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The Last Night At The Telegraph Club By Malinda Lo

1062 Words5 Pages

San Francisco, where secrets simmer beneath the surface and forbidden love ignites. The author of the book The Last Night At The Telegraph Club is Malinda Lo. The Last Night At The Telegraph Club is a novel about Lily Hu, a teenage Chinese American who discovers her identity and explores her sexuality while navigating through McCarthyism, ethnicity, and the Lavender Scare. Malinda Lo’s message revolves around themes of identity, self discovery, and the pursuit of love and acceptance despite societal expectations and prejudices. Through Lily’s journey we learn about the complexities of being a queer Chinese American woman in the 1950s, a time period where finding your true self was a struggle, a time when people suppressed individuality. The author encourages readers to embrace their …show more content…

Another quote that reinforces this idea would be, “Lily felt a queasy, self-conscious confusion. It was wrong to stare, and yet Tommy was onstage and they were supposed to look. It would be rude not to watch.”. This character is important because she portrays a crucial role in what it was like to grow up in 1954 as a queer Chinese American, letting us know her struggles and her dreams. The qualities that make her a relatable character to readers are her journey of self discovery and her yearning for acceptance from everyone around her. Lily’s culture and family values can contribute to readers with diverse backgrounds who struggle with self discovery and acceptance. The main conflict in the story is self discovery. This type of conflict would be character vs. society. I say this because during the time period the book takes place in, it was a conservative time in American society where being of different race and being a part of the LGTBQ+ community was dangerous. Shirley's eyebrows drew

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Lily is lost in her head, she doesn't know how to stick up for herself. She takes in all the abuse, both mentally and physically from T.Ray and she blames everything on herself. Throughout the novel Lily gains her confidence, bravery and strength by standing up to the challenges she faces throughout experiencing new cultures and way of knowledge. As the Novel went on Lily started to feel a connection with her mother.

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She has grown up without a maternal figure and only a callous father who abuses her. Therefore, she has never grown up to be the woman she was meant to be. In the middle of Chapter One, Lily demonstrates her immaturity by needing to somehow prove that bees were in her room when T-Ray doesn’t believe her. When Rosaleen, the African American worker in T-Ray’s house, is arrested because she stood up for herself when racist white men fought with her when she tried to vote.

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Although Lily did suffer a great loss from losing her mom, she gained so much more with the love and support that the Boatwrights and their group gave her. She has gained friends, someone to look up to, and the sense of family from all of them. Without the loss of her mom and the abuse of her dad she would never of gotten the experience of such powerful female role models and a new

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The book also set's in the past focusing on the story of the parents, and when Lily was younger. The story is set in 1964 and the social circumstances in the USA at that time were not good. Colored people is highly discriminated and are mostly working for the white people. In the beginning of the story, they achieve the rights to vote but with the risk at being killed

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Unlike the three ladies we must think about the consequences of our actions, especially when we are making decisions for others. Lily no matter if she had a disability was still human and deserved to be happy and not sent off to a place where she would be lonely and possibly sad. Ellisville could have been a special institute to help these “feeble-minded” people but as it was mentioned in the story it had over crowding and it just seemed like it wouldn’t be the best place for young Lily to be at. The biggest significance of the story was that the ladies finally in the end realize the mistake they are making by sending Lily to Ellisville and that Lily received that happiness and got the chance to what she wanted to do with her life, which was getting

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