About this Event
Hong Kong Community Hub is delighted to welcome Kit Fan, author of Goodbye Chinatown, for a conversation with Dr. Wayne Wong and Clara Cheung on food, memory, and migration. The event will take place on Saturday, 21 Nov, in the afternoon at the University of Sheffield, featuring readings from the novel and an audience Q&A.
Date & Time: 21 Nov 2026 (Sat), 14:00-16:00
Venue: Heartspace Boardroom, Sir Frederick Mappin Building, University of Sheffield, S1 3JD
About Goodbye Chinatown:
... 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.
Review at The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/14/goodbye-chinatown-by-kit-fan-review-a-chefs-elegy-to-london
About Kit Fan:
Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. Born and educated in Hong Kong and now living in the UK, he has written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Telegraph. His first novel is Diamond Hill (2021) and second novel Goodbye Chinatown (2026). 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 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 is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice-Chair of Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), and Co-Chair of Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA).
Event venue & nearby stays
Sir Frederick Mappin Building, Mappin Street, Sheffield City Centre, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.