Guest Post, Our Monthly Picks

San Francisco, the 1950s, and Me: An Exclusive Guest Post From Malindo Lo, Author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club — Our January Young Adult Pick

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (National Book Award Winner)

Paperback $10.49 $11.99

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (National Book Award Winner)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (National Book Award Winner)

By Malinda Lo

In Stock Online

Paperback $10.49 $11.99

Set in 1954 San Francisco, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a must-read coming-of-age story about a Chinese American teenager learning to understand herself, her sexuality, and her culture during a time and place where she is seen as less than. Here, Malindo Lo — author of our January Young Adult Pick — discusses the extensive research that went into writing this story, adding to a history for LGBTQ Chinese Americans that has been erased, and what winning the National Book Award means to her.

Set in 1954 San Francisco, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a must-read coming-of-age story about a Chinese American teenager learning to understand herself, her sexuality, and her culture during a time and place where she is seen as less than. Here, Malindo Lo — author of our January Young Adult Pick — discusses the extensive research that went into writing this story, adding to a history for LGBTQ Chinese Americans that has been erased, and what winning the National Book Award means to her.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club started out as a short story called “New Year,” which was published in the anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages. The story was inspired by two nonfiction books I’d been reading: Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt, about the women computers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the 1940s and 50s, and Wide Open Town by Nan Alamilla Boyd, a queer history of San Francisco. These two books had nothing to do with each other; they were simply topics I’ve always been interested in. But in my mind they came together to inspire the character of seventeen-year-old Lily, a Chinese American girl living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. Lily wants to be a rocket scientist like her Aunt Judy, who works at JPL, and she’s also starting to realize she might be a lesbian. 

I over-researched the short story because I’m a recovering academic—I almost got a Ph.D. earlier in my life. But when I decided to expand the short story into a novel, I realized I needed to do even more research. I knew hardly anything about the 1950s, or about the ways Chinese Americans and LGBTQ people were treated back then. 

I soon bumped into a big problem: Chinese Americans, especially LGBTQ Chinese Americans, have been mostly erased from history. There was very little trace of them in the historical record. I ended up studying footnotes for any crumbs of information, and following those notes to original sources. I also reached out to historians for help, and they connected me to Chinese American lesbians who lived in San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s, who generously talked to me about their lives. 

I went to San Francisco to visit archives where I dug through files about gay bars, and I flipped through actual yearbooks from Lily’s high school. I watched movies filmed in San Francisco in the 1950s and searched photo archives of the city in that decade. I personally retraced Lily’s steps through the city, trying to see it the way she would have seen it in 1954. I wanted to create a living, breathing 1950s for the reader. 

Winning the National Book Award has been an incredible experience. For one thing, I feel justified in my over-researching! But also, it’s brought attention to a novel that I hope many more people will read. When I was Lily’s age, I didn’t have any access to stories about LGBTQ Asian Americans. I can only imagine how transformative it would have been to know that people like me existed back then. We always have.