On any given morning in Hong Kong, one of the most bankable movie stars in the history of Chinese cinema might be standing next to you on the MTR. He'll be in a plain t-shirt, sneakers past their prime, possibly holding a red plastic bag from the wet market. His face has been on giant billboards from Guangzhou to Los Angeles. He is worth roughly US$714 million. He spends about HK$800 a month on himself.
That's Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) — the Cantonese kid from a Lamma Island farming village who became Hong Kong cinema's coolest man and then, at the height of his fortune, announced he was giving nearly all of it away. This is his story, and it's better than any script he ever shot.
A childhood with no electricity
Chow was born on May 18, 1955, on Lamma Island — back then a farming and fishing outpost that felt centuries removed from the neon skyline across the water. His father Zhou Rongyun worked on a fishing vessel. His mother raised chickens, grew vegetables, and cleaned other people's homes for extra income. Chow and his siblings helped her sell herbal jelly (龜苓膏) and tea puddings on the streets to keep the family fed. His ancestral roots are in Kaiping, Guangdong — pure Cantonese, straight through.
The family moved to Kowloon when Chow was ten. He left school at seventeen and took whatever work he could find — hotel bellhop, postman, camera salesman, taxi driver. In 1973 he saw a newspaper ad for TVB's actor training programme and, on a hunch, signed up. He was 18, broke, and had never acted in his life.
The TVB years that almost broke him
Chow spent 14 years at TVB grinding through soap operas. His breakout came with the 1980 period drama Shanghai Beach (上海灘), where he played Hui Man-keung, a suave 1930s gangster in a long trench coat. The show detonated across Chinese-speaking Asia. He became a superstar overnight — the kind of superstar auntie-in-the-lift knows by first name.
But TV wouldn't be enough. In 1986, a director named John Woo asked Chow to play a stylish gunman in a film almost no one at the studio believed in. It was called A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色).
🎬 The toothpick, the trenchcoat, and a whole new masculinity
Chow's character Mark Gor — sunglasses, matchstick clenched between teeth, twin pistols, cash-lit cigarette — changed what a Hong Kong movie hero could look like. Teenage boys across Asia started chewing toothpicks and buying long duster coats. The film won Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Chow, at 31, finally won Best Actor after being nominated and losing multiple times before.
🎲 The God of Gamblers hairdo everyone tried to copy
In 1989's God of Gamblers (賢神), Chow played Ko Chun — slicked-back hair, three-piece suit, a piece of chocolate in his mouth before every bet. The film became the highest-grossing Hong Kong movie of its year and made 賢神 a cultural shorthand for anyone unbeatable at anything. Barbershops in Mong Kok were suddenly full of guys asking for "the Fat Gor cut."
🎥 Hollywood couldn't quite hold him
In the late '90s Chow made the leap west — The Replacement Killers, Anna and the King, Bulletproof Monk, and eventually Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). But it was Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) that gave him a role worthy of his stillness — the swordsman Li Mu-bai. The film won four Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film. Chow could have stayed in Los Angeles. He came home instead.
🗺️ He still takes the MTR
Chow is famous in Hong Kong for one thing above the fame itself: he refuses to act like a star. He shops at wet markets, rides public transport, does his own laundry, and reportedly uses a Nokia phone he's had for close to two decades. Fans regularly spot him and post the photos — he almost always poses without hesitation. His nickname across Hong Kong is simply Fat Gor (發哥), "Brother Fat." Not "sir," not "Mr. Chow." Just Fat Gor.
The HK$5.6 billion he's giving away
In December 2018, Chow told the press he intended to donate his entire fortune — estimated at HK$5.6 billion (around US$714 million) — to charity. He and his wife of nearly four decades, Jasmine Tan, had already set up their own foundation to do it quietly. He put it this way: "I feel that the money does not really belong to me. I am just in charge of keeping it temporarily."
That is a Cantonese sentence, in its bones. Wealth as a duty rather than a possession. Big words about giving back are cheap in celebrity culture. Chow just keeps living in the same small flat, keeps riding the MTR, keeps letting fans take selfies with him at the market. The pledge isn't a headline stunt — it's how he already lives.
A little Cantonese for the road
發哥
faat3 go1 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: "Brother Fat" — the affectionate Hong Kong nickname for Chow Yun-fat.
Explanation: 哥 (go1) means older brother — an intimate, big-brother respect. Cantonese loves shortening a famous person's name to one character + 哥 to signal both love and closeness. Andy Lau is Wah Gor (華哥), Sam Hui is Sam Gor (山哥), and Chow Yun-fat has been Fat Gor for four decades.
Why Fat Gor still matters
The global Cantonese diaspora — in Vancouver, London, Sydney, San Francisco — grew up with Chow Yun-fat on their screens. He is the Hong Kong that people around the world still love: bold, stylish, generous, self-deprecating, deeply Cantonese in that particular way where you never brag but you always show up. From Leslie Cheung to Andy Lau to Fat Gor himself, the greatest Cantonese stars carry the same quiet code — the fame is loud, but you stay small.
He didn't build a billion-dollar life to buy a bigger apartment. He built it to give it away. That is, in the end, the coolest thing a movie star has ever done.
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