Hilton Cheong-Leen, who was 100 at the time of his death in the Chinese tradition of counting age, was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1922, the son of a Chinese immigrant father and a third-generation Chinese mother. The family left for Hong Kong when Cheong-Leen was nine. He enrolled at the prestigious La Salle College, a Catholic school in Kowloon Tong, when it opened in 1932 and started working at a bank immediately after he graduated.