MARTÍNEZ: Now, Lily you describe as stepping outside of the bounds of being a good Chinese daughter. So that's where I got the idea for the club. I saw ads in the Chronicle from this time that very openly reported this - that was advertising this. People would go to these clubs to see both female and male impersonators. And they were very popular in San Francisco. Male impersonators were what we might call drag kings today. She finds this ad in the San Francisco Chronicle for a club - the Telegraph Club - where a male impersonator is performing. So that's Lily and her science love.īut she's also starting to realize that she might be a lesbian. These kinds of stories about rocket ships are all over the place. And this is also the Atomic Age, you know? This is before Sputnik was launched, but America was certainly in a Cold War space race with the USSR.
She goes to high school at Galileo High School in San Francisco, which exists today. LO: She's a 17-year-old Chinese American girl. MARTÍNEZ: OK, so set the scene for us, if you would - 1950s San Francisco - height of the Red Scare. And they put me in touch with a couple of Chinese American queer women who lived in San Francisco in the 1950s and '60s.
I did reach out to historians who work in the period. And my mother is - speaks English as a second language. LO: I'm very proud to report that this is the first book of mine that my mother has read. Lo talked with our co-host, A Martinez, about the book, parts of which are in Chinese - a detail which won over a special audience of one. MARTIN: It's the first time that a young adult book with an LGBT female lead character won the prestigious award. And my wife was in the corner, so she wasn't going to be on camera. MALINDA LO: I was at home, obviously, because it was on Zoom. Malinda Lo was stunned when she won a National Book Award for her novel "Last Night At The Telegraph Club."
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