{"id":55377,"date":"2026-05-26T07:37:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T23:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=55377"},"modified":"2026-05-26T07:37:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T23:37:35","slug":"hong-kong-author-kit-fan-on-food-identity-and-reverse-migration-in-goodbye-chinatown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=55377","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong author Kit Fan on food, identity and \u2018reverse migration\u2019 in Goodbye Chinatown"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The writer Kit Fan likes his readers to know, at least initially, where \u2013 and when \u2013 he is taking them.<\/p>\n

His first novel, published in 2021 and set in 1987, is called Diamond Hill<\/em>, and its location is mostly confined to the Hong Kong neighbourhood it is named after.<\/p>\n

Diamond Hill was Hong Kong\u2019s 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\u2019s untidy shanties.<\/p>\n

Five years later, Fan has released his new novel, Goodbye Chinatown<\/em>. It begins in London\u2019s Chinatown<\/span> in the autumn of 2001, just after the September 11 terror attacks. This time, the character list is shorter \u2013 it is essentially a story about the parents and two children of one Hong Kong family \u2013 but the geographic range is greater.<\/div>\n
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The cover of Fan\u2019s new book. Photo: Amazon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The one constant amid the family\u2019s roaming is food, a literary fusion signalled to the reader from the outset by the book\u2019s epigraphs: one from fictional character Robinson Crusoe and one from food writer Nigella Lawson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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The writer Kit Fan likes his readers to know, at least initially, where \u2013 and when \u2013 he is taking them. His first novel, published…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[7799,2837,2797,108,5049,3569,4027,5701,5231,6762,12067],"class_list":["post-55377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-author","tag-chinatown","tag-fan","tag-food","tag-goodbye","tag-hong","tag-identity","tag-kit","tag-kong","tag-migration","tag-reverse","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/55378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}