WITH HER FRIZZY bleached hair, long curled eyelashes and dangling bead necklaces, Shirley Yu looks like a refugee from the 1970s. Dragging on a cigarette, she sits in the doorway of a tailor shop that is closed for the night peddling trinkets near Wellington and D'Aguilar streets.
People come and go, but no one pays much attention. Then one man does a double-take. Asked if he recognises Yu, 47, he replies: 'I am of a similar age. Of course I know who she is.' His indignant tone suggests she must have been someone special. But that stretches credibility. The buttons on her cotton blouse are undone revealing the top of her pale breasts. The zip that kept her tight jeans together has burst, but she doesn't seem to care.
As Sa Li, the jewellery hawker of Lan Kwai Fong, she's just another local character. There is no hint of her days of fame.
Twenty-six years ago, Yu was the soft-porn queen of local film studio Shaw Brothers, the object of lust for thousands of male cinemagoers. Every day reporters hounded her and newspaper advertisements featured her in provocative poses.
When Yu was 21 she had more than a million dollars in the bank, lived in a luxury flat in Prince Edward Road, wore designer clothes and drove a Mercedes-Benz. Those were the 70s, the heyday of soft porn and she was in high demand. 'I was very popular at the time; I was even hotter than Lin Ching-hsia [a famous Taiwanese film star],' she says.
This is hard to believe seeing her now, watching her scrape an existence hawking jewellery late into the night. She sells crystal earrings for $50 a pair and bead necklaces for $100 to $200 apiece. If she does $1,000-worth of business, it's a good night. On bad ones, she makes next to nothing.