Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan – A Chef’s Elegy to London | imaginary

Amber Fan, the 22-year-old protagonist of Kit Fan’s heartfelt and emotional elegiac second novel, is ready to say goodbye. She said goodbye to her parents, who had booked a midnight flight from London to Hong Kong, to enjoy the sunset years after they sold the family restaurant in London’s Chinatown. Goodbye to the old Chinatown they and their generation of hard-working Hong Kong immigrants represent, a Chinatown of Peking ducks, red lanterns, rude waiters, and sticky tables. She loves them the way they are, but she has her own plans for the future.

The story begins in late 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, as Amber prepares to open her own restaurant—an East-meets-West “fine dining” called Luna. She notes that this is “the worst possible time to open a restaurant.” Global markets are in a tailspin, and Chinatown’s old Cantonese-style shops, often set up by those who, like Amber’s parents, fled Hong Kong for Britain in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, are closing their doors and usually selling them to wealthy mainland Chinese investors. Everyone agrees that it is the end of an era.

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Amber, a talented chef, has quickly established herself as one of London’s rising stars. Adding ginger to chicken broth (which is strictly prohibited in traditional Chinese cooking but results in “complete satisfaction to the taste buds”) leads to lines of hungry diners lining the streets. She soon catches the attention of Celeste Gao, a mysteriously wealthy woman from Shanghai. Bold and reckless, perhaps connected to the Chinese Communist Party, Celeste prepares to determine the future of Chinatown (“My family will own Chinatown. That’s a fact”). The relationship between the two is due to their separation from their parents and their shared memories of the Tiananmen Incident, and Amber eventually wins Celeste’s offer with a cash injection and a promise to make her “the Alain Ducasse of Asia.”

For Amber, a second-generation immigrant, food expresses a love and shared history that’s hard to put into words. “Her relationship with her father was not based on hugs and kisses, but on the nose and mouth, the fingertips of garlic, the frying pan, the fire, the cleaver, and the cutting board.” When she tries to win over her younger brother Bobby, with whom she has a complicated relationship that forms the emotional core of the novel, Amber cooks him a special burger (recipe included). But Bobby is skeptical: “I think she mixed food with love from a young age.”

The narrative progresses from 2001 to 2007-2008 to 2019 and finally to 2020. Each time it is stimulated by historical events: the destruction of the Twin Towers; global financial crisis; Protests for democracy in Hong Kong. The focus shifts from London to Shanghai to Hong Kong, and we witness events through the eyes of various family members. As Amber’s star rises, the situation in Hong Kong gets worse. In 2020, the National Security Law was introduced, sparking a new wave of migration. The scenes in which fans mourn a changing Hong Kong (ground covered equally vividly in Diamond Hill, the author’s previous novel), and Bobby becomes dangerously involved in the protest movement, are the book’s most poignant scenes. It’s not just a farewell to Chinatown, but a farewell to Hong Kong as well.

The novel maintains an engaging note of contradiction throughout. Amber’s position as an outsider trying to succeed in a competitive industry is undermined by the fact that she herself is privileged. (I attended Marlborough College and Oxford University, having gotten into the latter through somewhat circuitous means.) It is also interesting to explore the complexities of being a successful and aspiring immigrant, and the loyalty (or disloyalty) one feels towards a country and culture left behind.

That’s not to say there aren’t weaknesses here (including the occasionally hackneyed prose). But the fire and flavor with which Van imbues this ambitious, spirited, and often courageous tribute to a region, city, or world running through history, makes this a deeply satisfying offering.