamed of rocket ships, growing up in the 1950s. This nugget of an idea first became a short story, “New Year,” published in All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens, edited by Saundra Mitchell, in 2018. And now Lily’s story has grown into this novel.

  ON LANGUAGE

  I made every effort to use historically accurate language in this book. For example, I chose terms about race that were widely used in the 1950s, some of which are offensive or at least outdated by contemporary standards. Oriental, which is now considered offensive, was applied to Asian Americans all the way through the 1970s and ’80s. The term Asian American was not coined until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  Lily and her family speak multiple dialects of Chinese, including Cantonese and Mandarin, and I followed historically accurate forms of writing for these languages. I chose to romanize Chinese terms when Lily and others are speaking Chinglish—that is, when they speak primarily in English but throw in a few Chinese words. I used Chinese characters when the whole sentence or the character’s thoughts are entirely in Chinese.

  All Chinese characters are rendered in their traditional or complex form. Simplified Chinese characters were not introduced until the 1950s and ’60s in the People’s Republic of China and would not have been in use in the United States at that time. For Cantonese romanizations, I followed The Student’s Cantonese-English Dictionary by B. Meyer and T. Wempe, published in 1935. For Mandarin terms, I followed the Wade-Giles romanization system, which was the standard for most of the twentieth century.

  There are a few exceptions to these romanization choices. Place names (e.g., Kwangtung) and historical figures (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek) are rendered with their historical spellings. I also chose to use cheongsam to refer to the form-fitting dress with slits up both sides, first popularized in Shanghai in the 1920s. This word is a loose romanization of 長衫, which is literally the “long shirt” traditionally worn by men, not women. The term for a woman’s dress is 旗袍, which would be romanized as kei po in Cantonese, but because cheongsam has become generally understood in English to mean a woman’s Chinese dress, I decided to use cheongsam.

  THE 1950S

  Popular perceptions of the 1950s often center on conformity and social repression, but in reality the midcentury was a time of transition and thus a time of great cultural anxiety that was often expressed in efforts to suppress difference.

  In 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb. The Soviet Union followed in 1953, setting off atomic-age fears of nuclear annihilation—and duck-and-cover drills in schools. The Korean War had ended, though it had not been won; and China, which had been an American ally during World War II, became a Communist enemy. Senator Joseph McCarthy began his paranoid crusade against Communist infiltration in 1950, and although he was censured by the Senate in 1954 and dead by 1957, McCarthyism pervaded the decade, resulting in the deportation of Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien, a Chinese scientist who cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and had aided the United States during World War II. Once he returned to China in 1955, Dr. Tsien became known as the father of Chinese rocketry. McCarthyism also led to the so-called Lavender Scare, in which queer people were forced out of their government jobs because homosexuality was believed to be linked with Communism.

  Although many people identify the 1950s with rock ’n’ roll and artists like Elvis Presley, Elvis himself didn’t really arrive until 1956, when “Heartbreak Hotel” was released. The pop charts of the early ’50s were still topped by crooners such as Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney. Rock ’n’ roll was still rhythm and blues recorded by black artists—and increasingly discovered by teenagers, who were coming into their own as an age group to be courted by advertisers and feared by adults, who depicted them as juvenile delinquents in films such as The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Although The Wild One would later become known for its homoerotic subtext, same-sex relationships were largely verboten in mainstream popular media—except in pulp fiction, which were small, mass-produced paperbacks that sold like hotcakes.

  The first lesbian pulp novel, Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres, was published in 1950 and sold a million copies. It was followed in 1952 by Spring Fire, which sold at least a million and a half copies. Spring Fire’s author, Vin Packer, was a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker, who would go on to write young adult novels as M. E. Kerr. Lesbian pulps were widely available in drugstores across the country, and although many were written with the male gaze in mind, plenty of lesbians also found them. Despite the publishers’ requirement, due to obscenity laws, that these books end in punishment for the homosexual characters, they still created a kind of imagined community for lesbians scattered across the nation, who could read these books and discover that people like them existed.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  San Francisco has long been known as a magnet for queer people. In Wide-Open Town, Boyd explains that although San Francisco’s licentiousness was periodically quashed by anti-vice campaigns, those very efforts ironically drove attention to the city’s anything-goes reputation, and “a wide range of adventure-seekers, homosexuals among them, made their way through the Golden Gate” in search of that freedom.

  World War II had a major impact on queer communities in San Francisco, due to the arrival of thousands of service members—many of them gay or lesbian—who moved through the port city and were looking for nightlife and community. Minority communities in San Francisco changed during the war too, with Japanese Americans forced out into internment camps, and African Americans migrating to San Francisco to work at military bases and in the defense industries.

  By the early 1950s, Chinatown was a well-known stop on the tourist circuit, and business owners leveraged white fascination with the Far East to sell them chop suey and souvenirs. The North Beach district, a traditionally Italian neighborhood that would become the heart of Beat culture in the late 1950s, was already home to multiple clubs that catered to gay men and lesbians. Sexually adventurous tourists could visit famous spots like Finocchio’s (advertised as the place “Where Boys Will Be Girls”), or Mona’s (“Where Girls Will Be Boys”). The Telegraph Club is fictional, but it is inspired by bars like these. North Beach
abuts Chinatown, sharing several blocks along Broadway and Columbus, so those who were interested in visiting Finocchio’s for a flamboyant queer-coded show could easily walk over to Chinatown afterward for late-night lo mein.

  CHINATOWN AND CHINESE AMERICANS

  The first Chinese landed in San Francisco in 1848, and soon afterward settled in the center of the city near Portsmouth Square in an area that would become known as Chinatown. For the next several decades, anti-Chinese bigotry tangled with demand for Chinese labor. White American entrepreneurs needed Chinese workers to build railroads and wash laundry, but white American workers resented the Chinese for taking those jobs. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration ban in the United States targeting a specific ethnic group. It remained in place until World War II.

  The sixty years of Chinese Exclusion created a bachelor society among Chinese Americans, because most Chinese women were legally barred from immigration due to the racist belief that they were all prostitutes. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from southern China and spoke Cantonese and its related dialects, including Toishanese. Robbed of the ability to form stable families in America, Chinese Americans formed institutions to serve communities of bachelors, such as mutual-aid societies based on family surnames or home villages. Businessmen founded the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or the Chinese Six Companies, to officially represent their interests and Chinatown.

  World War II had a major impact on Chinese immigration. With Japan situated as the enemy, China—which had thrown off imperial rule in 1912 and formed a republic led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—became an American ally. Chiang’s wife, Soong May-ling, aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was a key part of persuading America to support China against Japanese aggression. Madame Chiang was a Wellesley College–educated woman who spoke English fluently and was so adored by the American media that she appeared on the cover of Time magazine three times. In 1943, she embarked on a national tour to raise money and goodwill for China and became the first woman to address a joint session of Congress. After Madame Chiang’s tour, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in December 1943 and established a quota that permitted 105 Chinese to immigrate each year.