In 1977, a 20-year-old Kowloon boy walked onto the stage of RTV's Asian Singing Contest, opened his mouth, and the Hong Kong audience booed him off. He had just come back from England, where he had quit a textile-management degree at the University of Leeds after one year to come home when his father had a stroke. He didn't win. He was runner-up in the Hong Kong division. His first albums tanked, and critics called his voice too thin. Twenty years later, that same man had sold out ten nights at the Hong Kong Coliseum, won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards, received a Cannes Best Actor nomination, and dedicated 'The Moon Represents My Heart' to his male partner in front of thousands of fans and the entire city's press pack. The booing kid became Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing (張國榮) — the one Cantopop figure everyone still calls 哥哥, 'big brother', with a catch in the throat.
He was born Cheung Fat-chung (張發宗) on 12 September 1956, the youngest of ten children in a middle-class Hakka family in Kowloon. His father was a tailor who made shirts for Marlon Brando and Alfred Hitchcock — the kind of detail that reads like a scriptwriter's invention, except it's documented. He picked 'Leslie' at school in England at age 12, after Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind, because he liked that the name worked on a man or a woman. He kept that choice for the rest of his life, which turns out to be the earliest clue to who he was going to be.
Hakka tailor's son in a city of ten million
The RTV contract that followed the booing was a mercy hire. His first film was a 1978 softcore picture called Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber, which he spent the rest of his career trying not to mention. Capital Artists signed him in 1982, and in 1984 the single 《Monica》 — a cover of a Japanese pop song — cracked the city open. By 1986 he was in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow opposite Chow Yun-fat, and by 1987 he was the romantic lead in Tsui Hark's A Chinese Ghost Story, singing the theme song. The booed amateur was now the voice of Hong Kong romance.
The retirement that wasn't
In 1989, at the peak of his pop career, Leslie did what nobody at Capital Artists expected. He held a farewell concert series at the Hong Kong Coliseum, said he was leaving the music industry, and emigrated to Vancouver. He was 33. The reasons were a mix of the political — the 1989 crackdown in Beijing and the looming 1997 handover had every Hong Kong family having the Canada conversation — and the personal: he was exhausted by the rivalry the media had cooked up between him and Alan Tam, and the fan wars had turned ugly. He wanted to be done. He picked up film roles while he was away and figured music was over.
🎬 The textile degree he never finished
Before the mic and the camera, Leslie was studying textile management at the University of Leeds — a quiet, practical course picked for him by his tailor father. He lasted one year. When his dad had a stroke in 1976, he flew back to Hong Kong and never returned to finish the degree. He kept joking about it in interviews decades later: the only pop star in Hong Kong who could technically have gone into fabric manufacturing.
🎤 The 1997 Coliseum moment
At his 1997 Hong Kong Coliseum concert, Leslie performed Teresa Teng's 《月亮代表我的心》 and told the crowd he was dedicating it to his mother and to his partner, Daffy Tong (Tong Hok-tak). He had been with Daffy since the late 1980s. In a Hong Kong where celebrity sexuality was still spoken about in euphemism, saying it from a stage — calmly, in front of fans and cameras — landed like a thunderclap. He didn't do a sit-down interview to 'come out'. He just dedicated a love song. It is still the moment his fans quote first.
🎥 The Farewell My Concubine casting that nearly didn't happen
When Chen Kaige was casting Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine (1993) — a Peking Opera dan role that demanded a man convincingly embody a woman on and off stage — the production nearly went with a mainland star. Leslie learned Peking Opera from scratch and shot the film in Beijing, in Mandarin, which was not his first language. The film shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Chen Kaige later said Leslie lost Best Actor at Cannes by one vote because a jury member mistook him for a woman — a claim from the director's side, not an official result, but one that stuck.
🌛 The music video TVB banned
In 2001, Leslie directed the music video for his own song 'Bewildered' (《憑爲》). TVB refused to air it uncut, citing scenes that 'promoted homosexuality'. Leslie refused to cut them. The video played on the Internet instead — one of the earliest culture-war moments between a Cantopop artist and Hong Kong's biggest broadcaster, decided by a man who had already shown that he did not negotiate his own self down to fit a format.
In 1995 he came back to music with Beloved, a best-seller. In 1996 he released Red, an album and tour that leaned into androgyny, long hair, heels, and theatrical staging that would have been unthinkable at the time of 《Monica》. He was no longer a boy-next-door singing covers of Japanese pop. He was the person your Cantonese parents disapproved of, then quietly bought the album.
The 1 April 2003 the city still remembers
On 1 April 2003, Leslie Cheung died by suicide, jumping from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Central. He was 46. His suicide note cited depression, and his partner Daffy and his family later confirmed he had been in clinical treatment for over a year. Hong Kong was already in the middle of the SARS epidemic, and the city was afraid to gather. Tens of thousands of fans came to his memorial anyway. In Taiwan, Mainland China, Japan, Vancouver and London, Cantonese communities put up photos in their windows. For a generation, 1 April stopped being April Fool's Day and became 哥哥的生日 — Big Brother's day. His fans still gather at the Mandarin Oriental's steps every year.
Why the Cantonese diaspora still carries him
If you grew up in a Cantonese household in Toronto, San Francisco or Sydney in the 1990s or 2000s, there is a non-trivial chance you heard 《Monica》 or 《月亮代表我的心》 at a wedding, in a taxi, or coming out of your parents' CD player on a Sunday morning. Leslie travels with the diaspora the way Jacky Cheung and Andy Lau do, except where they stand for discipline and work ethic, he stands for the opposite thing — the courage to drop the mask the industry gave you.
He also made it safe, retroactively, for a lot of Cantonese men to be softer, more layered, more themselves in public. The 靓仔 Leng Zai oversized tee is a direct nod to that lineage — 'handsome guy' in Cantonese is not a shallow compliment, it carries style and self-possession, and 哥哥 was the archetype.
The Cantonese word Leslie made famous
The nickname fans still use is a Cantonese kinship term, not a stage name:
哥哥
go1 go1 — Jyutping romanisation
Meaning: Older brother. Also an affectionate honorific for an older male friend.
Explanation: On film sets, the younger co-stars called Leslie 哥哥 because he was the senior actor who looked after them. He was reportedly famously kind to junior cast, and the nickname stuck. In the years since his death, the whole fandom has kept using it — saying 'Leslie' in English feels distant, 'Mr Cheung' feels formal, '哥哥' feels like family.
And if you've ever been told you break mirrors because of how good you look — which is a Cantonese compliment, not an insult — the 靓爆鏡 Mirror Breaks sweatshirt is in the same lineage as the '87 Leslie posters.
What he leaves behind
An asteroid, 55383 Cheungkwokwing, carries his name. His fans set a Guinness record for the most origami cranes folded for one person: 1,956,921 — a nod to his 1956 birth year. His films still play in Hong Kong repertory cinemas every April. The city renamed a stretch of pavement near the Mandarin Oriental in his memory. What he actually gave the Cantonese world, though, isn't marked on any plaque: he showed a generation of us that you can be unapologetically yourself in a culture that prefers you be useful, and that the booing stops eventually, and that if it doesn't, you can sing anyway. Explore more Hong Kong cinema stories like Stephen Chow's or the 廣東仔 CANTONESE GUY oversized tee if you want to wear that identity.
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