On September 12, 1956, a boy named Cheung Kwok-wing was born in Kowloon. He would grow up to be a fashion student in a grey city called Leeds, come home to Hong Kong on a whim, lose a singing competition to a teenage rival, and then spend the next twenty-six years quietly becoming the person the entire Cantonese-speaking world would call, forever, 哥哥 — Big Brother. This is Leslie Cheung. And this is why, twenty-three years after he was gone, Hong Kong still hasn't stopped playing his songs on April 1st.
The kid who left
Leslie was the youngest of ten. His father was a tailor — the kind who made suits for Alfred Hitchcock and Marlon Brando when they came through Hong Kong. Their house was noisy, business-focused, and largely built around the older siblings. Leslie, the tenth child, was closer to his grandmother and to the family's live-in helper, Six-Sister, than to either of his parents. It marked him for life. Warmth from unexpected people. Loneliness inside a crowded room. Those themes never left his songs.
At twelve he was shipped to England for school. By his late teens he was in Leeds, studying fashion design at university, and picking the English name "Leslie" for its unisex softness. He liked that both men and women could carry it. He said as much in interviews for the rest of his life. Even his name was a small quiet argument with the world about what a man could be.
Second place, and everything that came after
He never finished the degree. His father fell ill in 1976, and Leslie flew back to Hong Kong. A year later, on a bit of a lark, he entered the ATV Asian Music Contest. He didn't win. He came in second. First place went to a Malaysian singer. Second place was enough to get him a contract. His first album, I Like Dreaming, dropped in 1978 and mostly disappeared. So did the next few. For six years he was, by every industry metric, a failure.
🎤 The night the audience threw his hat back
Early in his career, at a live show in the late 1970s, Leslie threw his cowboy hat into the crowd during a performance. Instead of catching it as a souvenir, someone threw it back at him. Hard. He talked about that hat for the rest of his life — the way rejection can burn a specific groove in your memory that success never quite fills in. He kept singing anyway.
Monica changed everything
Then came 1984. His self-titled album Leslie included a track called Monica, a dance number adapted from a Japanese pop song. It was unlike anything Cantopop had done. The old ballad kings ruled the charts. Leslie brought synths, an aggressive dance beat, and a stage presence that borrowed from Bowie and gave back something completely Cantonese. Overnight, at twenty-eight, he was the biggest new star in Hong Kong.
The rest of the 1980s were a two-man war for Cantopop's crown between Leslie and Alan Tam. Fans of the two singers famously feuded in the streets. In 1988 Leslie won the TVB Jade Solid Gold Best Male Singer award; in 1989, exhausted by the intensity of the fandom battles, he announced he was retiring from music at thirty-three.
The film years
The music retirement freed him for cinema. He'd already been acting on the side since 1978, but the 1990s were where he became a real actor. Wong Kar-wai cast him as the golden playboy Yuddy in Days of Being Wild (1990), and Leslie won his first Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for it. In 1993 Chen Kaige cast him as the Peking Opera performer Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine. That film went to Cannes, won the Palme d'Or, and remains — more than three decades later — the only Chinese-language film ever to take the top prize there.
🎭 He was almost not cast in Farewell My Concubine
The Chinese studio behind Farewell My Concubine initially wanted a mainland actor. Chen Kaige had to fight to cast a Hong Kong Cantopop star as a Peking Opera performer — a role that required singing in Beijing dialect, performing female-role opera moves, and carrying a decades-spanning tragedy. Leslie trained for months, learned enough Mandarin dialogue to shoot in it, and delivered a performance that critics still call one of the greatest in Chinese cinema history.
The 1997 kiss the world talked about
In 1997, Wong Kar-wai released Happy Together. Leslie played half of a broken gay couple stranded in Buenos Aires. Then, at his 1997 comeback concert, he changed the words of the ballad 月亮代表我的心 ("The Moon Represents My Heart") mid-performance and dedicated it publicly to his partner Daffy Tong — an unusual and quietly defiant gesture in Chinese pop at the time. He never played a straight love story quite the same way again. In 2000 he headlined the Passion Tour, a series of concerts in gender-fluid costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier that dared the industry to keep up. Some critics savaged it. Some of the same critics later called it visionary.
🎬 The Cantopop star who was also, quietly, a director
Not many people know Leslie wrote and directed a short film called From Ashes to Ashes in 2000, as part of an anti-smoking campaign. He also directed music videos for other artists and was preparing to direct his first feature film at the time of his death — a project called Departure that he'd been developing for years.
April 1, 2003
He'd been struggling with depression for months. His partner Daffy said later that Leslie had tried to seek help, that his brain chemistry had turned on him in a way no amount of success could hold off. On the evening of April 1, 2003, at the height of the SARS epidemic that had already emptied Hong Kong's streets, he fell from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Central. He was 46 years old.
Hong Kong shut down. The city that had lived through 1997 and was living through a plague had one more collective grief added to the pile. His funeral drew tens of thousands. Aaron Kwok, Andy Lau, Faye Wong, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat — half the industry — turned up in mourning. And every year since, on April 1st, fans queue outside the Mandarin Oriental to leave flowers.
Why he still matters
Leslie was the first mainstream Chinese pop star to live openly with a same-sex partner, to wear women's clothing on the main stage, to play queer characters in serious cinema without apology, and to be loved for it by aunties and uncles who would have said they disapproved of any of those things in the abstract. He didn't push a manifesto. He just refused to be smaller than he was. And a generation of Cantonese-speaking kids who felt weird about themselves grew up watching him and understanding that they didn't have to be small either.
A Cantonese word he made famous
靚爆鏡
leng3 baau3 geng3 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: So good-looking you'd break the mirror.
Explanation: The highest tier of Cantonese beauty compliment. The mirror can't hold you — the reflection is too much. Leslie is one of the vanishingly small number of people who this phrase actually undersells. It's the compliment that a whole generation gave him.
If you want to wear that compliment yourself, the 靚爆鏡 Mirror Breaks sweatshirt exists exactly for this. And for the gambling-film crowd who loved his other 1980s classic, God of Gamblers, the 賦神 God of Gamblers hoodie is a small nod to that era. And for anyone who just wants the Big Brother mood, the 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized tee carries the same quiet pride.
The songs are still playing
Twenty-three years later, Hong Kong plays Leslie in cabs, in cha chaan tengs, in Central after midnight when the DJ needs one that's guaranteed to make the room cry a little. 風繼續吹 — the wind keeps blowing. He wrote that line for himself. He gave it to us. And on every April 1st, the flowers at the Mandarin Oriental prove that a Cantonese speaker's love, once given, doesn't really get taken back.
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