Last Night at the Telegraph Club

It’s now Shirley and Lily’s senior year of high school, and they sit folding napkins in the Eastern Pearl, a Chinatown restaurant that Shirley’s family owns. While Shirley corrects hers, Lily looks through the Chronicle. On the same page as an ad for the Eastern Pearl is an ad that reads: “Tommy Andrews Male Impersonator—World Premiere! The Telegraph Club. 462 Broadway” (16). Something stirs in Lily, but she tries to focus on her conversation with Shirley. She’d always wondered about the nightclubs down on Broadway, but her parents told her that they weren’t for girls, let alone Chinese girls.

She tears out the ad.

Lily walks home, trying to not think about the Tommy Andrews show and the Telegraph Club.

Her brothers, Frankie and Eddie, are home, as is her father, Joseph. She waits for them to go to bed and then, alone in her room, pulls out the ad, starring at the Tommy Andrews’s picture. She thinks about the photos of men on Shirley’s wall and doesn’t think that even her friend would notice that the person in the photo wasn’t a man if she hung it up.

She then pulls out the two other folded newspaper clippings she has hidden. One is of Katharine Hepburn wearing clothes that made her look more like a man, and “[t]here was a knowing confidence in her expression, a hint of masculine expression in her shoulders” (22). The other clipping is of two women who opened their own airfield after World War II. They were holding hands. She wasn’t sure why she felt she needed it, but she’d ripped it from a copy of Flying magazine at the library.

When Lily and her mother, Grace, go to Macy’s, they encounter a young woman wearing a cheongsam—a traditional Chinese dress—and Mrs. Hu worries about her given that she’s not from San Francisco and lives with her uncle.

As they shop, Lily begins to feel self-conscious, noticing that they’re the only Chinese Americans on the floor. She stares at a display in which a woman in an ad wears a tuxedo-style vest, but her mother disapproves. Instead, she tries on the clothes her mother has picked in preparation for the school year, including a jacket that she knows her mother believes makes her look “respectable.” It projects an image in which she’ll attend college, find a husband, and then move to a house to have children.

At school, Lily sits in Senior Goals, a class about preparing for life after high school. The teacher divides them into groups, and they discuss their childhood and current dreams. Lily is with Shirley, Will, whom she knows from Chinatown, and Kathleen. Shirley teases Lily for having wanted to go to the moon as her dream when she was a kid. Now, Lily wants to work at a place like her Aunt Judy, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Kathleen says she wants to be a pilot, but Shirley rudely comments that she doesn’t think Kathleen will make it into college. Kathleen retorts that she doesn’t think she’ll see Shirley there. In a way, Lily is happy to see someone stand up to Shirley.

Walking home, Lily thinks about the Telegraph Club. She stops at the drugstore to look at the romance novels, and she finds one called Strange Season about two woman. As she reads, she’s shocked to find a passage in which the two women kiss. A clerk interrupts her reading, and she puts the book back on the shelf but can’t help thinking about the story.

She thinks she should feel ashamed for reading it but instead is excited. It feels like something makes sense. That night, she imagines the two women from the novel kissing and masturbates.

At Will’s invitation, Lily and Shirley attend a picnic, and when Will asks about two of their other friends, Shirley replies that they couldn’t make it, and Lily suddenly grows nervous that Shirley is up to something. She quickly realizes that Shirley wanted to come so that she could see Will’s brother, Calvin.

As the picnic gets underway, Lily meets several students from China who are now unable to go home because of the political situation. She enjoys herself, eating until she’s full, and then falls asleep.

When she walks home later with Shirley, Lily brings up Calvin. In return, Shirley points out how nice Will was being to Lily, which she hadn’t noticed. Shirley comments that if she doesn’t pay attention, she’ll never find a boyfriend. Lily resents that Shirley changed the subject and thinks about how she doesn’t feel anything when she pictures kissing Will.

At school the next week, Lily notices that Shirley seems distracted, but her friend brushes it off. When she runs into Will after school on Tuesday, he asks her to be his date to the fall dance. Feeling awkward and overwhelmed, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

There, Lily tries to avoid the person she hears in the stall next to hers, but her bag falls from the hook, and her notebook—with the newspaper clipping of Tommy Andrews, the male impersonator, slips out. The person in the other stall calls out her name, asking if she’s okay. When she opens the door, she finds Kathleen from her class standing there, holding both items. As Lily notes the strange expression on her face, Will calls into the restroom and knocks on the door.

After Lily explains that Will asked her to the dance, Kathleen talks to him, saying that Lily is on her period, and he leaves. She then tells Lily that she has seen Tommy Andrews at the Telegraph Club before. At first, Lily hesitates. When Kathleen says she has to walk home, Lily asks to join her.

They talk about Kathleen’s family, and Lily wonders why they never got to know one another, especially since they had classes together before. As they part, Kathleen asks Lily to call her “Kath” since they’re friends.

A few days later, Shirley chastises Lily for not saying yes to Will. Lily spots Kath and thinks about how, even though they’ve started walking home together every day, they pretend to not know each other well at school. After Shirley tells Lily to talk to Will, Lily departs with Kath.

They decide to get ice cream, and as they eat, they talk about flying. Kath still wants to be a pilot, and Lily is in awe as she describes the feeling of being in the air. When Kath apologizes for talking about it so much, Lily tells her that she enjoyed listening. As they look at each other, Lily feels a tightening in her chest. When they break their gaze, Lily notices a woman bump her hip flirtatiously against another. She and Kath still haven’t talked about the Telegraph Club.

Kath offers a hand to help her up, and they stay with their hands intertwined for a beat longer, then part.

Lily almost stops back at the drugstore, having made some progress on Strange Season, but when she sees a friend of her mother’s, she decides not to. However, she thinks about what it would be like to show Kath the book.

She’s startled to find both of her parents at home, and they want to talk to her. Her father tells her that two FBI agents took him out of work that day because he had a patient they believed was a member of a Communist organization.

Her mother explains that FBI agents are interviewing people when they suspect that someone is a Communist. Her father adds that he didn’t know anything about the man he treated but that he was a member of the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, which the FBI believes is a Communist organization also called Man Ts’ing. This is where Lily went to meet Will before the picnic.

Lily’s father explains that someone saw her at the picnic, and she worries that Will’s in trouble. However, her parents tell her to pay attention and that she thinks too much about outer space. They want her to steer clear of the group, especially since they “need to show that we’re Americans first.” She agrees but doesn’t completely understand.

Afraid, Lily thinks back to the Chinese New Year parade during the Korean War and recalls a banner that read “Down with Communism” (67). Her father says that they’re going to talk to Shirley and Will’s parents.

Later, Lily’s mother explains to her that the FBI took her father’s citizenship papers. He didn’t want her to know, but her mother thinks she’s old enough. She also accidentally lets slip that her father’s patient was Will’s brother, Calvin, and that the FBI wanted her father to sign a statement saying that Calvin is a Communist, but her father refused.

Lily’s mother explains that these investigations are a way for the FBI to deport Chinese people and adds that she thinks that he should sign the paper. Lily worries about what will happen if her father doesn’t get his citizenship papers back. Her mother responds that they shouldn’t think about that right now—but that they need to show how American they are. She asks Lily to tell her if anyone she knows is involved with the group. Lily agrees.