On the night of April 1, 2003, Leslie Cheung fell from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Central. The note he left behind spoke of depression. Within hours, Hong Kong's radio stations were playing nothing but his songs. The city stopped. For a generation of Cantonese speakers around the world, the day Leslie Cheung died is still a date you can locate without checking.
What makes Leslie Cheung — 哥哥, as the entire Cantopop world called him — different from every other Hong Kong icon is that his legend didn't begin with a career triumph. It began with a modest result and a half-decade of flops. He came in as first runner-up in Rediffusion Television's 1977 Asian Singing Contest, singing Don McLean's "American Pie." Reviews called him stiff. The gatekeepers of Hong Kong music told him he was finished before he had started. He then spent the next twenty-five years becoming the most beautiful, most daring, most singular performer the Cantonese language has ever produced.
The youngest of ten, raised at a distance
Cheung Kwok-wing (張國榮) was born in Kowloon on 12 September 1956, the youngest of ten children in a family that had just about collapsed under the weight of its own size. His father was Cheung Wut-hoi, a celebrated Hong Kong tailor whose Central Western-suit shop dressed Hollywood royalty including Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant. His mother ran the household. Leslie would later talk openly about feeling emotionally distant from both of them growing up, and about his grandmother — the family member he described as closest to a real parent.
At twelve he was sent to boarding school in England — Eccles Hall School near Norwich — and later to the University of Leeds to study textile management. He never finished. His father fell ill in 1976, Leslie flew home, and the next year, on a whim, entered the Asian Singing Contest held by Hong Kong's Rediffusion Television (RTV). His cover of Don McLean's "American Pie" earned him first runner-up in the Hong Kong division — and a short, humiliating recording contract that produced flop album after flop album for the next six years.
1984: Monica, and the moment Cantopop changed
The turning point was a single song. In 1984 Leslie released "Monica" — a Cantonese cover of a Japanese pop song by Kōji Kikkawa — and it detonated. For the first time, Hong Kong had a male pop star who danced. Who moved his body. Who looked directly into the camera and smirked. "Monica" was a Jade Solid Gold hit and Leslie went from a man the industry had almost given up on to the face of a new kind of Cantopop — glamorous, cinematic, unafraid of sex appeal.
🎬 The feud that wasn't
Throughout the mid-80s the Hong Kong tabloids ran a years-long rivalry story between Leslie Cheung and Alan Tam, the city's two biggest male stars. Fan clubs threw eggs at each other's concerts. Both men quietly hated it. In 1988, Leslie — exhausted — announced he was retiring from music at age 32 and gave a 33-concert farewell series at the Hong Kong Coliseum. He meant it. He wouldn't release another Cantonese album for seven years.
The second career that made him immortal
What most non-Cantonese fans don't realise is that Leslie had already been acting the whole time. His 1986 role as Mark's younger brother in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色) made him a credible dramatic actor. Then came Stanley Kwan's Rouge (胭脂扣, 1988) opposite Anita Mui — a ghost story about a Shek Tong Tsui courtesan searching for her lost lover across fifty years. Rouge is widely cited among the finest Hong Kong films ever made, and Leslie's performance as the fragile, selfish Twelfth Master is still studied in film schools.
Then Wong Kar-wai got hold of him. Days of Being Wild (阿飛正傳, 1990) gave Leslie the role of Yuddy — the beautiful, rootless Cantonese drifter who dances alone in his undershirt in front of the mirror in one of the most quoted scenes in Chinese cinema. That one minute of film has probably launched more Hong Kong streetwear aesthetics than any single moment in Cantopop history.
🎬 Farewell My Concubine, and the Cannes moment
In 1993 Leslie played Cheng Dieyi — a Peking Opera dan actor in love with his lifelong stage partner — in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬). The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Leslie's performance was so complete, so vulnerable, that it is widely remembered as one of the great screen performances in Chinese-language cinema. He trained in Peking Opera for six months to prepare. Hollywood critics called him "the most beautiful man in Asian film," and for once the cliché understated the truth.
🎬 The 1997 concert that outed him on his own terms
At his 1996–1997 Hong Kong Coliseum concert series, Leslie dedicated the ballad 月亮代表我的心 (The Moon Represents My Heart) to his mother and to Daffy Tong Hok-tak. In a city that was still deeply conservative about queer identity, that dedication amounted to an official public acknowledgement of his long-term partner — one of the most quietly radical acts in Cantopop history. His 2000–2001 "Passion Tour" went even further, with gender-fluid staging that pre-figured a decade of global pop performance.
🎬 "I am what I am"
In 2000, Leslie released the Cantopop single "I" (我), a direct declaration of self: "I am what I am / I'm a firework of a different kind." The song is widely treated as one of the earliest major Chinese-language queer anthems, and twenty-five years later it still gets sung at Pride parades from Taipei to Vancouver. In a culture built on indirectness, Leslie made directness itself an art form.
A Cantonese phrase he made famous
靓仔
leng3 zai2 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: A handsome young man; a pretty boy.
Explanation: The word 靓仔 was already Cantonese slang long before Leslie's career, but his 1980s image fixed its modern meaning. For an entire generation, 靓仔 described the way Leslie Cheung looked on stage — polished, androgynous, impossibly cool.
If you want to wear the word, we built one around it: the 靓仔 Leng Zai oversized tee is a quiet, confident self-compliment in two characters.
Why Leslie Cheung still matters
Every April 1st, the Mandarin Oriental in Central fills with flowers. Fans fly in from Taipei, Tokyo, Vancouver, San Francisco. They sing his songs on the sidewalk. His posthumous album sales still beat most living artists in Asia. In 2010 CNN named him one of the five greatest actors in Asian cinema history. In 2022 a Chinese social-media poll voted him the most-missed public figure in Hong Kong's 125-year history.
What Leslie Cheung gave the Cantonese-speaking world was permission — permission to be beautiful, to be queer, to be sad, to be unafraid of your own tenderness in a culture that often asked men to swallow it. Twenty-two years after his death, the Cantopop songs are still playing in every Hong Kong taxi, every karaoke room from Chinatown to Richmond. 哥哥 isn't gone. He's just somewhere in the next room, waiting for the song to end.
For more profiles of the Hong Kong icons who defined this diaspora, read our pieces on Anita Mui — Leslie's closest friend and co-star in Rouge — and on Stephen Chow, who came up alongside him in the same TVB system. And if you grew up watching Leslie, you probably already own too many Cantonese Guy black logo tees — but one more never hurt anyone.
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