Goodbye 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.

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.