About this event

Goodbye Chinatown: Migration, Conflict and the Unconscious - Kit Fan with Adam Phillips and Hugh Haughton

In this special session, novelist and poet Kit Fan joins the psychoanalytic critic and essayist Adam Phillips and the literary critic Hugh Haughton for a conversation that moves between the novel's pages and the consulting room's preoccupations. Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong's handover, Goodbye Chinatown follows a young chef in London who forges her own language for home through food after her parents returning to Hong Kong and carrying a haunting family secret. The event will explore what it means to be psychically split between two cultures, two histories, and two languages — and how the unconscious registers the unresolved conflicts of migration and geopolitical rupture. How does a writer give form to what cannot be said? What do food, memory, and culinary invention tell us about the work of mourning, displacement and desire? Taking Goodbye Chinatown as its starting point, this discussion promises a rich encounter between literature, psychoanalysis, and the inner lives of those caught between worlds.

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 will be published in 2026. His third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. 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). He also works at the Hull York Medical School as Governance Manager. 

Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. Born in Cardiff in 1954, he has long brought a deep engagement with literature, philosophy and the arts to his psychoanalytic writing. He is the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud and the author of over twenty books. His latest is The Life You Want (2026).

Hugh Haughton is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York, whose research spans modernism, modern poetry and poetics, psychoanalysis and literature, and twentieth-century Irish writing. Born in Cork, his publications include The Poetry of Derek Mahon, the co-edited Letters of T. S. Eliot, the Penguin Classics centenary edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's The Uncanny. He has collaborated previously with Adam Phillips on several projects.

View the full series here.

This lecture will be recorded and available for 7 days after the lecture takes place

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski: Storm Inside

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