Lily is the novel’s main protagonist. She’s 13 during the events of the prologue and 17 for the majority of the story. At the novel’s start, she’s at the Miss Chinatown pageant with her best friend Shirley, noticing the many different young women who entered the competition. As she observes, she can’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” (3). For the rest of the novel, Lily wrestles with what it means to be a Chinese American, balancing preserving the traditions of the former with the standards of the latter, especially as both Chinese people and Chinese Americans as treated as second-class citizens and scrutinized because of burgeoning communism in China.

It quickly becomes apparent that Lily is figuring out her sexuality. When she sees an ad in the newspaper for the Telegraph Club with the image of Tommy Andrews, a “male impersonator,” she’s immediately taken with it. For her, the club and Andrews both symbolize hope that there are others like herself. When she comes across a novel about two women who fall in love, she feels like “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” (42).