Goodbye Chinatown - by Kit Fan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 shows a family torn between two countries. Amber throws herself into her career to escape the painful cycle of family separations and reunions. The tastes and smells spark off every page in Kit Fan's latest novel, making for a truly multisensorial reading experience. Offering a behind-the-scenes of this iconic hub of London's hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising émigré who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.

Review Quotes

Praise for Goodbye Chinatown

"Skipping between London, Shanghai and Hong Kong, this tale of family migration, politics and food has plenty of flavour and fire."―The Guardian

"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 between Hong 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. Goodbye Chinatown shares different perspectives on being Hong Kongese, particularly in the context of the British handover to China. Fan comprehensively portrays a changing Hong Kong alongside developments in London's Chinatown, delivering a touching look at the search for home." ―Booklist

"At its center, this is a story of the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora of the 2000s; how so many, fearful of the turnover, would emigrate to England and help transform London's Chinatown. With its vivid imagery of food, this second novel by Kit Fan is cinematic, rich in atmosphere, and an in-depth chronicling of the immigrant experience. It exposes London's hospitality industry; especially in the context of London's Chinatown. It's a family novel, dysfunctional and yet so loving. It's about food as a trigger for identity and memory. There's a strong political undercurrent when this latter section commences, and we 'feel' the author's own convictions about this new Hong Kong, and what had been lost as the Mainland took over." ―Manila Bulletin

"Kit Fan has surpassed himself with Goodbye 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 entire territories 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

"Kit Fan writes place like no one else, using an émigré'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 Chinatown is 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 generational texture of what's happening now in Hong Kong." ―NAOISE DOLAN, author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple

"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 in Goodbye 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 of Goodbye Chinatown soon 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 Chinatown is 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

Praise for Diamond Hill:

"Kit Fan plunges us face-first into the pungently sordid world of Diamond Hill in his debut novel ... Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place, delightedly preserving Cantonese slang and profanities ... It's a timely consideration of Hong Kong's recent past" ―The Times

"Shifting between the austerity of the convent and the squalor of the shantytown, Mr. Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending ... The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world." --Wall Street Journal

"Fan's evocative debut portrays a Hong Kong in transition ... Fan brings poetic language and moving tributes to descriptions of the lost neighborhood ... The novel's aching beauty makes an effective argument for remembering." --Publishers Weekly

''Fan deftly mixes the sacred with the profane, often on the same page. Just when you decide there's no room for holiness amid the wreckage, you realize there may in fact be no other option.'' --Kirkus Reviews

"All the more impressive when considering that Diamond Hill is author Kit Fan's literary debut as a novelist. This compelling, deftly crafted, and inherently entertaining story of powerlessness, religion, memory, displacement, and the demise of a city is especially and unreservedly recommended." --Midwest Book Review

"This gripping debut portrays the territory in flux, witnessed by the colourful denizens of a crumbling neighbourhood ... The language veers from the sacred to the profane, and it is a dizzyingly kinetic and occasionally humorous read, with a zippy plot that adroitly balances both the satirical and schmaltzy undertones." --SHARLENE TEO, The Guardian

"Raw and authentic Hong Kong. Writing at its best. This book is exceptionally good." --CHRIS THRALL, bestselling author of Eating Smoke

"I enjoyed Diamond Hill very much. It's fantastically evocative of a time and place, full of vivid images but never at the expense of story. A hugely impressive first novel."--DAVID NICHOLLS, bestselling author of One Day and Us

"An extraordinary book. I can't remember reading something so terrifying, amazing, moving, and complicatedly fascinating. The characters brand themselves immediately and we know them completely and not at all. The interweaving of the political and the private is startling. It makes such a complete world and shows you how precarious complete worlds are."--ADAM PHILLIPS, author of Attention Seeking and Becoming Freud

"Diamond Hill's strong sense of place, its vibrant characters and its firm roots in history undeniably makes it one of the best books I've read in 2021. If this is Kit Fan's debut I have high hopes for what's to come." --West Words Reviews

About the Author

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. His first novel, also published by World Editions, is Diamond Hill (2021). Goodbye Chinatown is his second novel. His third poetry collection, The Ink Cloud Reader (2023), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and was a winner of the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize, Northern Writers Awards for Poetry and Fiction, Times/Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize and POETRY's Editors Prize for Reviewing. He has written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice-Chair of Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and Co-Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency(CLA). He was born and educated in Hong Kong and now lives in the UK.