Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan: Identity, belonging and food

I’ve a weakness for foodie fiction, devoting one of my Five Books I’ve Read to it, which was part of the attraction with Kit Fan’s Goodbye Chinatown, although his novel turned out to be much more than that. Through the experience of Amber whose parents brought her to London after the horrors of Tiananmen Square in 1989, aged ten, Fan explores events in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover from the British to the Chinese.

She was totally focussed on what she had always done best: finding her voice on a twelve-inch diameter dinner plate.

Amber’s parents were determined to give her the best opportunities, sending her to public school funded by the sale of half a slice of ancestral land plus hard, punishing work in their London restaurant. She grew up learning kitchen skills that have stood her in good stead. In 2001, the world still reeling from 9/11, she’s opening Luna, a fusion restaurant that attracts the attention of Celeste, daughter of a Chinese multi-billionaire who has been steadily buying up Chinatown. Impressed by Amber’s talent, flair and determination, Celeste offers financial backing to her Michelin star ambitions. Several years on, the financial crash precipitates another global crisis. Amber’s parents have returned to Hong Kong, taking four-year-old Bobby with them, returning for annual visits during one of which a revelation is made that overturns his world at the same age Amber’s had been overturned when the family emigrated to the UK. In Hong Kong, her parents have become increasingly divided, her father fatalistically embracing a future controlled by the Chinese; her mother angry at attempts to stamp out the freedom of young protesters willing to die for it. Twenty years after the novel opens, another crisis is about to rock the world.

Please tell my father that Hong Kong is my mother and I can’t bear to say goodbye to her.  

Fan structures his novel around several dramatic global events, exploring their effects through the family that shares his name. Its overarching theme is identity and belonging: the Fan family are British – three of them born before the handover of Hong Kong, one in the UK – yet each of them has a different view of where they belong and who they belong with. There are enough evocative descriptions of delicious sounding food to add this one to my foodie fiction list, but as the novel progresses the position that Hong Kong has found itself in comes to the fore as its fifty-year period of autonomy, due to end in 2047, is eroded by the increasing authoritarianism of its Chinese administration and the suppression of protesters, many so young they’re still at school. Moving and heartfelt, these passages turned Fan’s novel from an enjoyable, polished piece of fiction into something more thought-provoking and involving. There’s no author’s note, but his biographical details tell me that he was born in Hong Kong in 1979, ten years before the Tiananmen Square uprising just as Amber was.

World Editions: London ‎9781642861655 300 pages Paperback