On the evening of 1 April 2003, Hong Kong stopped. News flashed across every television that Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing (張國榮) — the Cantopop pioneer, the actor who had made the world weep in Farewell My Concubine, the man half a generation still called 哥哥 ("Big Brother") — had fallen from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He was 46. Fans gathered in the rain outside the hotel that night, and again every year since. Two decades later, Hong Kong still marks the day.
Leslie was not just a star. He was, as Cantopop scholar Yiu-Wai Chu has argued, one of the pioneers who shaped the very identity of Cantopop in the 1980s. Over 26 years he released more than 40 albums and appeared in 56 films. But numbers do not explain him. What made Leslie Leslie was courage — the kind that lets a Cantonese star wear red high heels on stage, sing a love song to a man, and refuse to apologise for either.
The Kowloon boy who grew up abroad
Leslie was born on 12 September 1956 in Kowloon, the tenth and youngest child of tailor Cheung Wood-tong, whose clients included Marlon Brando, William Holden and Alfred Hitchcock. His parents were, in his own recollections, distant and often quarrelling. At 12, he was sent to study in Leeds, England — where he waited tables at his cousin's Chinese restaurant and only came home after his father's stroke in 1976.
In 1977 he entered the ATV Asian Music Contest and placed second, singing Don McLean's "American Pie" alongside a Cantonese original. His early records flopped. He was young, androgynous and awkward on stage — a mismatch for the polite Cantopop of the late 1970s. But he stayed. And in 1984 he released a single called "Monica."
Cantonese to the core
Even after years in Leeds, Leslie's Cantonese was fluent, playful, and unmistakably Kowloon. His songs — 風繼續吹 ("The Wind Blows On"), 月亮代表我的心 ("The Moon Represents My Heart," Cantonese cover), 當年情 ("Love of the Past") — became the sound of 1980s Hong Kong. He was a Cantonese romantic in the tradition of Alan Tam, but darker, edgier, more theatrical. Where Tam was Principal, Leslie was Rebel.
🎤 The Alan Tam rivalry that split Hong Kong
In the mid-1980s, Cantopop had two kings and one throne. Fans of Leslie and Alan Tam turned every awards ceremony into a stadium. Tam eventually withdrew himself from competitive prizes in 1988. Leslie announced retirement from music in 1989 at just 33, exhausted by the fan wars and press. He was that famous, that young.
🎬 Farewell My Concubine — and Cannes
In 1993 Leslie played Cheng Dieyi, a Peking opera dan (female role) whose life unravels across half a century of Chinese history, in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes — the first Chinese-language film to do so. Leslie learned Peking-style opera movement for months, and later said Dieyi was the role he most loved. The performance is now studied in film schools around the world.
🌈 The 1997 Passion Tour and the moment he came home
During his Passion Tour concert in 1997, Leslie dedicated the song 月亮代表我的心 to two people — his mother, and his partner Daffy Tong Hok-tak. It was the first time a Chinese superstar of his rank had publicly acknowledged a same-sex relationship on stage. In a Hong Kong that was still deeply conservative, it was seismic. Daffy stayed with him until his final day.
👠 The red high heels of the Passion Tour
Costumed by Jean Paul Gaultier, Leslie performed in a series of gender-fluid outfits including sequined suits and, in one number, red high heels. Some Hong Kong press pilloried him for it. Twenty years later the same styling would be called revolutionary. He was, as his Wong Kar-wai collaborator Tony Leung Chiu-wai once put it, always ten years ahead of Hong Kong.
What Leslie means today
Leslie's death coincided with the SARS outbreak of 2003 — a period Hong Kong already remembers as its darkest post-war spring. That the city lost him then compounded the grief. In the years since, his image has become shorthand for a certain Hong Kong: unapologetically Cantonese, unafraid of beauty, willing to be misunderstood.
Every 1 April, fans still gather at the Mandarin Oriental and at his fan sites worldwide. His songs still play in cha chaan tengs and taxis. Younger fans, born after his death, discover him through TikTok clips of 風繼續吹 or through Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together. For the Cantonese diaspora, he is not just an idol — he is a piece of home.
A Cantonese word Leslie made his own
哥哥
go1 go1 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: Older brother; affectionate honorific.
Explanation: Leslie's nickname across the Cantosphere. Junior actresses on set called him 哥哥 with genuine warmth. It was a nod to his generosity — mentoring younger stars, paying medical bills quietly, checking in on friends who were struggling. Two decades later, when Hong Kongers say 哥哥 in a certain tone, they mean only him.
Why Leslie still matters
Every diaspora needs figures who prove you can leave home and still carry it with you. Leslie left Kowloon for Leeds at 12 and came back speaking Cantonese with a slight London roll, and somehow that only made him more ours. He is proof that a Cantonese boy can be tender, complicated, gender-fluid, world-class — and still be family. That is why we keep him. That is why every 1 April, a flower shows up at the Mandarin Oriental. The wind, as his song promised, keeps blowing.
📖 Related Articles
👉 Shop Cantonese Guy — Modern Streetwear for the Global Cantonese Community