She has certain expectations placed upon her by her family, friends, and the Chinatown community, and she has conformed without resistance until this point in her life. Lily is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist, the daughter of a nurse and a doctor who dreams about space exploration. Lo deftly navigates these concepts, depicting the nuances of filial piety as a subtle but persistent burden, one that has shaped Lily’s life and actions until this point.

These feelings are only amplified for migrant children, who are marginalised within society and raised with the hopes and demands that led their parents to seek life in a new country. Perhaps any child raised in a Confucian culture can relate to the struggle between filial piety and autonomy, between the person you’re expected to be and the person you really are. This book is clearly a labour of love, a product of tenderness, thought, and research that resonated with me and made me feel less alone in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. This may be a hyper-specific context, but Telegraph Club overflows with familiar, relatable emotions and compelling experiences throughout Lily’s personal journey. It comes from Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a historical young adult novel about seventeen-year-old protagonist Lily Hu coming out and coming of age in early 1950s San Francisco’s Chinatown.

This passage describes a feeling I’ve been living with my whole life, but always struggled to acknowledge or articulate. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick.” “Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed.

Content warning: internalised homophobia, d slur mention

Last night at the telegraph club review