On a spring morning at a concert hall in Toronto, Denise Ho, a queen of the Hong Kong genre known as Cantopop, prepared to appease the gods. Posters on either side of the stage door advertised her tour through Canada, where she spent her formative years, and California. An entourage of assistants and stagehands scurried around unloading speakers, costume bags, and equipment cases. Ho, a lean, athletic-looking woman of forty-one, wore a green bomber jacket and hiking boots. Her face was set in a steely expression of self-possession and purposefulness, which gave her the appearance of a cross between a soldier and a minor Buddhist deity.

Ho walked to a table, just outside the door, that was covered with a bright-red cloth. She ignited a few sticks of incense and bowed her head. The practice was a pre-performance custom common in Cantonese opera, a vernacular music tradition that is one of Cantopop’s precursors: artists call on the heavens for protection and appeal to the local spirits to forgive any disturbance that the performance might cause.

Ho said that she doesn’t believe in God, but that the spiritual element of life is important to her. “Rituals are different from belief,” she told me, and this ceremony was “an homage to the past, and performed out of respect rather than fear.” Since meeting the Dalai Lama, in 2016, she has taken to burning sage to “purify the energy” around her. The acrid scent follows her wherever she goes.

If a sense of the spiritual anchors Ho’s personal life, it is her political convictions that have come to define her public persona. Six years ago, she became the first major female star in Hong Kong to come out as gay, a significant move in a society that remains culturally conservative. Then, in 2014, during what became known as the Umbrella Revolution—protesters held up umbrellas as a protection against teargas—she joined thousands of people demonstrating against Beijing’s encroachments on the autonomy of Hong Kong. (In 1842, China ceded Hong Kong Island to the British, who gave it back with additional territory in 1997, in an agreement that secures certain privileges of self-governance for the territory.)

At the protests, Ho and a number of other Cantopop singers performed a song, “Raise the Umbrella,” that became the anthem of the movement. In the third month of demonstrations, she was arrested. The footage of her being led away by police furnished one of the enduring images of the protests. On the Chinese mainland, where Ho had been a burgeoning star, and where most of her income came from, she became persona non grata. State media outlets called her “a poison of Hong Kong,” and one editorial warned that the mainland sales Ho depended on were far from guaranteed: “Don’t think you can eat our food and smash our pots at the same time.” Since then, her music has been rigorously purged from streaming platforms in China, and she is banned from having a social-media presence there. As Beijing chips away at Hong Kong’s freedoms, Ho has become an emblematic figure of the territory—embattled, emboldened, and unbeholden.

In person, Ho can be pensive, introverted, even awkward, but something inside her is released once she walks onstage. At the Toronto concert, when the stage lights came up, the outline of her silhouette materialized, to feral applause and hoots. Her slender frame, clad in a khaki trenchcoat and shiny black ankle boots, seemed to fill the stage, as she pranced around her microphone stand, the drums, and the backup vocalists, like a mischievous child hamming it up and pretending not to know that she’s being watched.

Cantopop is often dismissed as mass-produced pabulum. Many of the genre’s songs, slickly manufactured for a swooning teen audience, lean heavily on idealized, treacly romance—a litany of bad breakups and hopeless crushes. The performers are often Bambi-eyed maidens and clean-cut swains who have not necessarily been recruited for their vocal gifts. But the music can be almost lethally catchy, and perfecting the genre’s blend of Western-style melodic lines, Eastern-style pentatonic ones, and electronic disco beats requires skill. Songwriting in Cantonese, the dominant language of Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, presents particular challenges. Chinese languages are tonal—the same phoneme has different meanings depending on how it rises or falls—and Cantonese has many more tones than Mandarin, the dominant language of the mainland. Writing a melody that fits the contour of a sentence, or finding words to fit a preëxisting melody, is notoriously difficult.

Cantopop’s influence extends far beyond Hong Kong. For a generation or more, it was a leading pop genre across Asia—with sizable followings not only on the mainland but also in Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. And, in spite of the music’s more formulaic features, its greatest stars have managed to shape striking personas and produce songs of real expressive power. Denise Ho is one of them. Her songs often twist Cantopop’s formulas in audacious ways, and her voice, though agile in the silvery high register favored by female performers, can shift within a few beats to a forceful, earthy contralto that seems to issue straight from her solar plexus.

At the end of the Toronto performance, Ho stood at the edge of the stage and addressed her fans. This was the first time she had performed in North America since her politics had derailed her career. “In the past three years, a lot of things happened,” she said. The mood in the hall shifted, and the people next to me set down their beers and hunched forward. “I can no longer be a simple singer like I was in the past,” Ho continued. “I actually took a pause in writing. But, at the beginning of this year, I suddenly felt that it was time to re-start the creative process.” She cleared her throat. Her eyes shone. “I believe in the power of creation—even in times as dire as these.”

In “Seeking,” a memoir Ho wrote just before she turned forty, she considers the distinction between “home” and “roots,” and suggests that the latter are more malleable than most people assume. “Like resilient plants, people’s roots regenerate over time,” she said. But the place that feels to her most like home is a stone-façade house in a suburb of Montreal, where her family lived after moving from Hong Kong, in 1988, when she was eleven. Her parents eventually sold the house and moved back to Hong Kong, in order to be closer to her, but she has vowed that she will buy it the next time it comes on the market, regardless of where she happens to be living.

“I make a pilgrimage every time I’m in Montreal,” she told me as we stood outside the house, the morning after she performed a concert in the city. The branches of a Japanese lilac swayed in the front yard, and Ho pointed to her bedroom window. Her parents and her brother, who had come from Hong Kong for the tour, were making the pilgrimage, too. Ho’s mother, Janny, wore jeans covered in street-art-style designs; her father, Henry, whom Ho closely resembles, made a clown face when she held up her phone to take a picture. A young woman pushing a stroller passed, and then an older couple, hand in hand. A few yards past the house, the man turned around and called out, “Henry, is that you?”