Goodbye Chinatown

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 émigré 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 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

'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