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ABSTRACT
This paper considers the posthumous celebrity of Hong Kong singer and actor Leslie Cheung, taking into account his amplified profile among fan communities following his 2003 suicide. Through a site analysis of the now-closed Hanyuan Bookstore in Shanghai, a major site of pilgrimage for his fans, our work is structured through an analysis of the bookshop space as well as a reading of the compendium of handwritten fan letters left behind and addressed to Cheung beyond the grave. To this end, we argue for the necessary queerness of Cheung’s status as celebrity. This queerness is not only the product of his sexual identity and his relationship with Daffy Tong, but due to the spatio-temporal orientation of Hanyuan. With Cheung maintaining a posthumous presence in the space, Hanyuan embodies and instantiates multiple spatio-temporal registers and offers a space for affective re-orientation in face of the everyday, creating a commensurate site of proximity between living fan and deceased star. With Hanyuan standing as a unique site of pilgrimage linking past and future and enhancing already-held parasocial relations, this paper equally considers the geographic particularities of Cheung’s posthumous celebrity status within a more complex field of contemporary Chinese-speaking popular culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The 2020 Weibo hashtag #LeslieCheung912HappyBirthday received 460 million views and 748 thousand discussions this past year. The 2020 Weibo hashtag #17YearsContinueAdoringLeslieCheung, in honour of his death, had received 11 million views and 30 thousand discussions at the time of writing.
2. The second author visited Hanyuan Bookstore on 12 March 2017, several months prior to its closing.
3. All translations from Mandarin into English by the second author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ana Howe Bukowski
Ana Howe Bukowski is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Their research interests attend to the relationships between public access television, artists’ uses of broadcast technologies, community video practices, and queer histories of music and the moving image, all with an emphasis upon the regional context of Los Angeles. Their work been published in Spectator (forthcoming), the International Journal of Communication Studies, and popular outlets including Canadian Art and The FADER.
Junyi Lv
Junyi Lv is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. She holds a Masters Degree also from USC Annenberg and a Bachelor degree in Broadcasting Journalism from China. Her research interests lie in the entanglement of humans and non-humans, public spheres, and social media entertainment. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and International Journal of Communication.