Last Night at the Telegraph Club(110)

“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 from 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.