 Hello. Welcome. My name is Eliana and I'm a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library. I am so glad that you're here with us for our second author event in our series, The Golden Door Meets the Golden Gate, in partnership with the New York Public Library and the San Francisco Unified School District Libraries. This program is live streaming from San Francisco, California. I'm going to share a land acknowledgement to raise awareness and offer gratitude. The area now known as San Francisco is the unceded ancestral homeland. Of the Ramatush Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramatush Ohlone have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working and learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush community. I encourage you to learn about the land you reside, or the land that you visit. There are resources in the chat and at your local library. I'm very happy to introduce Elizabeth Bevington, senior librarian at the Chatham Square Library of the New York Public Library. Elizabeth. Thank you so much for being here today and for the intro, Eliana. We're very thankful to our partnership with the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Unified Public Unified School District Libraries, the Chatham Square and Seward Park Libraries at the New York Public Library to bring this special series to students, educators and our communities. Student book groups from San Francisco's Marina, Herbert Hoover, and Roosevelt Middle Schools, along with students from New York City's PS 184 and PS 126 have been discussing two books in this series, The Golden Door Meets the Golden Gate. In this series, students and educators have connected with their Bicostal Cures and are participating in virtual author talks based in San Francisco Chinatown and New York City's Chinatown. In preparation for the author visit, educators and youth developed discussion questions about the themes and of each of the books. Watch last month's author event with Ed Lynn, author of David Tongue Can't Get a Girlfriend until he gets into an Ivy League college set in present day New York Chinatown and New Jersey on YouTube. Here is a map of San Francisco with our schools Marina and Roosevelt and Hoover marked. Here is a map of New York City with our schools PS 184 and PS 126 marked. Before we start our conversation, I'd like to make a land acknowledgement recognizing the traditional indigenous inhabitants of where I'm located in New York City, the unceded Muncie Lenape homelands. If you know the tribes that traditionally lived in the area where you are we invite you to introduce yourself and those tribes in the chat box. There is an interactive map where we can provide a link in the chat. It's a great resource to see the history of the land and ongoing legacies of the peoples that have and continue to call these lands home. It's now my pleasure to introduce Melinda Lowe, the author of today's book. She's a New York Times bestselling author of last night at the telegraph club winner of the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, as well as the Michael L Prince and Walter Dean Myers honors. The debut novel Ash is a sapphic retelling of Cinderella was a finalist for the William C Morris YA debut award, the Andre Norton Award for why science fiction and fantasy, the myth or poet fantasy award and the Lambda Literary Award. Melinda short fiction and nonfiction have been published by the New York Times and PR auto straddle, the Horn book and multiple anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog. San Francisco librarians created this map with place markers to set the scene for us. Here we have our setting San Francisco and two neighborhoods Chinatown and North Beach. In this map here we have places of interest in the novel along with the New York City schools represented and libraries. Melinda Lowe has a phenomenal blog post, a guide to Lily San Francisco on her website with more details and mapping which will add to the chat. And now we're very excited to welcome Melinda Lowe. Hi, hello everyone. Thank you so much, Elizabeth and Eliana New York Public Library and San Francisco Public Library for inviting me here to talk with you all today. This is great. I love all these maps. Thank you so much. Um, so I, I think if maybe you want a little bit to talk about since you mentioned the map specifically your connection to San Francisco and your choice of this setting for the book we had a few questions from our students about that. Oh, sure. So, the book is set in San Francisco because. Let me backtrack a little bit. So last night at the Telegraph Club is a novel obviously but it started out as a short story. The short story was called New Year and it was published in an anthology called All Out, the no longer secret stories of queer teens throughout the ages. And that sort that short story was inspired by two nonfiction books that I had been reading Rise of the Rocket Girls by Natalia Holt, which is about the women computers who worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the 1940s and 50s. It was also inspired by Wide Open Town by Nan Ella Miller Boyd, which is a history of queer San Francisco. So I was reading these two books around the same time. They don't have anything to do with each other. But in my head, they came together to create the character Lily, a 17 year old Chinese American girl who lives in San Francisco and is just fascinated by rocket science. So you can kind of see how those books stimulated those various inspirations in me. So for me it was always going to be set in San Francisco and it was always going to be set in the 50s. Because in Wide Open Town, the 1950s actually were a period in San Francisco's history when there was a very lively gay bar scene. And that gay bar scene was mostly located in North Beach, which is right next door to Chinatown. So to me it seemed like a very fertile area for cross-pollination. You know, I kind of imagined if Lily was living in Chinatown, she could literally look across Broadway and across Columbus Avenue and see North Beach. And you could see those gay bars and vice versa. So I always kind of wondered, did anyone who lived there at the time go in between these communities because they're so close to each other. And it seemed to me that that was just a perfect place to set a story. So I had started and I wrote this short story and then my literary agent actually persuaded me that it could be a novel. He pointed out that I had done so much research for this short story. Clearly I was really fascinated by this and I realized as I thought about it that I had a lot more to say about Lily. And that's where the novel began. A little bit, we had some students that were curious about your process and obviously this is a really well researched book for anyone who hasn't seen it or read it or just didn't go that far back. There is some really good informative fact matter and work cited, which librarians always appreciate. A little bit about how, you know, what your process maybe looks like generally and how it was different for this book, you know, you're not inventing a world you're facing in a very real world. Yeah, so it is different for every single book I know writers say that all the time but it's very irritatingly true. So with this book I had never written a historical novel before. So I had to learn how to write a historical novel. There was a lot of work, you know, I really knew nothing about the 1950s. When I started working on this book it wasn't a period that I had been particularly interested in for any reason. But once I started digging into this decade. It was very fascinating to me. One of the most interesting aspects of research for this book so let me just say I allowed myself to do about six months of research into the 1950s and Chinatown and LGBT history at the time I did that for about probably six months before I started writing, I continued to research while I was writing and all the way through multiple drafts and copy editing even fact I was fact checking all the way to the very end. Really, but I made myself start writing at a certain point because you can just research forever. But that's not necessary if you don't stop researching and start writing the book will never get ready. Basic tip. So one of the things that was fascinating with this research is the most important question I had to answer was what was it like to be a Chinese American lesbian teen in 1950s San Francisco. This is a very specific question. And there are no answers to this in the historical research. Okay, because there's lots of history about Chinese American. There's lots of history about San Francisco. There's lots of history about LGBT history, but they don't intersect in most of the archives. So what I had to do was research each of these areas separately and kind of combine them together in my imagination to create this character and her world. I know I can go on forever, but I That's a great segue into, you know, you created this character in their world. Obviously, there is a very real factual basis for the world, but you did have to invent these people. So a few specific questions. You know, one of our students asked, which character in last night at the telegraph club, do you relate to the most. And then we had some other kind of more general inspiration questions we can get to. Yeah, this is a question I get all the time, which is very interesting because I have written this is my sixth novel that telegraph covers my sixth novel, the six published novel I have written more novels that have not been published. And I really identify with every single character I have ever written. So that's a lot of characters right and as an author what you're trying to do is put yourself in the shoes of each character in the story. So I'm always trying to empathize with people. And these characters and see how they might feel in certain situations I'm always trying to understand the context of their lives, every single characters lives. And that gives me insight into how they might react in a certain situation, how they might feel about things. So I think that a lot of readers think that the author is primarily identified with the protagonist in the book. And that may be true for some writers. It's not usually true for me. I think that I really love getting into the minds of all of the characters and I really empathize with all of them, even the ones that readers often dislike. I feel very fondly toward. So, in this book, I think that, you know, I identify with aspects of Lily's character. Identity wise we are similar and that we're Chinese American, we're both clear, but I grew up in the 80s in Colorado, in a very white community. So I did not have Lily's community around her. And also, I did not, I was not obsessed with rocket science the way she is. I did not exactly love math. So that was a, that was kind of, I mean, I'm fascinated by it, but Lily really likes math. I didn't love it. I did it, but it wasn't my thing, you know. You know, I identify with aspects of her personality. I identify with aspects of Shirley, her best friend, you know, and I identify with aspects of, you know, actually, Kat probably I don't identify with. I think that Kat is very different from me. But I have a lot of friends who are like Kat. So I think I put those friends into her in a way. And, you know, I understand Lily's mom I understand where she comes from I identify with her mom and her and her dad too, you know, I'm older now. So I don't have kids of my own but I do, I can see what it's like to be living for longer the longer you're alive you have similar experiences no matter where you are so that's a long convoluted answer to that question. I think that you like touched on a lot of kind of what the students were getting at and their questions. We always want to know, you know, what inspirations did you draw from your real life do you know anyone like these people. And in your book and as well as the Lynn book that we read the, the protagonist family is a really important. You know, part of what's happening in that person's inner worlds there are obviously like a really informative sort of set of characters. You talked a little bit about empathizing with the characters that maybe people don't like as much. And I would say Shirley is maybe one of those characters. I know, I know. We had a student who specifically wanted to know what the inspiration for her was because she's, you know, like all of them very complicated but certainly someone who you wouldn't necessarily want to be like. You know, the thing is, what I was thinking about Shirley and Lily as friends is that they grew up together you know they were in a small community together I feel like the neighborhood of Chinatown San Francisco of the 1950s was very, was very close and tightly linked and Lily and Shirley grew up in the same church they went to the same Chinese school they went to the same elementary school their families knew each other. They were kind of in the same class of Chinese Americans in Chinatown you know Shirley's Shirley's parents are restaurant owners. So they're in the merchant class. Basically they're kind of the middle class in Chinatown, and Lily's father is a doctor. So they're kind of professionals and so their families have a lot of interaction. And so when you grow up with someone, you know you might make become friends with them when you're like four or five years old. When you grow up together and you have that long history of being friends, but your interest will start to diverge I mean they often do, as you grow older, but you're still kind of stuck together because you're in the same place you know you're still in the same classes all the way through high school. And I know that for me, I had childhood friends that I met when I was like four or five, six, you know and I was still friends of them all the way through middle school and high school, even when we became very different people and our friendships became much more strained, frankly, because we didn't have necessarily the same interests but we were still friends because we were just there together. You know, it wasn't until I left for college and had the opportunity to meet more people and be an adult in the world and choose my friends more carefully. That's when I was able to make really close lifelong friendships with people, because I was able to choose them. But when you're just in this one community together growing up together with your friends you've known since you were five. There's not a lot of choice. And so I think that's what their friendship was like for me. I think one of the things you know this is in many ways a sort of coming of age novel and Lily is just starting to exercise our autonomy in many ways but including socially. And a lot of our students I know occupy many disparate worlds in terms of the people who they're interacting with many of them go to Chinese school. In addition to you know their regular Monday through Friday public schools that they attend. And some of our students would like to know did you go to Chinese school and what was growing up. Yeah, I totally went to Chinese school. It was, I went to Chinese school all the way through middle school probably it was this is in Colorado so it was a very small Chinese school but but there are only a few. It wasn't large so we knew everyone there you know our parents knew each other. And that was interesting because in school in Colorado is very white so in my class I was one of only three Asian American students, and we all knew each other. We weren't friends necessarily, but one of them actually emailed me after my after I won the National Book Award. And to say congratulations and I was so amazed that she, I mean I wasn't amazed that she remembered me because I remember because we were the only two Asian to Chinese American. Yeah, students in our class but it was really wonderful that she looked and her parents still kind of know my family. So it was a very, there weren't very many of us Asian Americans but we did go to Chinese school together. And I really found Chinese school interesting but also, it was so separate from my regular school life that I don't think it gave me a really great sense of Chinese community. Because, generally speaking, 95% of the time or more I was in my all white school. And when I went to college I also took Chinese I majored in Chinese studies. I ended up getting a master's degree in East Asian studies. I spent a lot of time studying Chinese. And I did have that basis in Chinese school I have to say, because when I went to college I could write some stuff because of Chinese school. However, as an adult, I'm very sorry to report that my Chinese is terrible and I forgot so much of it I can barely read it. And it's just one of those things if you don't use it every day you're not going to, you forget it. I'm sure that many of our students have heard that from their parents. Yes, it's true. They're not lying to you. I hate to tell you. Let's see. I don't know. We have a couple of comments from YouTube and I think some questions in a Q&A box. I don't know if we're going to get towards those at the end or if we want to get to some of those now. But we have a question in our Q&A and this is fully a pivot from Chinese school. But is there an actual Telegraph Club in San Francisco like the one in the book? No, it's fictional, but it is based in a lot of the real gay and lesbian bars that existed in San Francisco in the 1940s and 50s. So that that book that I mentioned Wide Open Town, it's an academic history book. But it goes into so much wonderful history about the gay bar scene in San Francisco and many of them inspired the Telegraph Club right down to the way that the bar looks, which I have to tell you was fascinating to me because when I read about it. So the way these bars looked at the time, they were built a certain way, right? You come in the front door and there's a very long hallway, but it's a long room where the bar is. So it's a narrow space. You have to walk right past that bar because the bartender can then see you coming in. So this was a security situation so that the bartender could see who was entering the bar. And at the back, so this long room would then lead into a bigger room in the back where they would have tables or a stage for a show. And there would always be a back door in case the bar was raided so you could escape. And this is the way that many of the bars that still exist in San Francisco, especially in the gay areas of the town, that's the way they look today, even. And they were built that way for a reason. So when I lived in San Francisco in the early 2000s and I was going to gay bars, a lot of them were like that. They had that exact same layout. So when I read Wide Open Town and learned that, and then I could think about my own experiences going to those bars, it really helped me to write the Telegraph Club, the fictional Telegraph Club because I felt like I had been in those spaces because they still exist. It's really incredible to think about the legacy of those architectural buildings and the culture that they have unfolded and created over the decades. It's so, I'm really happy to hear you say that because I think there is, you know, obviously we think a lot about our queer ancestors, Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P, but the places are so important, you know, the physical geography of our history is really so meaningful. So I think that's a very special aspect of this book I'm really glad that you addressed. You know, in thinking a lot about this book and again the history, the cultural context and setting community is really important for queer individuals presently and in the past. And also family and we had some students who wanted to know, you know, who's some of your biggest supporters and cheerleaders and part of your community in the sort of Genesis and publication of this book were Well, before, in this book in particular my parents were extremely helpful to me because they speak Chinese fluently. So they helped me to write all the Chinese dialogue in the book. So in the book there is, there are some sections that are actually in Chinese, which I made the decision to put Chinese characters in the book to reflect the fact that Chinese is a full language. So often in English books, English language books, foreign languages are italicized. And when you, so I did I did not italicize them in this book for one thing, because I wanted them to just be a language, not a special, special situation. I also chose to use Chinese characters instead of romanizing in certain situations, because romanizing Chinese is very complicated. And the way it's presented in most English language books is not complete. And if you read the incomplete romanization of a Chinese word you have no idea what it is. So I wanted to make sure that readers could see that it was a whole word and a whole, a whole language and so my parents helped me to write those and they were so wonderful so when I grew up. As a kid, my parents always told me that I could not be a writer they distinct memories of them telling me you cannot be a writer, and I wanted to be a writer my whole life, but they always told me I couldn't be one. And I know that that's because they are immigrants, and they wanted me to have a good life, not a life of struggle. They knew that I would have to pay the rent. And, you know, they were telling me this for a reason and I respect that reason. But, you know, I wanted to be a writer. It took me a long time to get to the place that I am at now, and my parents were right it was a struggle. And it was really hard to pay the rent at times in my career. So I understand why they said that. And it took them a while for them to come around to the idea of me being a writer, but they've definitely come around to it now. I mean they helped me write this book. And my mom is speaks English as a second language. She came to this country in her late 20s, early 30s, and so she had to learn it as an, learn English as an adult. So, she read this whole book. This is the first book of mine that she has read. So I feel really grateful to her for taking the time to do that, you know, and I'm really happy that she that she did that. I'm terrified, because that means she might try to read my other books. Now, I don't know. I don't know if you really want your parents to read your books. Like it's, it's on the one hand it's very lovely. On the other hand it's very scary. So I don't know, but they've been great supporters with this book. I think also as part of our ongoing conversation and families being so much a part of both of the novels. I hope that's a valuable takeaway for some of our students. In addition to, well, I guess I would like to say one of the notable features of your book was that you didn't romanize characters that there wasn't italization of the text. And there are many, many aspects of this book that are really exceptional in the context of a wider body of young adult literature on historical fiction specifically, a lot of which is, you know, there's lots of historical romance. There's lots of like, not very interesting, or stuff that's very well trod territory, the Revolutionary War, you know, this is we've read many of these things over and over again. And you've gotten some recognition, obviously, for this book being an exceptional book. So, obviously you won the 2021 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. How did that feel? That was surreal. I mean, it was, it was, I did, first of all, first of all, no one becomes a writer with the goal of winning the National Book Award. Like this is not a thing, I don't think it's a thing you think it's possible. Okay, like I did not, this didn't even occur to me that this was a possibility. So it was totally shocking when, when, when it was long listed, I didn't know the long list was coming up because I purposely did not pay attention to when award announcements were going to happen because that's just very stressful. So I remember my editor called me one morning and he was like congratulations and I was like, for what? No idea. So, but then I paid attention afterward. It was, it was totally surreal and really it has changed, it has changed my career. I have to say like it has totally changed the way I think my books are perceived or it has changed the degree to which my books are perceived. You know, like plenty of people have read my books before and I know I've had some wonderful dedicated fans for years, but the degree of the number of people who have learned about me since then has been incredible. It's just, it's been, it's been incredible and it continues to change the way my career is going. It's just amazing. So I'm very grateful to those judges for choosing my book. It's very exciting to see. I can only imagine what it actually feels like. I remember when Ash came out and there was a lot of love for it in the library community as being, you know, and exciting original work. So to see you getting the accolades that I'm sure many of us have felt like you deserve for a long time is is a really special. We talked a little bit about, you know, some of your educational background and wanting to be a writer from a young age but you've had some moves in your career and obviously it's it's taken some turns now. One of our YouTube viewers would like to know kind of how your career shifted what your path from want to be writer as a youth to like real life award winning author as an adult, what that trajectory has looked like. Well, it's definitely been a little convoluted because I started even though I wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how I could do that. So I went to college and I majored, I double majored in Chinese studies and economics. So I had this idea that I would be an investment banker. So I was going to be an investment banker and I one of the stories that I tell all the time. So I'm sorry this is a repeat for anyone but I one of the bankers who interviewed me my senior year in college said I'm very sorry you didn't get the job he called me to tell me this, but good luck in your career as a writer. So I had clearly talked about how much I wanted to be a writer and not a banker in that interview, which don't do that. If you're interviewing for job, you know, don't tell them you want to do something else. But I didn't, I didn't become a writer, even though I didn't get the banking job. I ended up moving to New York after graduation and I got a job as an editorial assistant at Valentine books and imprint of Random House. Before it was Penguin Random House. So I worked there for a couple years and it was funny because it was like I was so close to two writers, but I was not one and I just hated it. I was like this, I don't want to be on this side of the desk, you know I want to be on the other side. So did I become a writer. No, no, I went to grad school. I got my master's degree in East Asian studies, and then I got into a PhD program to do a PhD in cultural anthropology. So I had this idea that I would be a professor and I could like write during the summers. I'm sure if there are any professors out there they're laughing their heads off right now. I was in grad school for like four years when I realized I hated academia. And at that point, I was like okay I'm going to be a freelance writer because you know what, being a freelance writer actually would make me about the same amount of money or more than being a grad student. So it was not, it was not a drop in income to drop out of grad school. And so I did that and I didn't really know what being a freelance writer meant I didn't do any research into it, because well I probably would have been too scared to do it if I had tried to research it. So I just dropped out of grad school and I'm very fortunate I had a couple of friends, one of them worked for a consulting company and she hired me to write reports for her consulting company. So I was definitely being a writer, even though I was writing business reports. And then I had another friend who was starting a website, this was the dawn of the internet. She called me, she was like I'm starting this website, it's going to be like a lesbian entertainment weekly. Do you want to write for it, since you dropped out of grad school to be a writer. So nobody read her website at this time. So I said sure, because I had nothing else to do, and I wrote an article about Ellen DeGeneres. And I kept writing freelance articles for her I started freelancing for other LGBT media publications, and her website grew and grew and it was acquired by MTV. And I ended up working full time for it and I was a full time entertainment reporter for several years. And at that time I was. So I was reporting on the representation of lesbians and bisexual women in entertainment. And I watched a lot of the L word, the first version. I wrote too many way too many articles about the L word. Thank you. I mean, at the same time I was working on ash, my retelling of Cinderella so I wrote that while I was being an entertainment reporter. And then I, once Ash sold. I haven't really looked back I mean I then I started writing. So it was, I mean I always wanted to be a writer so I always had the kind of writing on the, on the sidelines to some degree but it took me a while to get here ash was published when I was in my 30s. So, you know, a lot of people I see on the internet are like, I'm 25 I haven't published a novel. I'm just like, no it's not too late. And my, my grandmother, my father's mother. She published a memoir in 1980 about my family's time in China during the Cultural Revolution, and she was in her 60s, or 70s at that point in her 60s. So, never too late. I'm not too early. I'm sure you're all very young, so I'm just saying you can start now. Something wasn't Chris probably me like 16 or 17 when that book was like, I wrote three novels when I was a teen in high school I would three complete fantasy novels I have parts of them because you know back then I you had to print them out on a dot matrix printer. And I would run out of paper and ink couldn't get to them all. But I'm very glad that I did not publish them, and that there was no publishing at the time. Is it, is it possible that we'll ever see a reworking of any of those. So, Okay, I'm very glad they're on. But sometimes I do conventions and they have these places, these events where you read your juvenilia, like stuff you write when you're a teenager, and I have read excerpts of them allowed and they're people laugh. They think it is so funny. Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed, maybe, maybe it'll happen or they'll, you know, get held in your collection of your papers at Wellesley or something like that. Well, we'll just. So we have, we're going to maybe start wrapping up a little bit, but we do have a question from an attendee here in the Q&A box. Yeah, I thought it was so appropriate that Lily put the newspaper clipping in the book exploration of space, given that the exploration of queer spaces is a queer theme of the book. And our viewer wants to know if that was intentional or a happy accident. Oh, well, you know, that was a suggestion. Well, you see, this book I worked with like three years and sometimes I think I understand or remember what happened and sometimes I'm not sure. So the clippings in the book, it was my editor who suggested that Lily might collect different clippings from various places. And I can't remember if he suggested that she put them in the book, because I believe maybe initially she had told me she only had the newspaper ad for the Telegraph Club, and she did put that in the book. The book was an interesting discovery that I made during my research because I wanted to know what people thought about space in 1954. So I had to find a book about space from the 1950s to read because I didn't want to have, you know, current knowledge about space in the book, it had to be only what they knew in the 1950s. Arthur C. Clark is the person who wrote that book. And I really loved his books when I was a teen and I was amazed to discover that he had written this book. And he had also written several columns in 17 magazine in the 1950s, which was a shocking discovery to me. Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah, I didn't know either and he's a very clear writer and so I, and I found a copy of the exploration of space on the internet and I bought it and weirdly the person who sold it to me lives in my town and he they walked it over to my house. So I have this book now, and it just seemed like this is a book that Lily would use to put things in I thought she'd have to hide it someplace that no one would would go. You know, so who's going to look at this book called the exploration of space in her house no one, no one but her. So that's why she hides it in there. Thank you so much. That is a great question. And we're so appreciative of your coming to visit with us talking a little bit about your book and about yourself. And I feel like a little struck. I don't know how our students are feeling. But we're so grateful for your coming to talk to us, being so generous with your time. Just a reminder to everyone who's with us today that you can find both Ed Lynn's book that we talked about last month and last night at the telegraph club by Melinda low as well as ash and many of her other books at your local San Francisco public library and your public library location. I hope you enjoyed today's program, and you would like to watch it again. You can visit the San Francisco public libraries YouTube channel and I think that we may have a link available in the chat. But yeah we're so grateful for your visiting with us today. And hope that everyone takes care of themselves stay safe and see you virtually soon. Thank you so much everyone.