Book Review of Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan

 Name of Book: Goodbye Chinatown

Author: Kit Fan

ISBN: 978-1-64286-165-5

Publisher: World Editions 

Type of book: Hong Kong, England, China, protests, 2001-January 2020, relationships, mother/son relationship, parents/daughter relationship, cooking, ambitions, fame vs motherhood 

Year it was published: 2026

Summary:

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 suburb 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.

Characters:

Main characters are Amber, her parents and Bobby. Amber is a young woman who desires to do what she can to become a chef as she tries to make her dream come true. She also has made a lot of decisions regarding her dream, namely regarding Bobby as well as decisions to where she can live, be it in England or Hong Kong or even China. Its also modern history that begins in 2001 and ends in January 2020. Amber's parents are in love and have a good relationship with one another, with Amber sometimes worrying on how her mother dared to give up her dreams in order to help achieve Amber's father's dream. Her father is a bit more drawn as he teaches Amber the cooking skills and is a bit more traditional and a bit colder. The reader gets to learn more about Bobby at the end, namely his hobbies and interests, that of being obsessed with variety of mosses as well as being a budding filmmaker of sorts? Secondary characters would be Celeste, an only wealthy daughter who seems to flit from one thing to another in order to get more money as well as Bobby's friend who is quite a revolutionary. 

Theme:

There can be second chances but in different forms

Plot:

The story is in third person narrative from quite a few characters' points of views, although the primary characters would be Amber, her parents and her brother/son Bobby. At the start Amber opens up a restaurant named Luna where she meets a wealthy woman Celeste who helps her expand talents, even helping Amber earn a Michelin Star. While that is one of the main plots, there are ties to Amber's past in living in Hong Kong and witnessing the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 as well as her fragile relationship to her brother/son Bobby and the choices she makes for better or worse. Despite the heavy topics the book tackles, namely racism, wealth disparity, complex family relationships and immigration as well as attempts to fit in, ;there is something cozy about the atmosphere and belief that things will go well. 

Author Information:
(From goodreads)

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. His first novel Diamond Hill (2021) was published with critical acclaim. Goodbye Chinatown (2026) 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), Co-Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), and a Trustee of New Writing North. He was born and educated in Hong Kong and now lives in the UK.

Opinion:

To be honest, my rating is 3.5 but since I don't do half stars, I rounded it up to 4 stars. I honestly have trouble verbalizing on what I liked or disliked about the story, perhaps because it was underwhelming or maybe there seems to be too much sensory details for me to enjoy the story? And also sometimes point of views switch with little to no warning. There are things that I liked about the story namely learning about Hong Kong (my son's father is Chinese who was born in Hong Kong) and it would be nice to know more about my son's heritage. (very long story on his father...) I also liked the years and the details that the author went into to making the years feel realistic. I do feel that I didn't really understand the purpose of Bobby's point of view in the story. 

This was given for review

4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)