Where Hong Kong's Stars Buy, Buy, Buy: A Cambodian Heiress, North Point's Eyewear Queen | Hong Kong Streets ⑯

"Hong Kong Streets" is a QDaily contributors' column that sets out to sketch, as quickly and as fully as it can, a place that is changing fast.

At 278 King's Road in North Point stands Peace Optical. England's queen is an ocean away; the one who holds court inside this shop is Hong Kong's own "eyewear queen."

Wall after wall of eyeglasses. The décor is plain and still stuck in the 1970s, but this is where the fashionable come to hunt for treasure. Jacky Cheung, the God of Songs; Yao Lee, one of the seven great singing stars of old Shanghai; Hilary Tsui, wife of the other God of Songs, Eason Chan; Josie Ho, daughter of the Casino King; Alex To; Ricky Hui — all of them have been customers here, or guests of honor. Even the late Lydia Shum — Fei Jie, "Big Sister Fat," the woman who kept Hong Kong laughing — built her signature look on a wardrobe of extravagant cat-eye glasses, and that too was Mrs. Tang's doing.

Mrs. Tang, the proprietress, wears oversized black "fly-eye" sunglasses, a scarf knotted at her throat, denim on denim. She looks nothing like a woman in her seventies; there is real socialite poise about her.

The Tangs were overseas Chinese from Cambodia. They came to Hong Kong in 1973 and opened the shop in 1974. Over more than forty years, Mrs. Tang reckons, the stock has grown to ten thousand pairs. In the glass case in front of her the glasses are piled four layers deep — "like building a tower," she says, laughing. The muddle only makes the treasure hunt better. "Shops want new styles, so they're always clearing out the old ones. I take the old stock off their hands — stock so old you wouldn't believe it."

The shop is only forty-odd years old, yet some of the glasses in it are seventy; they go back to the 1940s and '50s. That she became the eyewear queen has everything to do with the wave of emigration before the 1997 handover, and with the financial crisis. The shop used to live off students from the schools nearby. Then, one after another, the old established optical shops around Fortress Hill shut down — some because their owners were leaving the country, some because the rent went up. What others threw away, she picked up.

An old employee knew where to look, too. The owners of the big optical shops on Nathan Road were in a hurry to emigrate: no credit, cash only, and they didn't mind selling cheap — one dollar to a dozen-odd dollars a pair, two or three thousand pairs at a time, plenty of them name brands. She didn't know that then; she only knew it was a bargain, so she bought boldly, cash down, at low prices, even dipping into her own private savings. Mr. Tang is resting up in the loft, and she suddenly drops her voice: "I told the staff to bring the stock in on the quiet, without telling Mr. Tang. We hid it on the roof and under the bed." She is glad she had the sense to take the loft space back then — she spent her dowry, HK$280,000, on the shop, and that gave her somewhere to stockpile. It is why their glasses became famous for being cheap: old overseas-Chinese gentlemen would come in and buy nearsighted lenses under 400 degrees for HK$100 a pair.

Fools have all the luck, as the saying goes. Mrs. Tang's foolish buying spree made Peace Optical famous overnight — a decade and more later.

In the 1990s a magazine reporter came to interview her. Only when the piece ran did she learn that the shop held discontinued Carrera frames, the very model Eason Chan had worn in a McDonald's commercial. The press started calling the place an "eyeglasses museum." That brought the Cable TV host Suzie Wong in to film a segment. "The Sunday after the show aired, people were trampling each other," she says. Box after box of old stock finally saw daylight.

"A woman came in that day and asked, 'Is the stock you've got here vintage, or is it fake?'" A housewife standing nearby tipped her off, and that was how Mrs. Tang learned it was Hilary Tsui, Eason Chan's wife. She pulled out box after box for Tsui to pick through, while Eason Chan's daughter stood to one side, up on tiptoe, posing at the mirror. "I let her try on whatever she liked and told her it was old stock. She knew her stuff — I couldn't have fooled her."

Tsui swept up sixteen pairs in the end, most of them the original Playboy style with a little metal white rabbit in the bottom right corner of the lens. Before she left she made a phone call: "Get over here! There's so much that would suit you — you'll buy loads, guaranteed." A little over an hour later Josie Ho, the Casino King's daughter, arrived with several photographers in tow. Mrs. Tang kept opening cartons; Ho picked hard and bought more than a hundred pairs — Balenciaga, Rodenstock and more. "On one pair I asked whether she wanted the fit adjusted," Mrs. Tang says. "She said she wasn't going to wear them. She bought them to hold their value."

Brand or no brand, Mrs. Tang sold everything cheap, under HK$1,000 a pair. "I can't read English, and I didn't know what I had." It was customers who told her the brand names, and only then did she learn them. But bad luck can turn out to be good: it was those knowing customers who made the shop's name.

Retro is in fashion now, and an old style left on the shelf long enough becomes an antique; the material in a good copy and the material in the real thing are worlds apart. Brands that have since disappeared — Ray-Ban from twenty-odd years ago, the original Playboy, Italy's Double Star, France's Lamy, Germany's Rodenstock, Yves Chantal — can all be found here. On the old Prada frames the leopard print was worked into the material; now it is sprayed on. She pulls open a drawer and takes out a pair from the French label Morel, the "cat label": the gold frame is real 14K. "Back then a tael of gold cost HK$280. Now it's more than ten thousand. There are fewer and fewer frames made of the real thing." None of these are for sale.

The proprietress's eye is inseparable from where she came from. Mrs. Tang, it turns out, was the daughter of a very rich family. Her father did not only trade in gold; he ran department stores, a record company, property and more, and he did well at it. A whole row of shops on the street belonged to him.

She wanted for nothing. Some days she knitted wool in the department store; other days she worked the record player in the record shop, spinning the Beatles, Zhang Lu and bands of every kind all day long. She haunted the cinema, too: she saw the Shaw Brothers black-and-white film Love Without End twice. The big house had a roof terrace fitted with a tape recorder and a video recorder, and the moment she was off work she would rush up there and, in the dark under the moon, listen to Yao Lee sing "I Can't Forget You."

That old life was like candy: the war came and it melted. In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge took power, and Vietnam and the United States both moved into Cambodia. By then she had married Mr. Tang and had two daughters. Her father was quick: before the fighting started he sent all six of his children out of the country on the pretext of a holiday, and stayed behind himself. He reassured her: "Don't worry about running. Go to Hong Kong first. I don't know what's coming, but I own a whole row of shops. If Hong Kong doesn't work out, come back and take your pick."

But war has no mercy, and her father had chosen to stay. The Khmer Rouge's rule of terror followed. In the name of pure communism, its extreme agricultural reforms produced mass famine, and huge numbers died of forced labor during the "re-education." To date, 1.5 million skeletons have been dug up.

"After 1976 there was no more word from my father." It still grieves her: "So terrible nobody would believe it." Mr. Tang's watch shop in Cambodia had been called Peace, and Peace Optical carries the name on. But the move brought no peace; her heart was still with the family she had left in the war. "I listened to the radio every day, the international news. Cambodia was in chaos — windows smashed, looting, the Khmer Rouge everywhere." Only after the war did the family learn that the gold hidden in the house and the shop had been taken by the army too. The brothers and sisters scattered — France, Taiwan — and have been apart ever since.

Cambodia became a place of grief. Even after the war, the family never went home. The music she loved stopped playing. She only laughs: "My husband finds it noisy, and there's no time to listen now." Still, every so often she hums "I Can't Forget You," skipping the line about parting and singing only her favorite: "I can't forget you, I can't forget you…"

She had escaped the war; there was no more singing on the roof, and glasses took its place. She put down her past as an heiress and threw herself into Hong Kong's golden age.

In the 1970s Hong Kong was awash in information and its entertainment was dazzling; every household ate dinner in front of the television. It opened another window for her. "Hong Kong was a different world," she says.

The golden age of Hong Kong television peaked in the 1990s, and Mrs. Tang followed every episode of The Giant, The Greed of Man and A Kindred Spirit. "You've worked hard all day, take it easy now; you've had dinner, have a bit of a rest… we'll keep you company!" As the theme music came up, Enjoy Yourself Tonight went out every night from nine to ten-thirty, and the couple watched it on the dot, right up to closing at ten.

She was especially fond of Fei Jie. Nobody disliked Fei Jie, or the laughter she brought. At a TVB anniversary gala Fei Jie put on an aerobics leotard and walked across several layers of eggs, and Hong Kong gasped and applauded.

The day Fei Jie — Lydia Shum — honored the shop with a visit is, in her telling, like yesterday.

It was again after the Suzie Wong episode aired, with the shop packed shoulder to shoulder, that another call came in. A woman's voice asked: "You're on Fortress Hill Road — where should the taxi stop?" Mrs. Tang did not recognize her. The car pulled up at the corner and Fei Jie strolled over with her daughter, Joyce Cheng. Fei Jie picked up one of the shop's plastic rattan baskets and bought fifty or sixty pairs in one go — Mrs. Tang digs out one of them, a folding cat-eye set with rhinestones. Joyce Cheng came away with some too. Fei Jie wore that batch of glasses to the end of her life, and when Joyce Cheng won a top-ten award at the Ultimate Song Chart Awards in 2017 for "Goddess," she wore one of the pairs on stage in tribute to her mother.

While Fei Jie was recovering in Canada she sent her own elder sister in to buy glasses, and so did Adam Cheng's sister. The entertainer Jerry Lamb came for round frames and picked up a pair in Fei Jie's style for his mother while he was at it. Ricky Hui, younger brother of the God of Songs Sam Hui, came too — "such a lovely man; the old styles he picked were odd, scruffy, grubby things" — which fits his puckish, playful image. She lived nearby Alex To and got to know him, and one day he brought in her idols Yao Lee and Jacky Cheung to sit for a while. Face to face with Yao Lee, she was so nervous she blurted out that she was "crazy about her songs" — something she would never once have imagined doing.

Through the glasses, she became part of Hong Kong's golden age herself. Jade Solid Gold used to have Sandy Lam on it; the television had Teresa Teng, whom she was "crazy about." The singers and actors who came after, she no longer knows — customers like Moses Chan and Vincent Wong.

As TVB's output got worse, at some point the television in the shop stopped going on at all. Today's songs, she says, aren't nice to listen to; today's dramas she calls "nonsense." "Reruns are no fun. I watch Jade Solid Gold and doze off, so I switch it off and don't watch."

Her marriage was fool's luck too. "I never knew how to date, how to get along with boys." On January 1, 1970, she and Mr. Tang married on her father's arrangement; next year makes a full fifty years, their golden anniversary. There have been ups and downs: the two of them squabble now and then over a customer, and money has been made and lost. But the word "divorce" has never been in her vocabulary.

The two get on. Mrs. Tang has the quick tongue and handles everything facing outward; Mr. Tang, an optometrist, is the quieter one — he works the equipment and fits the lenses, and he knows glasses inside out. In the old days, if a customer wanted a brow bar with a slightly different curve, Mr. Tang could turn around and produce a whole stack with exactly that curvature. He gives his opinion straight — "this doesn't suit you" — while Mrs. Tang will add, "it's fine to just look and not buy."

The shop premises are worth a fortune now, and property agents have called again and again, but she flatly refuses to sell. "Plenty of shop owners are living the easy life, and they all envy me — once you retire there's nothing to do." She has no plans to emigrate either: "I really love Hong Kong." Inside the shop she keeps photocopies of a health guide from a book she borrowed. Just then a regular walks in, and she is busy again, seeing to him.

Mrs. Tang suddenly digs out a letter from some school of management — "out of the blue they said they wanted to give me an award" — which she turned down. Praise her for caring nothing about fame and she says: "I don't know anything. I know my own place." Praise her for being stylish and she laughs it off: the big sunglasses started because she had cataracts a few years ago and her eyes couldn't take the light after the surgery. She counts off the rest — the trousers and the jacket are cast-offs from her daughter and granddaughter; your bones shrink as you age, so hand-me-downs mixed and matched fit just right. She may be called the eyewear queen, but she puts on no airs. She doesn't want the honors people press on her, and the world's restlessness has nothing to do with her. Happiness, in her telling, is a swim before opening up, keeping the shop with Mr. Tang day after day, her family well fed and housed — and "selling off a bit more of the stock."

Long live the Queen, they say. All she says, humbly, is: "I hope I can go on selling glasses a few more years."

Unless otherwise credited, the cover image and the photographs in this article were taken by the author.