Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Kathleen (“Kath”) Miller is Lily’s primarily love interest in the novel. She and Lily have long had classes together, and the two eventually forge a friendship built around a shared interest in math and science. In addition, she discovers that Lily wishes to go to the Telegraph Club, where she has already been with her friend Jean. While Kath has little experience with women, she becomes Lily’s source of comfort in finding someone like herself, someone who’s LGBTQ+ and also wants to follow a stereotypically male career path.

Additionally, Kath’s relationship with Lily helps her be honest with herself and stay honest with others even if it would be easier not to. After Lily kisses Kath and they admit to having feelings for one another, Lily feels that denying her identity and what Kath means to her would be dishonest, even though her family pressures her to deny her newfound identity after she’s spotted leaving the Telegraph Club the night of the raid.

Lily’s childhood best friend, Shirley Lum is a foil to Lily’s character in that she’s much more confident and seemingly content to inhabit her role as a Chinese American woman. At the start of the novel, when she and Shirley are at the Miss Chinatown pageant and Shirley runs onstage after it’s over, Lily wonders if Shirley is “what a Chinese girl should look like” (8-9).

Shirley is much more confident than Lily from the start and appears to be the leader of their group of friends. She often tries to couple Lily with another boy in their friend group. However, she’s displeased when Lily starts to hang out with Kath, having heard rumors about Kath’s friend Jean being caught with a girl in the bathroom the year before. She’s worried that it will mar Lily’s reputation and is even outright rude to Kath, causing an initial and, later, final wedge between herself and Lily.

Lily describes Shirley as someone who doesn’t typically apologize, so when she offers a truce, Lily is pleased that Shirley, in her own way, is admitting that their conflict wasn’t entirely Lily’s fault. This brings them back together long enough for Shirley to ask Lily if she “ever wish[ed] you weren’t Chinese” (204). At this point, Shirley seems bogged down by the treatment of Chinese Americans and the complications from the rise of the Communist Party in China in the mid-1900s. However, she quickly turns this around by deciding to run for Miss Chinatown, seemingly to address gossip about her and Calvin, though she never mentions him explicitly. Not until later does Lily discover that Shirley’s in love with him.

Shirley is the first one to tell Lily that she was spotted leaving the Telegraph Club, and as her mother does soon after, she encourages Lily to pretend that it was all a mistake. However, Lily, now confident, stands up to her.

Grace is Lily’s mother. She was born in the US and trained as a nurse, which led her to meet Joseph. Like Lily in many ways, she feels caught between her identity as a Chinese woman and as an American. She’s fiercely protective of Lily but also pressures her to look and act like a good Chinese American citizen. When the two go shopping at the beginning of the novel, she picks out clothes for Lily, emphasizing that she “need[s] to have the right look” (28). This pressure builds and creates conflict for Lily, who wants to work on rockets like her Aunt Judy and is becoming aware of her sexuality.

When Lily brings this up to Grace, she doesn’t respond kindly. At first, she emphasizes to Lily that she’s a “good Chinese girl” (327), again laying pressure on her daughter to behave in a certain way. Then, she tells her that “[t]here are no homosexuals in this family” (329). Instead of giving in, Lily refuses to lie and leaves. Even when Grace and Joseph send her away, Lily refuses to give up who she is, and at the novel’s end it’s clear that Grace still expects Lily to be straight.

Joseph was born in Shanghai and immigrated to the US to finish his medical training. He eventually obtained his citizenship papers—but at the start of the novel, they’retaken from him by the FBI because he refuses to lie and name one of his patients as a Communist. Their treatment of him exemplifies the racism that Chinese Americans experienced in the 1950s. The US government often targeted people of Chinese descent, accused them of being Communists because of the rise of the Communist Party in China, and then deported them despite their having done nothing wrong. The threat of Joseph’s deportation looms throughout the novel. When he joins Grace and Judy in sitting Lily down and trying to persuade her to pretend her experiences at the Telegraph Club were a mistake, Grace points out that Lily’s association with lesbians could only make Joseph look more suspicious and could put him in danger of being deported. However, following her father’s example in refusing to lie, Lily stays strong.

Although Joseph refuses to accept that daughter’s interest in women, he clearly cares deeply for her. He eventually tells her of a female Chinese doctor he knew around whom rumors of relationships with women swarmed, and he expresses the hope that Lily can live a full life. While this doesn’t help Lily (or rectify the stigma behind sending her away), it illustrates that he acknowledges the challenge she faces, even if he considers sexual orientation—and not one’s honesty about it—a choice.