Flowers, Flowers

Shelly texted me this weekend, urging me to get down to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel with our camera, telling me that there were loads and loads of white roses and other flowers on the corner, all in tribute to some guy named Leslie.

She wasn't kidding.

Turns out that it was a memorial for Leslie Cheung, a Hong Kong-born singer and actor who committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the hotel April 1, 2003. Cheung was one of the founders of Cantopop (Cantonese pop music) and his memorial service was apparently a huge deal: tens of thousands people from around the world came to Hong Kong in the middle of the SARS scare for the service (which, according to Wikipedia, was also called "Yellow Pneumonia." Hmmm.)