Last Night at the Telegraph Club

The problem was, she didn’t. She felt as if she had finally cracked the last part of a code she had been puzzling over for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had started deciphering it. She felt exhilarated.

 don’t believe you had any bad intentions. You’ve never shown any interest in politics, but the things you do can reflect badly on others. We’re living in a complicated time. People are afraid of things they don’t understand, and we need to show that we’re Americans first. Do you understand?”

She remembered her father and Aunt Judy watching the parade with such odd expressions on their faces, as if they were both proud of Eddie and a bit frightened by the spectacle. Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.
			

“But why would the FBI punish Papa for—for not lying?”
			“They aren’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for scapegoats. Your father should know this. He should have just told them what they wanted. Now he’s protecting a boy he barely even knows—all because he refuses to tell them what they want. And that has put your father in danger, which means it’s put you and me and your brothers in danger.”
			

“They’re using these investigations as an excuse to deport Chinese,” Lily’s mother explained. “They took his papers, so now he has no record of his citizenship. 

Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, her seductive silk gowns and coy dark eyes wreathed in cigarette smoke

as she contemplated Americans’ prurient interest in things that should be private

It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other.” And then she asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”



Sometimes he felt as if he never saw past the surface anymore; it was safer to look at the world with a detached, clinical eye.

for the first time in a long time he felt a kind of ache for her. It wasn’t the yearning he would have felt as a young man long separated from his lover. It wasn’t a simple physical desire. It was thoroughly unscientific, this feeling that was overtaking him, as if his body was belatedly acknowledging how far apart they had been for so long, and his mind was finally catching up.

Lily had seen people like her before (she had always noticed; they had drawn her eye magnetically, somehow, in a way that made her pulse leap), but never in this context: as if it were natural, and even expected, to be dressed this way.

And Lily squirmed with embarrassment, because that question led her to imagine what Tommy’s body looked like under her suit, and that seemed so disrespectful—like those men who had leered at them at the bowling alley. 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, so she did.