Hong Kong author Kit Fan on food, identity and ‘reverse migration’ in Goodbye Chinatown

The writer Kit Fan likes his readers to know, at least initially, where – and when – he is taking them. His first novel, published in 2021 and set in 1987, is called Diamond Hill, and its location is mostly confined to the Hong Kong neighbourhood it is named after. Diamond Hill was Hong Kong’s equivalent of Hollywood during its heyday after World War II. But by the late 1980s, it had lost its movie glamour. In that book, Fan played with a colourful, often profane, cast of nuns, triads and drug addicts amid the neighbourhood’s untidy shanties. Five years later, Fan has released his new novel, Goodbye Chinatown. It begins in London’s Chinatown in the autumn of 2001, just after the September 11 terror attacks. This time, the character list is shorter – it is essentially a story about the parents and two children of one Hong Kong family – but the geographic range is greater. The one constant amid the family’s roaming is food, a literary fusion signalled to the reader from the outset by the book’s epigraphs: one from fictional character Robinson Crusoe and one from food writer Nigella Lawson. “I wanted to write a book that resonates with Hong Kong people,” says Fan, whose life in the UK began in September 2001, when he was a 21-year-old postgraduate student. “But also with a wider readership that may experience migration, who think they’ve settled in one place but then things change.” The other thing he wanted was to write about Chinatown, minus the seediness – “a Chinatown that is not about triads or where you get medicine that helps to abort a child, but about food”. Food and the Chinese diaspora Culinary events deftly advance Goodbye Chinatown’s plot while supplying useful metaphors. The main character, Amber, arrived in London with her parents in 1989 when she was 10. In Hong Kong, her parents had been white-collar workers; in London, they had no alternative but to sweat through their days in a Chinese restaurant. They return to Hong Kong with Amber’s four-year-old brother, Bobby, in 2001. “I won’t repeat the mistake of bringing up another banana child,” Amber’s father says. But Amber, who speaks “flavourless Cantonese” and has been educated at public school and Oxford, wants to stay in London. She yearns to reinvent Chinese food for the elite. She is about to open a restaurant on Rupert Street in Chinatown, where she aims to cook crab with Aleppo chilli and ox tongue glazed with yuzu, rosemary and honey, and “deconstructed mooncakes”. Amber’s father, who refers to Nigella Lawson as Nutella, worries both about bird flu – “If I were you, I’d take chicken off the menu” – and that she will suffer racism, not from the British but from mainland Chinese who are also operating in Chinatown. Sichuan hotpot, Beijing noodles and Shanghainese xiaolongbao soup dumplings are already nudging out the dim sum stalwarts. Soon, Amber has dropped her British business partner and, despite not being able to speak Mandarin, takes up with Celeste, who is from Shanghai, motherless and says, “My family is going to own Chinatown – that is a fact.” Amber is so consumed by food that, in 2007, when she sees English people queuing in the streets, she assumes it is for high-end cupcakes – not a devastating bank run that heralds a worldwide economic crisis. By 2009, Celeste has given up on London, and Amber is in booming Shanghai as “the only two-starred Michelin woman chef in Asia”. Running in tandem with these events is Amber’s relationship with her family, now living in Yuen Long in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Goodbye Chinatown is less jaunty and more heartfelt than Diamond Hill, but has echoes of the earlier book. Fan remarked in a 2021 interview about the British handover of Hong Kong: “You have to ask yourself – what happens if your mother decides to give you up?” Goodbye Chinatown addresses this question. Parallels with Fan’s own life Part of the book is written in Bobby’s voice, in a way that feels particularly personal. Fan takes a moment when asked about this, eventually replying, “You hit a nerve there. I didn’t spend a lot of time with my parents as a child; they were both working full-time. I have a strong sense of separation, actually.” Fan loves food. He began cooking when he was about nine years old, taught by his taxi-driver father, who had health issues and needed to rest at the end of his shifts. “I have a very early memory of him teaching me how to clean a red mullet, how to scale it, make sure the gills are clean,” Fan says. When presented with the parallels between his father and Amber’s in Goodbye Chinatown, Fan says: “Yes, but my father didn’t open a restaurant.” Fan laughs when asked about why Amber’s family is also called Fan, saying it was a sudden creative decision. He talks about parallel lives: “I remember at school in 1989, after [the] Tiananmen [Square crackdown], many of my friends with the ability to emigrate went to Canada. They left, and then they returned. I’m interested in the reverse migration. There was almost an unspoken conversation that we didn’t have the resources to leave … but I always thought, ‘What if?’” Fan’s parents are still in Hong Kong, as is his younger sister. It is now a quarter of a century since Fan left. Though he does not have plans to return to Hong Kong permanently, he admits he does not know where home is. “This is the risk,” he says. “You know the moment that you leave a place that you may never return. Or that when you return, you’re a different person. This is what happened to Robinson Crusoe.” It so happens that in Daniel Defoe’s novel, Crusoe came from York, in the UK, where Fan now lives. “He travelled the world, he came back and he felt utterly foreign,” Fan says. The Crusoe epigraph at the beginning of Goodbye Chinatown reads: “When I came to England, I was as perfect a Stranger to all the World as if I had never been known there.” Fan says: “And then he couldn’t stay in Britain, he left. That has always fascinated me, the protagonist who leaves, then returns. The question for the Fan family is – did they return to Hong Kong as different people? And how could they tolerate it?”

Hong Kong author Kit Fan on food, identity and ‘reverse migration’ in Goodbye Chinatown

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The UK-based writer, whose Goodbye Chinatown follows a food-centric family between Hong Kong and London, talks about how places change people

The UK-based writer, whose Goodbye Chinatown follows a food-centric family between Hong Kong and London, talks about how places change people