Last Night at the Telegraph Club(114)
Lily’s story is my attempt to draw some of this history out from the margins, to un-erase the stories of women like Crystal Jang and Merle Woo and Dr. Margaret Chung. Lily’s story is entirely fiction and is not based on theirs, but I imagine that she and these real women all had to deal with similar challenges: learning how to live as both Chinese American and lesbian, in spaces that often did not allow both to coexist.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
In addition to periodicals from the 1950s including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and Seventeen magazine, some of the most useful references I consulted include:
BOOKS AND ARTICLES
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America. New York: Viking, 2003.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity: 20th Anniversary Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Holt, Nathalia. Rise of the Rocket Girls. New York: Little, Brown, 2016.
Kao, George. Cathay by the Bay: Glimpses of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the Year 1950. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Lim, Shirley Jennifer. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930–1960. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Moy, Victoria. Fighting for the Dream: Voices of Chinese American Veterans From World War II to Afghanistan. Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 2014.
Nee, Victor G., and Brett de Bary. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.
Ni, Ting. The Cultural Experiences of Chinese Students Who Studied in the United States During the 1930s–1940s. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.
Rodger, Gillian. Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Sueyoshi, Amy. “Breathing Fire: Remembering Asian Pacific American Activism in Queer History.” In LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2016.
Wong, Edmund S. Growing Up in San Francisco’s Chinatown: Boomer Memories From Noodle Rolls to Apple Pie. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018.
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Yeh, Chiou-Ling. Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Chen, Amy, and Ying Zhan. Chinatown Files. Filmakers Library, 2001.
DeLarverié, Stormé, and Michelle Parkerson, et al. Stormé: the Lady of the Jewel Box. Women Make Movies, 2000.
Dong, Arthur E. et al. Forbidden City, U.S.A. DeepFocus Productions, 2015.
Poirier, Paris. Last Call At Maud’s. Frameline, 1993.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without the hard work and support of so many wonderful people. I will always be grateful to my friend and fellow author Saundra Mitchell, who first gave me the opportunity to imagine Lily’s story when she invited me to contribute a short story to her anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages. I thought that story, “New Year,” was the end of it—until my prescient agent, Michael Bourret, persuaded me that it could become a novel. (It only took me three years!) My editor, Andrew Karre, gave me invaluable guidance in transforming that story into this novel, and inspired me to think outside the boundaries of what I perceive to be young adult fiction.
Thank you to my parents, Kirk and Margaret Lo, and my aunt, Catherine Lo, who provided invaluable assistance in writing the book’s Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue. Thank you to Amy Sueyoshi, Crystal Jang, and Kitty Tsui for sharing their advice and personal experience when I was researching this book. Thank you to emily m. danforth, Britta Lundin, Cindy Pon, and Betty Law, who read early drafts and offered honest feedback and encouragement. I’m completely in love with the beautiful cover illustration by Feifei Ruan, who brought Lily and Kath’s San Francisco to life in such a magical way.
Thank you to Julie Strauss-Gabel and the entire team at Dutton and Penguin: designer Kristin Boyle; copy editor Anne Heausler; publicist Kaitlin Kneafsey; Carmela Iaria, Venessa Carson, Summer Ogata, Rachel Wease and the whole school and library team. As an author, I don’t know the names of everyone who takes part in making my book into a real thing that readers can hold in their hands, but please know that I think of all of you during the long process—everyone from production to sales—and I thank you for the work that you do.
Last but not least, thank you to my wife, Amy Lovell, who supported me throughout the entire journey: my first reader, my cheerleader, my love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Malinda Lo is the critically acclaimed author of several young adult novels, including most recently A Line in the Dark, which was a Kirkus Best YA Book of 2017 and one of Vulture's 10 Best YA Books of 2017. Her novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book for Children and Teens. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda's nonfiction has been published by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, the Huffington Post, The Toast, the Horn Book, and the anthologies Here We Are, How I Resist, and Scratch. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife.