Amber Fan, the 22-year-old protagonist of Kit Fan’s heartfelt and elegiac second novel, is ready to say goodbye. Goodbye to her parents, who are booked on the midnight flight from London to Hong Kong, there to enjoy their sunset years having sold the family restaurant in London’s Chinatown. And goodbye to the old Chinatown that they and their generation of hard-working Hong Kong émigrés represent, the Chinatown of peking duck, red lanterns, rude waiters and sticky tables. She loves them both, in their way, but she has her own plans for the future.
The story begins in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, as Amber prepares to open her own restaurant – an east meets west “fine fusion restaurant” called Luna. It is, she notes, “the worst possible time to open a restaurant”. Global markets are in meltdown and the old Cantonese-style joints of Chinatown, often established by those who, like Amber’s parents, fled Hong Kong for Britain in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, are closing down and selling up, usually to cash-rich mainland Chinese investors. Everyone agrees that it is the end of an era.
But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Amber, a talented chef, quickly establishes herself as one of London’s up-and-coming stars. An inspired addition of ginger to her chicken broth (strictly verboten in traditional Chinese cooking but resulting in “total satisfaction of the taste buds”) sees queues of hungry diners lining the streets. She soon comes to the attention of Celeste Gao, a mysteriously wealthy Shanghainese woman. Celeste is brash and bold, possibly linked to the Chinese Communist party, and set to determine Chinatown’s future (“My family is going to own Chinatown. That is a fact”). The two bond over their estrangement from their parents and their shared memories of the Tiananmen incident, and Amber is eventually won over by Celeste’s offer of a cash injection and the promise of making her the “Asian Alain Ducasse”.
For Amber, a second-generation immigrant, food expresses a love and a shared history that are otherwise difficult to put into words. “Her bond with her father was not built on hugs and kisses but on the nose and mouth, the garlicy fingertips, the wok, the fire, the cleaver and the chopping board.” When trying to win over her younger brother Bobby, with whom she has a complex relationship that constitutes the emotional core of the novel, Amber cooks him a special burger (the recipe for which is included). Bobby, however, is sceptical: “I think she has confused food with love from a very young age.”
The narrative progresses from 2001 to 2007-08 to 2019 and finally to 2020. Each time it is spurred on by historical events: the destruction of the twin towers; the global financial crisis; the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The focus skips from London to Shanghai to Hong Kong, and we witness events through the eyes of various members of the family. As Amber’s star rises, the situation in Hong Kong worsens. In 2020, the national security law is introduced, sparking a fresh wave of emigration. The scenes in which the Fans mourn a changing Hong Kong (ground covered equally vividly in Diamond Hill, the author’s previous novel), and Bobby becomes riskily involved in the protest movement, are the most affecting in the book. It’s not just goodbye Chinatown, but goodbye Hong Kong, too.
The novel maintains an appealing note of ambivalence throughout. Amber’s status as an outsider trying to make it in a competitive industry is tempered by the fact that she herself is privileged. (She attended Marlborough College and Oxford University, having got into the latter through slightly devious means.) Interestingly explored, too, are the complexities of being a successful, ambitious immigrant, and the loyalty (or not) one feels to a country and a culture that have been left behind.
That is not to say there aren’t weaknesses here (including occasionally clunky prose). But the fire and flavour with which Fan imbues this ambitious, exuberant, and often quite brave salute to a district, a city, a world passing into history, make this a highly satisfying offering.
