happy wild, farewell tomorrow: the life and legacy of leslie cheung
TW: discussion of clinical depression, homophobia and suicide
哥哥* took his life 18 years ago.
Hong Kong is quite balmy in April. I would imagine this to be the case in 2003, when air conditioners were guttural and slopped exhaust water from its engines when overworked. The heat almost takes on a wispy quality as it settles slowly onto your skin; its sheen becoming pallid in the dimming yellow of street lamps standing tall and presiding over the ruckus taking place underneath them. Sometimes it is the whine of traffic, sometimes it is footwork. Sometimes it is the shrill, toothy Cantonese overlapping in the air, insults and business inquiries that continue to linger long after its patrons have thundered off elsewhere, out of sight, out of mind. I have had the privilege to see Hong Kong as it was: from above, and anyone else who has done the same knows well that the sight is staggering in its beauty. I have often thought that I would want that very spectacle to be my final sight.
When Leslie Cheung jumped from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong’s most swanky business district, he upended an entire nation on its head.
At first, I could not grasp how a bygone star who had only barely managed to sneak into the crevice of mainstream Western media had elicited such a reaction. I would not have been much older than sixteen when I was first made aware of his existence, through a baseless question to my mother about who this person was and why the tabloids were drenched with images of the same man. I remembered finding that he was starkly handsome. I liked the way his features were carefully evened out, symmetrically bound, and how he had a strong philtrum like me (which at the time I despised.) I was particularly taken aback by the lightness that danced in his eyes, and even more bewildered by the fact that someone so mourned by my own people had evaded my knowledge.
I asked if he was well-known.
“Of course,” my mum’s eyes were a bit glazed. “Everyone was a little bit in love with Leslie.”
I have been agonising over how to write about Leslie Cheung.
I doubt my own capacity to spell out his influence in all the spheres he dominated, least of all the ability to convey how he wrested the hearts of millions and then plunged them into grief with his passing. That I am even a passable cultural authority on him, as someone who had been but four years old when he died strengthens the argument that I will not know how it was like for those who loved and experienced him and lost him in real time. Yet I am determined to write about Leslie Cheung; not simply about his twenty-six year career spanning music, performance, acting, and not even about the controversies that bled into his life — from societally upheld homophobia and political estrangement from the Chinese government, and unacceptance from his own family and former lovers.
I want to write about Leslie as a spectral presence in my life, and in others. What I mean by this is that I want to examine the visceral emotions he inspires in his art and body of work, and the eternality of his cult following that continue to stream, watch, and hold space for him as time continues to stretch on. I will focus on the delineations of identity, performance, discography — because those are the three spheres in which he has wielded the most influence over me. Leslie’s enshrinement as a queer masthead who is forever loved and a cultural forefather of Cantopop is doubly extraordinary, and after reading this piece I hope you leave with an iota more as to why this was the case.
Affectionately coined 哥哥 by the masses, Leslie breached norms and ceilings in a Hong Kong that was uncertain of its identity: eager to individualise as a separate entity from the motherland, but also detached from the colonial bastion which governed it. The asymmetries of Hong Kong identity was something that he embodied in all avenues of his work and he made haste to shed himself of the responsibilities that came with having to adhere to either. Indigenising the social commentary central to Cantopop’s stake in greater contemporary Chinese music (Fai 2011), and doing so as an openly queer idol was something that was unheard of in the 80s.
Yet it was within that climate that he sprung onto the scene, hot off schooling in Leeds, United Kingdom (Parkes 2021) armed with the still-cooling knowledge that he was small fry from a small fishing town. Leslie’s metamorphosis can be likened to the city and its occupants in so many ways: our quest for identity, our unique meld of east-meets-west, and the cultural intricacies that filter into those pockets of difference; and sometimes fighting against them. Though loved and flaunted to no end, he was gravely misunderstood — and this is something deeply resonant for a lot of Hong Kongers. The local press crucified his ‘flamboyant dress,’ and did not shirk from reading into his relationships with men and women alike. The Chinese Government banned Farewell My Concubine, the film that propelled Leslie into the eyes of the mainstream, citing its ‘unsavoury’ depiction of homosexuality and the communist party in the 50s (Parkes 2021.) On the other hand, western media held him to a slightly different standard. The distance from Chinese hegemony at the time allowed for white appraisal; Leslie’s acceptance as an openly queer icon hinging on the fact that he wasn’t too ‘Chinese,’ spoke flawless English and had the looks to rival James Dean. In short, he was tasked with the impossible: performing to the nightmarish standards that both raced and gendered presentation demanded of him.
It is crucial to denote that he did not buy into either.
When the region was still mired in British conservatism and the filial reservations of the mainland, he eschewed both. Leslie, like so many of us, struggled with voided identities. He walked a very thin line that would have been socially calamitous had he surrendered to one over the other, yet he managed to do exactly that.
Of course, one of the ways this manifested in his body of work was through music, or more notably, his role as a Cantopop legend. Leslie did not adhere to the compulsive masculinity that many other male stars donned in that era. When greats like Andy Lau, Leon Lai, Aaron Kwok and Jacky Cheung played into those rigidly enforced astigmatisms, Leslie chose to forge his own path in the creative industry. Down to his signature red pumps, which he often paired with dresses and a heavily made up face, Leslie would fill stadiums and amphitheatres teeming with zealous fans and put on a show.
The actual elements of his music also became an outlet of self expression. My two most beloved tracks, Thanks Monica and 風繼續吹* encapsulates the ferocious range of the human experience — the fabled highs of his relationships told in syncopated, contagious beats to soundscapes dedicated to his former loves immortalised in sentimental croons. I alighted on these two songs in particular because they are connected by an underlying theme of remembrance — honouring the passing of time with someone special. Thanks Monica is a triumph, and the latter a ballad. Yet both manage to capture the power of nostalgia as a drug; the stream of aching memories of somebody who was once someone significant to you. Freewheeling through the songs dredges up my own visceral emotions in ways that are achingly familiar, not to mention accessible to all. Leslie’s music is akin to putting a face to a name — the association of something fixed and known sliding neatly into place in your own life and experiences.
Finally, I want to consider the onscreen performances which greatly shaped the momentous highs of Leslie’s career - notably in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. Alongside Tony Leung, Leslie made waves with his performance as the jaded, capricious lover of Leung who lived day to day for the thrill and very little else. The film transcended geopolitical and sexual spaces, jumping from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong as the film attempted to linearize the love affair between the two men as they grappled for redemption in one another. In their search for home, they diminish their bonds with one another and their origins, co-opting desire from both the contextual perspective of Chinese queer men as they travel aimlessly across the globe.
Leslie remains at the juncture of Hong Kong identity because he, like the city, mirrored the beginning and the end. His trajectory parallels that of my home; chronicling the passing of time and abrupt loss of something well-worn, sensing the displacement that follows. His spirit and his legacy is buoyed by the intrinsic fact that this is a reality that we as Hong Kongers understand intimately. Though our history can be marked by rise and fall by the emerging powers that hope to cradle and sometimes suffuse, we do not let it consume who we are. We kick and fight and demand to be recognised, to be temporally unbound by the restrictions of homophobia and racism, because that is what 哥哥 had done.
On the eve of Leslie’s commemoration concert in 2013, Tony Leung shared that he had accidentally dialed his number — when it connected, he heard a familiar voice say, “Please leave a message.”
Tony mentioned, “I felt like leaving a voice message and said, “Why don’t we start all over again?”
This callback to Happy Together, in which Leslie’s character professes that exact line to Tony’s is not lost on the world. This world which he had pivoted his image and expression to the forefront of, regardless of the consequences. I think of his lush artistry, his performances which eclipsed genre and gender and political realms alike. I think of the transcendental state of being I find myself in when I listen to his songs; the high strummy beats near hallucinogenic and the lows charting my own internal struggles. I think of the future generation of queer and queer emerging Sino-Cantonese hopefuls, who may find a bridge to their culture and their identities in Leslie.
There is a profound, twisted sorrow in his death. But in his rest, 哥哥 leaves signs of life.
哥哥*, gor gor, affectionate term for elder brother in Cantonese
風繼續吹*, Wind Keeps on Blowing and my favourite song by Leslie
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