Hong Kong beauty queen Hazel Cheung lost her beloved business and became a widow – then, unexpectedly, a pageant lifted her depression

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

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Hazel Cheung lost her Sai Kung bakery, became a widow, and fell victim to a love scam – but got her spark and self-confidence back at a pageant. “The pageant is about inner beauty, self-confidence, self-esteem, not just looks,” says Cheung. Photo: Eugene Chan

Published: 11:15am, 19 Aug 2024

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”.

Hazel Cheung photographed for Post Magazine. Photo: Eugene Chan

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One could argue these days that beauty contests are superficial, outdated, perhaps even demeaning, and Cheung “spent a week thinking about it”, she says. “I didn’t tell my family. A lot was going on at the time so the pageant was kind of an escape.”

After a period of tragedy, heartbreak and bad luck, Cheung had been drained, emotionally, physically, financially, and putting herself out there again wasn’t a matter of vanity, but self-preservation.

“The month before [signing up] I had been scammed online,” Cheung confesses, and soon thereafter “I met a well-connected Chinese business lady who I hoped could help find the guy who scammed me. But she said, ‘Even if we find him, we can’t get the money back, so why not use your time and energy for something else?’”