After a series of tragedies – including losing HK$5 million to a love scam and the closure of her Sai Kung bakery Ali Oli – Hazel Cheung rediscovered her spark with Mrs Globe China Hazel Cheung was understandably elated being declared Miss Chinese International’s second runner-up on February 10, 1991. TVB’s Miss Hong Kong may have been the more typical local girl’s dream, but the then-21-year-old had just fled a miserable wintry Montreal, living with her parents, to represent the Canadian city at the Hong Kong broadcaster’s other annual beauty pageant. “I finished high school in the UK before going to Montreal,” says Cheung, born in Hong Kong to parents from Indonesia.
And once settled in Canada, “a business-person who knew my family was one of the organisers of the local branch of the pageant. She suggested I join, so I did”. Cheung didn’t quite know what she wanted to do with herself, but “I didn’t like Montreal”.
So, when she won Miss Chinese International Montreal, what excited her most wasn’t the trophy, the prizes, the sash or the title. It was “a chance to come back to Hong Kong”. Thirty-two years later, having made her home here since, Cheung would enter another beauty contest, this time under very different auspices: last December, at the age of 53, and a mother of two grown children, she entered the Mrs Globe China pageant.
One could argue these days that beauty contests are superficial, outdated, perhaps even demeaning , and Cheung.