There is a man worth more than HK$5.6 billion who still rides the MTR. He shops at the wet market in Kowloon City, takes selfies with anyone who asks, and reportedly held onto the same Nokia phone for 17 years before grudgingly switching to an iPhone. His name is Chow Yun-fat (周潤發), and the Cantonese-speaking world calls him 發哥 — Fat Gor, Big Brother Fat. He's not just a movie star. He's the closest thing modern Hong Kong has to a folk hero.
From a House With No Electricity
Chow Yun-fat was born on May 18, 1955 on Lamma Island, in a small farming community without electricity. His father worked on a Shell oil tanker; his mother was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer. As a small boy, he woke before dawn to help her sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea pudding on the streets, then went to the fields in the afternoon. His ancestral roots are Hakka and Guangdong — the cultural soil that grew Cantonese cinema's most relaxed leading man.
The family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. By 17 he had left school to help support them — bellboy, postman, camera salesman, taxi driver. At 18 he answered a newspaper ad for TVB's actor training programme. He didn't know it yet, but he had just walked into the door that would change Cantonese cinema.
The Bund, and Then the Avalanche
In 1980, the TVB drama 《上海灘》 (The Bund) made him a star across Asia. But he wanted the big screen, not the small one. Television had typecast him; his first attempts at film acting were, by most accounts, disastrous. He drifted for years.
Then on August 2, 1986, director John Woo released A Better Tomorrow. Chow played Mark Gor — trench coat flapping, toothpick between his teeth, twin pistols in his hands — and the city woke up the next morning to find that a new kind of movie star had been born. Suddenly every kid in Hong Kong wanted shades, a long coat, and a toothpick. The look became a generation's uniform.
🎬 The Toothpick Was an Accident That Became an Icon
Mark Gor's signature toothpick wasn't in the script. It was a small piece of business Chow brought to the role, an unconscious bit of street-cool he had absorbed growing up around Cantonese working-class characters. It became one of the most imitated film props of the 1980s. To this day, when someone wants to draw "Hong Kong cool," they sketch a trench coat, sunglasses, and a toothpick.
The Cantonese Everyman in Costume
What made Chow different from every other action star of the era was that he played gangsters but felt like a neighbour. Whether he was Mark Gor in A Better Tomorrow, the slicked-back Ko Chun in God of Gamblers (1989), or the gentleman swordsman Li Mu-bai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), he carried the same Cantonese-everyman warmth underneath. He could shoot up a room and still feel like the kind of guy who'd buy you a milk tea afterward. That was the trick. That's still the trick.
🎰 God of Gamblers Started a Whole Genre
When Wong Jing's God of Gamblers opened in December 1989, nobody expected it to spawn a movement. Chow's Ko Chun — jade pinky ring, slicked-back hair, an inexplicable love of Feodora chocolate — became so iconic that the film triggered a Hong Kong craze for gambling movies. The next year, Stephen Chow's parody All for the Winner was such a hit that Wong Jing hired him to co-star in the official sequel. One performance lit the fuse on an entire sub-genre.
The HK$5.6 Billion Man Who Spends HK$800 a Month
🚇 The Movie Star on the MTR
Chow takes the MTR almost every day. He once explained, with characteristic Cantonese practicality, that the roads in Hong Kong are too congested — the train is faster, cheaper and more comfortable. He hikes, runs marathons, eats at cha chaan tengs and shops at the Kowloon City market. Hongkongers swap "I saw Fat Gor on the MTR today" sightings the way other cities trade celebrity rumours. The difference is that in Hong Kong, those stories are almost always true.
💋 The HK$700 Million Gift
Chow has said publicly that he plans to give away 99% of his fortune — around HK$5.6 billion, or roughly US$700 million — to charity. He reportedly lives on something like HK$800 a month. "The money's not mine," he told reporters. "I'm only keeping it safe for the time being." Most movie stars become rich and start collecting things. Chow became rich and started collecting nothing.
What Cantonese Sounds Like Through Fat Gor's Mouth
Part of what makes Chow such a beloved figure across the global Cantonese diaspora is that his Cantonese still carries the rhythm of the streets he grew up on. He learned the language not in a textbook but in the wet market, the taxi cab, the TVB green room. When he speaks, you hear the cadence of working-class Kowloon — warm, dry, faintly amused. The persona he plays onscreen is borrowed straight from that world.
A Cantonese word to remember him by
發哥 (faat3 go1) — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: "Big Brother Fat" — the affectionate nickname Hongkongers gave Chow Yun-fat, formed from the second character of his name plus 哥 (older brother).
Why it matters: In Cantonese, calling someone 哥 is a quiet honour — it means they’ve earned respect without demanding it. Almost no other Hong Kong celebrity gets the title applied this naturally. Chow has been 發哥 for four decades.
Why He Still Matters
In a region that has produced more icons than almost anywhere on earth — Bruce Lee, Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui, Stephen Chow, Tony Leung — Chow Yun-fat occupies a category of his own. He's not the most beautiful, not the most intense, not the most acrobatic. He's the warmest. He's the one whose face lights up the cha chaan teng next to yours. He's the one who proved that you could be a global Cantonese icon and still wave at the security guard on the way home.
For the global Cantonese diaspora — children of Hong Kong parents in Vancouver, Toisanese grandkids in San Francisco, second-generation kids in London — Fat Gor is a living link to something irreplaceable. He is what Cantonese cool looks like when it grows up, makes a fortune, and keeps its feet on the ground.
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