Leslie Cheung (張國榮): The Kowloon Tailor's Son Who Rewrote Cantopop, Took His Red Heels to the Coliseum, and Became the Diaspora's Patron Saint

On April 1, 2003, Hong Kong lost its most charismatic icon. Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing (張國榮) stepped onto the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Central and jumped. He was 46. The city was in the middle of a SARS epidemic, masks everywhere, hospitals overwhelmed. Still, tens of thousands of mourners poured into Central to see him off. More than two decades later, every April 1st, fans still gather at the Mandarin Oriental, place flowers, leave letters, and play his songs on repeat.

To call Leslie Cheung a Cantopop singer or Hong Kong actor is to miss the point. He was the first Chinese entertainer to publicly acknowledge a same-sex partner on a Hong Kong Coliseum stage. He was the Peking opera cross-dresser Chen Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine, the Hong Kong policeman in A Better Tomorrow, and the restless lover Yuddy in Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild. He was a boy from Kowloon who became the voice of a generation and the quiet patron saint of queer Cantonese identity.

The tailor's son from Kowloon

Leslie Cheung was born September 12, 1956, in Kowloon, the youngest of ten children in a Hakka family. His father was a celebrated Hong Kong tailor whose client list reportedly included Alfred Hitchcock and Marlon Brando — a detail that already feels cinematic. But Cheung's childhood was anything but glamorous. He later described it as marked by "silent resentment" and said there was little worth remembering, except his bond with his grandmother, who raised him while his parents worked.

At 12, he was sent to boarding school in Norwich, England. In those cold English classrooms he discovered Western cinema, pop music, and the name "Leslie" — chosen for its androgyny, drawn from Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind. The move created a lifelong tension in him: a Cantonese boy who had been shipped away and had to find his way back to his own culture.

He came back to Hong Kong in 1976 and entered RTV's Asian Music Contest the next year, finishing as the Hong Kong runner-up. The industry wasn't convinced. Critics called his voice "chicken-like" and his early albums flopped. For four years, Leslie Cheung was almost thrown out of the music business.

The man who rewrote Cantopop

The turnaround came in 1982 with the Cantonese cover "The Wind Blows On" (風繼續吹), his first hit. Then, in 1984, "Monica" exploded. The upbeat, danceable track topped Hong Kong charts and introduced synth-pop energy to a Cantopop scene that had been dominated by sentimental ballads. Leslie became an icon of the new wave.

Through the 1980s and 90s he released over 40 albums. Summer Romance (1987) and Most Beloved (1995) each sold over 300,000 copies — monster numbers in a city of six million. His 1996 album Red, with its androgynous visuals and genre-blurring production, is still studied as a landmark in Cantopop reinvention. If you've ever stood at a Cantonese opera stage or a karaoke bar in a Chinatown anywhere in the world and heard an older uncle belt out "Monica" — that's Leslie's reach.

The three films that made him immortal

Leslie Cheung's acting career is one of the strongest résumés in Chinese-language cinema. In A Better Tomorrow (1986), he played Kit, the idealistic rookie policeman standing opposite Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung — a role that helped define John Woo's heroic bloodshed genre. If you've seen the brotherhood of that film, you've felt his contribution to the heroic-bloodshed template that put Hong Kong cinema on the global map.

In Days of Being Wild (1990), he played the restless, mother-haunted Yuddy for Wong Kar-wai, a role so defining he won Best Actor at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards. The famous scene where his character dances alone in his undershirt to a mambo track is burned into Hong Kong's visual memory. Then came Farewell My Concubine (1993), where he played the Peking opera dan Chen Dieyi — a cross-dressing male performer whose entire identity blurs with his stage role. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and remains one of the most celebrated Chinese films ever made.

And in 1997 came Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai's story of two Hong Kong men adrift in Buenos Aires — a tender, bruising portrait of a same-sex relationship that would have been unthinkable from a top Cantonese leading man in any other era. Watch it with a Cotton Tree Flower Hoodie on and you can feel Hong Kong in every frame.

The confession at the Coliseum

In his 1997 Hong Kong Coliseum concert, Leslie dedicated the ballad "The Moon Represents My Heart" to his mother and to his longtime partner Daffy Tong (Tong Hok-tak). It was one of the first public acknowledgements of a same-sex partnership by a Chinese entertainer at that level of fame. In a 2001 interview he put it simply: "My mind is bisexual. It's easy for me to love a woman. It's also easy for me to love a man, too."

He didn't frame it as activism — he framed it as truth. But the ripple went everywhere. For queer Cantonese kids in Hong Kong, Vancouver, San Francisco, London, Sydney, seeing someone of Leslie's stature claim his life publicly was oxygen. Decades later, his April 1st anniversary has quietly become one of Hong Kong's most emotionally resonant unofficial days of remembrance.

What he left us

Leslie Cheung battled clinical depression for years. His suicide note referenced it directly. The city tried to make sense of the loss during a plague — SARS case counts climbing, hospital staff dying, and now this. In 2010, CNN named him one of the 25 Greatest Asian Actors of All Time. Hong Kong scholar Douglas Parkes wrote that "Cheung's importance to the cultural memory of contemporary Hong Kong cannot be overstated."

Learn one of his signature words

Leslie's films and interviews made certain Cantonese phrases iconic. One of them is 靓仔 — the Cantonese word for handsome young man, often shouted at him from fans:

If you want to carry a bit of that Hong Kong confidence, we made a 靓仔 Leng Zai oversized tee. It's the one word Hong Kong has shouted at icons for decades.

Why he still matters to the diaspora

Leslie Cheung is the Cantonese artist that queer kids in the diaspora find on YouTube at 2am and feel seen. He is the record older cousins play when they're homesick in a cold apartment in Toronto. He is the voice in the back of a Hong Kong cab stuck in Central traffic at 11pm. He never asked to be a flag — he just lived truthfully, and in doing so turned Cantopop and Cantonese cinema into something more open, more tender, more alive.

For a city that is still negotiating its identity, Leslie Cheung is proof that Hong Kong Cantonese culture at its best is confident, cosmopolitan, and unafraid to be beautiful. That's a legacy worth wearing — same way we built the Cantonese Guy best-seller collection around phrases and symbols that let you carry that heritage out into the world.