The ornate lettering of the Miss Gladys Sym Choon shopfront has been attracting Adelaide shoppers for almost a century.
But for Natalie Carfora, the story of the family behind the façade holds as much fascination as the luxury fashion and homewares sold inside.
Gladys Sym Choon opened the store that still bears her name in 1923.
“They sold napery, embroidery, lingerie, Chinese handicrafts, porcelains, that kind of thing,” says Ms Carfora.
“It was very much selling a kind of exotic view of China to the white person in Adelaide.”
Ms Carfora is a Curator at Adelaide’s Migration Museum, where the Sym Choon family’s fortunes are documented in a new exhibition.
Gladys was the daughter of Chinese migrants who arrived in Australia just before the newly-federated nation’s discriminatory White Australia migration policy kicked in.
“John” Sym Choon first sold fruit and vegetables at the markets, while his wife looked after their children.
As the family grew, so too did their wealth and renown.
By the time Gladys was a young woman, she had the means to open a shop next to her brother Gordon’s grocery store in Adelaide’s bustling east end. By many accounts, she was a savvy businesswoman.
Her daughter, Mei Ling Niel, remembers she would always go to an effort for customers.
“In the early days, she would look for customers. When she went overseas, if they requested any article, any Asian article, she would search for it.”
Ms Carfora says Gladys used her Chinese heritage to her advantage in business.
“In a lot of advertisements, she’s holding Chinese lanterns, or she’s wearing exotic dress, and in her private photos, she never wears any of those things, so it’s a really interesting look into her business model.”
The Sym Choon family became both well known and wealthy. Gladys married and moved to Hobart, running the store remotely with an occasional trip to Adelaide.
Mei Ling Niel says her mother never talked much about her success.
“We’re very proud of her, my brothers and I, because we didn’t really realised until we’d left school what my mother had achieved.”
Among the finery and delicate objects on display are documents that shed light on another side of the Sym Choon’s story as Chinese Australians.
There’s a copy of John Sym Choon’s exemption to a dictation test, complete with inked fingerprints. The dictation test was a language test required of non-Europeans travelling into Australia.
Each family member would have had to apply for such a document every time they returned from a trip overseas.
For a business built on imports from China, this would have been a considerable burden, says Ms Carfora.
“They had to have head and shoulder photos taken, they had to have personal references and they had to have their thumbprints taken.
“And this definitely, kind of, made the Chinese Australians feel like criminals, because they’re the only other people who have thumb or handprints taken,” she says.
Abdul Razak Mohammad and his partner Joff bought the Miss Gladys Sym Choon store in 1983, after falling in love with the brand.
“If you saw her collection, [it’s] just completely off the planet, not like any other Chinese shop,” he says.
Though the product line has changed, the spirit of the pioneering Sym Choon family and the woman at the heart of it is still part of the brand.
“She had so much wit about her, her merchandising, from jade to fine lingerie, pyjamas, handkerchiefs anything. Anything beautiful,” he says.
“What we do, then, is try to carry on this whole personality of Miss Gladys Sym Choon.”
The Sym Choon exhibition runs until July 22.
