Leslie Cheung Deserves Better Than this

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Review of by Nigel Collett, Signal 8 Press, Hong Kong, 2014.

by British author Nigel Collett is the first biography of Hong Kong superstar Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing to appear in English. Collett spent 10 years researching and writing this book and in the introduction Collette characterizes it as “the brief and provisional story of his [Cheung’s] life” and an “attempt to understand Leslie’s achievement and the cause of his death.” The book is described as “a first step in bringing Leslie to the notice of the English-speaking world.” (15-16)

[if !supportEmptyParas] The actual book is something rather different from the author’s description. Those unfamiliar with Leslie Cheung, especially outside of Asia, will hardly gain much insight into why Cheung is held in such high esteem in Hong Kong and throughout Asia, a superstar not only in film but likewise in popular music. Because family and friends of Leslie Cheung declined Collett’s requests for interviews, he relied almost exclusively on previously released information in the form of published articles and interviews, musical recordings, and video recordings. Collett, however, utilizes anonymous sources that raises a number of troubling methodological and ethical issues.

[if !supportEmptyParas] A number of fatal flaws are evident in the approach Collett adopted in this biography. He is almost entirely uncritical in his use of published sources despite the fact that it is well-known Leslie Cheung was not always well-loved or treated even-handedly by the Hong Kong media. There is also the issue of Leslie’s own statements made in interviews by this often hostile press. To say Leslie he had an adversarial relationship with many in the Hong Kong media is not to overstate the case. An opportunity was missed to delve more deeply into the complex dance that Leslie performed with an intrusive and often adversarial media throughout his career. To understand why there are so many contradictions in Leslie’s statements to the press, especially about his private life over the years requires a more serious and sustained examination of this issue than is found in this book. Collett mostly ascribes Leslie’s contradictory statements to an attempt to disguise his homosexuality from the press. While there certainly is a kernel of truth to this, it is evident that more is behind many of Cheung’s pronouncements to the press. This is a major issue since it concerns Cheung’s self-presentation to the public and begs for a much deeper analysis than Collett provides.

[if !supportEmptyParas] Collett also displays a troubling tendency to try and force Leslie Cheung into the role of tortured gay man. A great deal of attention is paid to Leslie’s adolescence and early adulthood, just the period of time that Leslie worked hardest to keep veiled from prying eyes. This is the period about which we have the sketchiest information and when Collett relies heavily on his anonymous sources for information about Leslie’s sexual orientation and private life. As we are never told who these informants are, it is impossible to judge not only the veracity of their statements about this murky period in Leslie’s life, but also to know if they have an agenda where Leslie is concerned. Because Leslie was so good-looking, popular successful and eventually quite wealthy, he inspired a certain amount of jealousy in Hong Kong. Not everyone who calls himself Leslie’s friend is necessarily what he appears to be.

[if !supportEmptyParas] A second problem encountered in Collett’s treatment of Leslie’s sexual orientation is more fundamental. Collett appears to view sexual orientation in binary terms, i.e., straight or gay (at least where Leslie is concerned). The fact that Leslie had romantic  and even sexual relationships with women, and proposed to at least one of his girlfriends during this period of time is dismissed by Collett. He views Leslie during this period of his life as a deeply tortured homosexual trying to act in accordance with the norms of a heterosexual society. In many ways Collett wants to define Leslie primarily by his sexual orientation, attributing much of his greatness as a performer as well as the debilitating mental illness at the end of his life that led to his suicide to his homosexuality.  Collett as a gay man raised in England in the 1960s and 70s had his own personal experiences related to that sexual orientation. But he is all too ready to transfer his own experiences onto Leslie, who was born in a later era and in a very different culture and family, as if they are universal and equally applicable to all gay men.

[if !supportEmptyParas] The only statement Leslie made to the press specifically about his sexual orientation was to the American film critic Roger Corliss in a 2000 interview for Time Magazine. In that interview Leslie described himself as bisexual. Collett dismisses Leslie’s statement as another example of his inability to be honest with the press and public about his true sexual orientation. But by 2000 Leslie had been in a long-term relationship with another man for close to 20 years. This fact was by then well-known to both the press and general public in Hong Kong. Leslie had nothing to gain or lose by not being honest at this point in his career. Rather than examining why Leslie might have made this statement at this time, to this individual, for this English-language foreign-based publication, Collett simply dismisses it and moves on. Leslie displayed an amazing ability to perform gender on stage and screen. Rather than presenting a binary, black and white, straight or gay image of gender and sexuality, Leslie treated it in performance as a continuum from one pole (straight) to the opposite pole (gay) with a great deal of gray area between that combines features of both genders. He appeared to delight in positioning himself in ever shifting places along this spectrum. Sadly, such an analysis of Cheung’s treatment of gender is not to be found in Collett’s book.

[if !supportEmptyParas] Collett’s biography of Leslie Cheung is basically merely a detailed chronicling of Leslie’s life presented year by year, month by month, week by week, and event by event. A brief synopsis (unfortunately not always accurate) of every movie and documented tour Leslie made is included. Very quickly it becomes a numbing catalog of details, each treated with equal importance. In the midst of so much undifferentiated information, Cheung’s greatness as a performer gets lost. Rather than placing Leslie’s film roles in the larger context of Hong Kong cinema in its golden age in the 1980s and 90s, we merely get synopses of the films one after another. There is a lot of description, but painfully little analysis.

[if !supportEmptyParas] When we come to Leslie’s musical career, the treatment is even more disappointing. There is little discussion of the broad outlines of Cantopop and no real in-depth analysis of how Leslie revolutionized the recording industry in the 1980s. Similarly, there is precious little analysis of his staged musical shows, only more repetitive description. Cheung’s musical career, every bit as influential and perhaps even more popular with audiences than his film career, is precisely the area that Westerners know the least about. In fact, most Western audiences don’t even know that Leslie was a singer and mesmerizing live performer, and that he was the premier male musical icon of his era! This is another huge missed opportunity if this book is genuinely aimed at Western audiences. Collett is also inaccurate in saying that many of Leslie’s CDs are no longer in print. In fact, all of the Universal/Access Music CDs were reissued in a boxed set in 2011 and more have been reissued as individual discs since then.

[if !supportEmptyParas] Collett also does little with the music videos that Leslie starred in and sometimes wrote and directed from 1996 onwards. Many of them are more like short art house films than they are standard music videos, and these videos in which Leslie’s creative hand are so evident clearly demonstrate Leslie’s approach to music and film. Collett does not appear to have studied them closely at all and even conflates two different videos, for the songs “I” and “Big Heat,” into one! Similar odd mistakes are also evident in Collett’s descriptions of the musical shows (that are well-documented on DVD even now and readily available 10 years after Cheung’s death). It is a shame that Collett didn’t examine the abundant available primary sources with greater care.

[if !supportEmptyParas] Additional potentially fruitful areas of inquiry are also regretable absent from Collett’s book. Leslie Cheung was a new type of iconic superstar in Hong Kong. It would be very helpful to discuss Leslie in terms of his celebrity and the celebrity culture that both created Leslie the icon, and that Leslie the artist helped to redefine. A great deal of work has been done in academic circles on the subject of celebrity and it would be interesting to see what Leslie Cheung could contribute to this topic.

[if !supportEmptyParas] This also brings up the question of fans and fandom, again an area that is very important in discussing the life and after-life of Leslie Cheung. Collett interviews one fan, Amanda Lee, who first met Leslie when she was 8 years old in 1980 and was a volunteer with his fan organization until it was disbanded in 1989. But he plumbs her primarily for factual data about Leslie and does not appear to have questioned her about the fan experience during Leslie’s superstar icon phase. There is also the fundamental issue of the role of fans in the perpetuation and reshaping of Cheung’s legacy after his death. In many ways, this continual reshaping of Cheung’s life and legacy by fans presents those newly encountering Leslie Cheung with a different experience from what fans had during his lifetime. With Leslie’s explosive growth in popularity among certain segments of the population in Mainland China in recent years, we are currently witnessing another major reshaping of Leslie’s legacy. Finally, there is also the issue of Leslie now being the primary representative of some almost mythic golden age of Hong Kong from the 1970s until 2003. This era is now commonly seen to have come to a close with the SARS epidemic and the deaths of Leslie Cheung (in April )and Anita Mui (in December) of that year. So much added meaning now resides in the figure of Leslie Cheung for many citizens of Hong Kong, yet Collett never explores any of these critical issues around Cheung’s constantly developing legacy.

[if !supportEmptyParas] Collett set out wanting to write an intimate tell-all biography of Leslie Cheung, especially as regards his private life and sexual orientation. For reasons that remain unarticulated, those who knew Leslie declined to cooperate with the author. Collett gleaned what information he could from printed sources and a few anonymous informants, determined to follow the agenda he had set out for himself. But in his determination to produce such a work, he has missed the wealth of information about Leslie Cheung that is begging for exposition and analysis. Instead of taking on this challenge, Collett chose to take the easy path of simply providing a chronology of  Cheung’s life and work. This information is already readily available in English on several fan sites, which Collett himself heavily utilizes in his chronicle of the Life and Times of Leslie Cheung. Any trained scholar (as Collettt claims to be) knows that pet ideas and preconceived notions about a research topic often need to be reshaped or even relinquished in the face of what the research actually uncovers.. Rather than using the primary and secondary sources to develop his thesis, Collett seems to have approached his topic with hard and fast preconceived notions of who and what Leslie Cheung was. Instead of analyzing his source material in a way that might illuminate the issues he was attempting to explore in all their complexity, Collett simply minimizes and even dismisses information that doesn’t support his agenda, or tries to recast the facts by engaging in excessive supposition and risky extrapolation. In the end, this biography cannot be recommended as either a fair and representative picture of Leslie Cheung or as a well-written example of biography in general. The life, career, and after-life of Leslie Cheung is a marvelous topic for scholars and future biographers. Sadly, such a biography will have to waif for another author to write it..

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