Faye Leung died in Vancouver on Nov. 1. She leaves two sons, three grandchildren, two sisters and a large extended family. Ms. Leung listens as a formal apology to British Columbia's Chinese-Canadians for historical wrongs by past provincial governments is recognized in the B.C. legislature in Victoria, on May 15, 2014.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
Faye Leung, a businesswoman known as the Hat Lady for her spectacular collection, brought down a B.C. premier after accusing him of withholding her commission from the sale of his amusement park.
Ms. Leung, who has died at 92, was a central figure in the scandal over the sale of the roadside attraction owned by premier William Vander Zalm to Taiwanese billionaire Tan Yu. News of her death this month was confirmed by her son.
The small amusement park included a windmill, a miniature train, cobbled medieval streets and a replica of Noah’s ark, as well as a flower garden depicting Biblical themes, pairing the premier’s own Christian fundamentalist beliefs with the garish aesthetics of a small-town merchant. The premier and his wife lived in an apartment within a stone castle at Fantasy Garden World, also known as Fantasy Gardens.
Angered at not being paid for her role as intermediary in the US$14.5-million sale of the property, Ms. Leung released tapes of telephone calls with the premier. On one, she can be heard shrieking at the premier in a high-pitched, rapid patter: “Tan Yu got a good deal, you got a good deal, but I got the bum rap!”
From the recordings as well as documents filed in court by Ms. Leung in an unrelated civil case, the question was raised whether Mr. Vander Zalm used his political office for personal gain. The premier asked the province’s conflict-of-interest commissioner to investigate the matter.
A scathing report by Ted Hughes, who had interviewed Ms. Leung, led to the premier’s resignation. Mr. Vander Zalm then faced a criminal trial on breach of trust.
Even as a young woman, Ms. Leung had a reputation for dressing well with hats, shoes, gloves and a purse. Ms. Leung attends the Heffel fine art auction in Vancouver, Nov. 18, 1999.Jeff Vinnick/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Leung was the Crown’s star witness, though her excitable, often incoherent and dizzyingly erratic testimony did the prosecution no favours. On her first day in court, she wore a suit in rich coral with pink stockings, topped by a wide-brimmed chapeau of creamy white straw. Her fingernails were painted dragon red.
On the stand, she exasperated defence lawyer Peter Butler, a self-proclaimed bumbling barrister known for his tousled bonhomie, who demanded of her, “Answer yes or no!”
“Yes,” she answered, before taking a pause. “And no.”
Asked whether she knew a particular businessman, she replied, “No, not until I met him.”
She reached into her bag to wave sheets of paper, slapping down business envelopes holding cassettes of her recorded telephone calls.
After a 10-day trial, Mr. Vander Zalm was found not guilty.
Even before the verdict was announced, Ms. Leung sought to cash in on her newfound notoriety. She hired a publicist and promoted sales of a Faye Leung Fan Club T-shirt featuring a cartoon of the premier pinned facedown atop the hat she wore to court. The caption read: “Zalm bam thank you ma’am.”
Her machine-gun diction was parodied by the satirists on CBC Radio’s Double Exposure, while she asked the comedy duo Local Anxiety if she could join them on stage after she spotted one wearing a T-shirt from an earlier satirical show, Escape from Fantasy Gardens. Kevin Crofton and Mark Leiren-Young wrote a parody of the reggae song I Shot the Sheriff; Ms. Leung performed I Fought the Premier on stage as part of the Vancouver International Comedy Festival in 1992.
“She got that this was her moment in history and she was going to ride it for all it was worth,” said Mr. Leiren-Young, a playwright and sessional writing instructor at the University of Victoria. “She loved the spotlight.”
The dispute with Mr. Vander Zalm and other legal cases left Ms. Leung with massive legal bills. She lost her house, which had been designed as a replica of the Imperial Palace in Beijing complete with interior courtyard, as well as many of her furnishings and possessions, though not her wardrobe.
After testifying at the former premier’s trial, she told reporters: “I’m a mother, I’m a housewife. I’ve lost my home and right now I have nothing. I’m trying to get back on my feet. It’s been absolutely no life. The Faye Leung you read about in the newspapers and in the magazines, that’s not me. I’m trying to get back the real me. I’m trying to find the original person again.”
Leong Fuell Chew was born in Victoria on May 27, 1932. She was the first of seven children born to Nipp Suey Kee (Kate), a seamstress who had also been born in Victoria, and Leong Chap Kwong, an editor and scholar. Her maternal grandfather had arrived in British Columbia just a decade after the former colony joined Canada.
After moving to Vancouver, she dropped out of school at the age of 14 after the sudden death of her mother. She helped raise her younger siblings while working at her family’s produce store, at a drycleaner, and as a sales director for a company importing Chinese herbs. She took accounting classes at a vocational school. She claimed to have talked her way into being the first Chinese Canadian to be hired by the Hudson’s Bay department store in downtown Vancouver.
Even as a young woman, she had a reputation for dressing well with hats, shoes, gloves and a purse.
“One of the ways we were all taught to deal with discrimination was to be exemplary citizens in every way,” she told Christopher Best for a 2020 biography, It Ain’t Over Until Faye Leung the Hat Lady Sings!.
After marrying Chun Kwong Leung, known as Dean, who had come to Canada as a postgraduate student and stayed after the Communist takeover of his homeland, the couple opened the Pender Realty and Insurance Agency in Chinatown. They later opened a branch of a trust company to serve the neighbourhood. The Leungs joined others in the community in successfully fighting against the building of a freeway that would have destroyed Chinatown.
Ms. Leung became a real-estate broker, and the couple developed the Oakridge neighbourhood in Vancouver, as well as the Simon Fraser Gardens in suburban Burnaby, just downhill from the new university for which they were charter convocation members. The couple also built the six-storey Mandarin Centre shopping mall in the heart of Chinatown.
In 1971, she was featured on the cover of the Chinatown News under the headline “Lady developer.” Earlier, she became the first woman to be named “man of the month” by a city tourism industry group.
Ms. Leung travelled extensively, promoting business ventures in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Egypt, Nigeria and Guyana.
“The men say, ‘Oh, she’s just a dizzy dame,’ ” she told Martha Robinson of the Vancouver Sun in 1981. “But this dizzy dame will deliver the goods.”
She remained an irrepressible presence at numerous public events over the years.
“You knew when she entered a room,” said Kyle Simunovic, 36, a marketer. “You saw a big hat. She certainly had a voice. There was a fearlessness about her. She was always there to support a good cause.”
Ms. Leung died in Vancouver on Nov. 1. She leaves two sons, three grandchildren, two sisters and a large extended family. She was predeceased by her husband, who died while dancing with her in a Hotel Vancouver ballroom in 1993 at the age of 74. She was also predeceased by four brothers.
Ms. Leung’s extensive collection of hats, numbering in the hundreds, will need to be dispersed.
“There’s a whole lot of them,” said eldest son Dana Leung of Los Angeles. “I haven’t figured out yet what to do with them.”