I met Aaron Kwok when I was a kid at a banquet for his crew and entourage. He was performing in Hunan, and somehow my mom—usually indifferent, if not downright dismissive of my sister’s diehard fandom—had scored us “staff” passes.
I was walking by his seat when he suddenly stuck his arm out to block me from passing. “Hi! What’s your name?” he asked in Cantonese.
I felt my cheeks getting hot. Not only was he a boy, but he was forcing me to speak in Cantonese—a language I felt immensely self-conscious about growing up in Hong Kong as a half-European, half-Chinese kid with a gwai mui (鬼妹, white girl) accent.
Plus, there was the whole issue of him being a Cantopop superstar whom I had seen on TV, in magazines, on Yes! collectible cards, and plastered all over my sister’s bedroom wall.
“It’s Tung Tung,” I replied in Cantonese.
“Oh! So, what’s your English name? Is it…Tung Tung?” cheekily putting an English accent on my Chinese name. The disarming, down-to-earth joke coming from Kwok was too much for my shy seven-year-old brain, and I squirmed past him, mumbling something about needing the bathroom.
At the time, I didn’t understand how big a deal it was—one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Cantopop teasing me in Cantonese. Looking back, it feels like brushing up against what I now realize was Hong Kong’s golden era of pop culture. Little did I know, for a brief moment in the 1980s–1990s, our small city’s music, TV, and movies spilled into living rooms, karaoke bars, and cinemas around the world—shaping the imagination of future audiences.
Growing Up As An Insider-Outsider
I was born in Hong Kong in 1986 to a Belgian father who had moved here in the 1970s for a telecommunications job, and a first-generation Hong Konger mother whose family immigrated from Chaozhou to escape the Second Sino-Japanese War.
My sisters and I grew up speaking English as the household language, as well as the language of the international schools we attended. Many other mixed kids I knew didn’t speak Cantonese at all, but my mother made sure we learned what she could impart, which was successful to varying degrees. The joke was always that I looked the most Chinese of the sisters, but spoke the worst Chinese. Aunties and uncles giggled at my gwai mui accent, which only made me feel more embarrassed. To protect myself from feeling stupid, I leaned away from my Chinese identity.
What kept me plugged into local culture was doing what younger siblings usually do—copying my older sister. My world was still mostly cartoons, while my sister—nine years older and firmly in her Gen X teen years—lived and breathed Hong Kong pop culture, despite not being fluent in Cantonese herself.
I quietly observed her obsession with Kwok: playing his music, watching his live performances on TV, thumbing through Yes! magazine—a teen magazine that defined Hong Kong fandom in the ’90s.
She also watched Faye Wong and Sammi Cheng music videos, swooned over actor Kenny Ho, and rented Wong Kar-wai and Fruit Chan films. She also watched the occasional violent triad movie I wasn’t supposed to see, but that I sneakily caught glimpses of—with the same curiosity I felt peeking through the tinted windows of seedy video arcades, which my mom always told me to avoid.
There were moments we engaged with the culture as a family, too: watching the Miss Hong Kong pageant, laughing at the ridiculous celebrity games in variety show Super Trio Series (獎門人系列), or admiring Leslie Cheung’s performance in Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬).
For me, it was all more voyeurism than participation. Too young to swoon over idols, I arbitrarily declared Sandy Lam my favorite Cantopop singer because I knew and liked her 1987 hit song “Grey” (灰色). Jacky Cheung was my favorite of the Four Heavenly Kings, probably because he was the least conventionally handsome. It was less about fandom than about staking a small claim in a world that didn’t fully feel like mine.
Even then, I sensed it was more than just entertainment. These singers, films, and TV shows were small access points—a bridge into a Hong Kong Chinese identity I often felt estranged from. But it wasn’t until I became a pre-teen in 1996 that I found my real on-ramp: TVB’s Journey to the West.
I already knew and loved the 16th-century Chinese novel through an English book set adaptation for kids, but seeing it come to life on screen in Cantonese was something else. I was obsessed. The series was so popular that it became one of the rare TVB shows dubbed for the broadcasting company’s English channel.
My Cantonese improved two or threefold over its run, and by the finale, I emerged with a new identity: a pre-teen who watched TVB, bought Karen Mok CDs, sang karaoke with friends, and laughed defiantly at the Stephen Chow mo lei tau (無厘頭, nonsensical) slapstick comedies my mother dismissed as vulgar.
That phase ended when I entered high school, but the seeds were planted. Those fragments of Hong Kong pop culture I picked up as a kid turned out to be part of something bigger.
Realizing the World Was Watching
I left Hong Kong for New York City when I was 17, convinced that whatever magic I felt in Cantopop or TVB dramas was a small, insular thing. Hong Kong was known abroad as a financial hub, not a cultural capital. Yes, Bruce Lee and kung fu movies had made their mark internationally, but I thought the rest of our pop culture—low-budget TV dramas, formulaic songwriting—was second-rate compared to the West. And besides, who outside of Canton would ever consume something in Cantonese?
It didn’t take long to realize I was wrong. In college, Chinese American friends were actually envious that I’d grown up with direct access to TVB. Even people with zero Chinese heritage surprised me: a Puerto Rican friend once suggested we watch Kung Fu Hustle, while at another movie night, a friend from Baltimore put on Chungking Express.
Over time, I saw how Hong Kong culture had traveled to many places. I met Mandarin speakers from the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan who casually picked up Cantonese because they’d consumed so much of our music and TV. Indonesians who worshipped Andy Lau. Vietnamese people who’ve never been to Hong Kong but know the names of our neighborhoods, having seen them endlessly replayed in films.
Beyond my personal experiences with people, we’ve seen the ’80s–’90s Hong Kong have an outsized impact on the world. While Japan was the Asian leader of the idol economy at the time, Hong Kong proved that a small city could create pan-Asian stars with fan clubs, magazines, and merchandising that crossed borders.
Likewise, Hong Kong essentially rewrote the genre of action filmmaking. John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled pioneered a distinctive style of action film that Hollywood directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowskis borrowed heavily from.
And now, in the 2020s—thirty or forty years removed from this golden era—the reverberations are everywhere. It’s not current-day Hong Kong we see reflected—it’s the retro charm of neon shop signs and steaming dai pai dongs, which are increasingly difficult to come by today. Or the distinctive saturated hues of a Wong Kar-wai film. These scenes are immortalized through our cinema and now live in the world’s collective imagination of Hong Kong.
But this golden age isn’t just nostalgia—it’s raw material for new cultural futures. Instagram and TikTok are full of HK nostalgia edits, putting a modern spin and point of view on clips from the past. Gen Z travelers come not just for the Peak and Victoria Harbour, but to wander Sham Shui Po or Chungking Mansions because they’ve seen them on screen. The viral “pre-wedding” photos by Vietnamese photographer Vũ Thụy Khuê, aka Kemmie The Cat, were fresh photos that channeled Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels so well that many insisted that they must be taken from ’80s–’90s Hong Kong.
But how did a small Asian city—crammed into a footprint a third the size of New York and speaking a local language—manage such an outsized reach in the pre-internet era?
How The Golden Era Emerged
In an interview, Canadian photographer Greg Girard said, “Every place goes through an evolution on its way to becoming its most authentically realized version of itself. For Hong Kong, up until now, it has to be that period in the ’80s and ’90s where Hong Kong’s popular culture was not only consumed in HK but also exported around the world.”
He’s right. And that golden era wasn’t random—it came from very specific conditions. By the 1970s, Hong Kong had shifted from a “refugee mentality” to a confident local identity. Generations were now born and raised here, and Cantonese was no longer just for the street market—it became the language of pop music, thanks to Sam Hui’s everyday lyrics that made people proud of their own vernacular.
At the same time, Hong Kong’s booming economy in its late colonial period fueled an entertainment industry that was more ambitious, polished, and prolific than ever before. The looming 1997 handover back to China added urgency: people didn’t know what the future would bring, so they doubled down on what felt uniquely Hong Kong.
The result? An explosion of pop culture that was hyperlocal in flavor but cosmopolitan enough to resonate across Asia and beyond. It was self-actualization on a citywide scale: a moment when uncertainty mixed with newfound confidence to create a culture so distinctive it still echoes today.
The Glow Lives On
Looking back, I’m floored by how much I underestimated the reach of what I once thought of as low-budget and amateur. What felt like cheap entertainment turned out to be some of Hong Kong’s greatest cultural exports. I was growing up within it, never realizing I was living through a golden age.
Over time, the pop culture of ’80s–’90s Hong Kong has become an important bridge to my own identity. The things that once felt silly or throwaway are now what connect me to others. They’re the shorthand I share with Hong Kong Chinese who grew up in a completely different world from my mixed international school upbringing, with diaspora friends across the globe, and even with non-Chinese people who discovered our films and culture in their own way. It’s in quoting lines from cult classic All’s Well, Ends Well (家有囍事) with its trademark Stephen Chow humor, or in debating which Heavenly King of Cantopop reigns supreme.
What makes that time so unique is that it’s frozen—it can never quite happen again. Hong Kong has, of course, continued to contribute to global culture after the handover: Jackie Chan in Hollywood’s Rush Hour as a post-handover Hong Kong Police Force Chief Inspector, or Infernal Affairs (無間道) reborn as Hollywood’s The Departed.
More recently, the worldwide Labubu craze—created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung—is produced and sold exclusively by the China-based retailer POP MART, and most people just know it as “Chinese.” That’s the difference: after 1997, Hong Kong’s output has been folded into China’s broader cultural story, rather than standing apart as distinctly Hong Kong. In many ways, this golden era helped lay the groundwork for today’s Chinese pop culture boom.
And so, I find myself strangely proud—not just of the global impact, but of having been there when Hong Kong’s culture was at its most self-actualized, bold, and resonant. Of realizing, years later, that the neon glow I grew up under was something the whole world would see.
Cover image courtesy of the author.
