As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London's Chinatown.
Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London's Chinatown following the failure of her father's traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London. That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy? Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, Goodbye Chinatown iconic hub of London's hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising emigre who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.
'Kit Fan writes place like no one else, using an emigre's metonymic key. A totality too large and painful to hold all at once comes to us in gradually accumulated detail through dishes, proverbs that don't quite translate, memories of sudden calamity.Goodbye Chinatownis not an elegy to Hong Kong, nor a love letter, nor anything so blandly digestible; rather it is an embodiment, an ongoing navigation, and a refusal to deny agency to characters who neither escape seismic political shifts nor lose the vibrancy that makes you desperately care for them to the last page. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the lived generationaltexture ofwhat's happening now in Hong Kong.' Naoise Dolan, author ofExciting TimesandThe Happy Couple
'Caught between two cultures and cuisines, a gifted young chef works to make her professional and personal marks in Kit Fan's moving novel Goodbye Chinatown. Goodbye Chinatown is an affecting novel about navigating the porous borders between cultures. Its descriptions of food are mouth-watering. The shifting political and cultural climates just beyond Amber's restaurant doors are an engrossing backdrop to the book's appealing dramas.' Foreword Reviews
'"We all love food, but what exactly is love?" asks Bobby about his family, who oscillates betweenHong Kong and London. Bobby's question captures the essence of Fan's novel, an insightful,reflective, and tender exploration of indescribable familial bonds, whether food, ambition,memories, or national loyalties.GoodbyeChinatownshares different perspectives on being Hong Kongese, particularly in the context ofthe British handover to China. Fan comprehensively portrays a changing Hong Kong alongsidedevelopments in London's Chinatown, delivering a touching look at the search for home.' Booklist
'Kit Fan has surpassed himself withGoodbye Chinatown, a novel full of sense, sensibility and sensation: food, family, identity, appetite, time and love. Fan's work reflects powerful themes both personal and political, but wears it all with extraordinary lightness and sensuality. His observations are delicate and precise and he shows that while the fates of entireterritories hinge on power and politics, so do families. But succor and salvation come in the small, fragile things: forging (or re-forging) community, family and belonging through simple acts of giving, and sharing a table.' BIDISHA,journalist, broadcaster and author of The Future of Serious Art
'Given the quality of the prose, the succulent descriptions of Chinatown food, and the wide-ranging themes, it comes as no surprise that each review [of Goodbye Chinatown] has thus far identified a different aspect of the text that speaks to it. These reviews, together with my own, although not in direct conversation, form a body of discourse that seeks to inform the curious reader as they engage with the book, a service that, like the restaurants described inGoodbye Chinatown, appears increasingly endangered by present-day realities.' Jonathan Han, Hong-Kong-based writer
'Kit Fan is not one to luxuriate in unproblematic progress and enlightenment. Readers ofGoodbye Chinatownsoon learn that the Fan family is fracturing. The heart of this novel, which at the sentence level, as accomplished as the English prose of D. H. Lawrence, Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro, is Hong Kong. More specifically, it is a nostalgic Hong Kong witnessed and recollected from afar, a gourmet Hong Kong whose flavours transcend continents, while offering a real refuge from Machiavellian politricks, a Cantonese Hong Kong to which novelist Kit Fan lamentably bids farewell. The Fan family, as an allegory of Cantonese Hong Kong, becomes increasingly deracinated by all-pervading mainland Chinese influence. An idea of home, the practice of language, a sense of belonging, even the division of generations, each, Kit Fan shows, risks collapse in the face of incremental institutional cultural erasure.' Jason S. Polley, Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University
'There are several ways to read this book. One could interpret the dynamics of the Fan family as reflecting the ways in which Hong Kong has changed over the past four decades. Kit Fan uses the most tumultuous episodes of the past forty years to frame this touching family saga, contained within a little more than 250 pages. From the late 1980s to the turbulence after 9/11 and the bird-flu outbreak, from the international financial crisis around 2008 to the months leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fan suggests that it is sometimes necessary to leave in order to begin again.' Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Bernardine's Shanghai Salon, Good Chinese Wife and When Friends Come From Afar
'This novel offers a refreshing perspective on the complexities of the Hong Kong diaspora in England in the 2000s, situated between the desire to preserve continuity during a period of profound change "back home" and the transformation of a London Chinatown. As readers, we are left with the sense that it may be possible to accept change while preserving cultural tradition, and at the same time to continue defending the values that matter to an ethnic diaspora. In other words, the novel gestures toward a form of compromise.' Jennifer Eagleton, Hong Kong-based journalist and writer
'Goodbye Chinatownis deeply concerned with its Chinese diaspora story, and with the fading of an idealised and short lived liberal Hong Kong. And yet the book is arguably at its best when engaging in its portrait of a small but complex family. This portrait is in some ways culturally specific, but it will surely chime with what the ideal of "family" means to many readers across cultures, patience that survives disconnection and dislocation and that, given time, can outlast any wound. The novel excels when serving the reader the delights of Amber's fusion cooking. The fact that these dishes exist within a novel, and are therefore arranged in a purely verbal form rather than set on a plate, only emphasises the cultural dimension of Amber's creations.' Angus Stewart,Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast
