Lily was thirteen, and she couldn’t remember if she’d seen a group of Chinese girls like this before: in bathing suits and high heels, their hair and makeup perfectly done. They looked so American.
By the second paragraph of the Prologue which introduces this story, it is made explicitly clear that the reader has wandered into the land of the clash of cultures. Anyone even just casually aware of cultural differences between Americans and Chinese will not be surprised that the sight of Chinese girls in bathing suits strikes the teenage Lily as unusual even in today’s world. The Prologue doesn’t get to the time period in this the novel is situated immediately, so this telescopic event could be taking place in the modern world of the 21st century. That the women are described as wearing “bathing suits” rather than bikinis also means it could just as likely be taking place a hundred years earlier. That this is a possibility—no matter how genuinely remote—is intriguing.
Lily was flipping through the job brochures in the filing cabinet in the back of Miss Weiland’s classroom, hunting for something to write her career report about. Slipped almost slyly into a stack of brochures about government jobs was a pamphlet that offered “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.”
The setting doesn’t remain a mystery for long, relative to the time period. In fact, most readers will likely already be aware of it before reaching those lines in the Prologue. The significant thing is that even though the story takes place what can be considered a relatively long time ago, the zeitgeist of the era rings surprisingly—and discomfortingly—familiar. It is the 1950’s when tens of millions of Americans were blindly following the lead of an ignorant, ridiculously uncharismatic snake oil salesman intent on rising to power through the spread of misinformation, outright lies and heavily stoked fear.
The Red Scare which brought Senator Joe McCarthy from obscurity to becoming, however briefly, the most powerful man in American politics could not possibly have seemed prime for a comeback in the 21st century considering the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990’s and yet in the very same year in which this novel was published, it was still actually possible to see hundreds of people among protestors numbering thousands holing signs and wearing shirts decrying the dangerous threat of socialism in America. What makes this novel set in the age of Eisenhower so palpably resonant in the age of MAGA is that often it is difficult to determine whether this is historical fiction or taking place in modern times.
The Telegraph Club’s white neon sign was smaller than Lily had expected, and it glowed over a circular awning that was also printed with the name of the club. Beneath the awning, half-lit by the nearby streetlamp, was a black door, and in front of the black door stood a person whom Lily initially thought was a short, stocky man in a suit, but soon realized was a woman.
Although the original cover for this book very strongly hints at the period in which it takes place through the design of the only three automobiles in sight, the artwork remains coy about divulging exactly what the titular club actually is. The Telegraph Club is ambiguous enough that it could describe an actual architectural meeting place just as easily as it could be a description a group of people no matter where they actually meet. While much of the period setting of this novel remains shockingly relevant in the early decades of the new millennium, the necessity for the Telegraph Club to exist and operation as it does will seem to many readers like a relic from another time. At least for now.
