Staff and tenants of the Chinachem Golden Plaza will not be able to easily forget Nina Wang - each day they file through the building's lift lobby past an imposingly cute pig-tailed statue of a cartoon character of the flamboyant businesswoman.
Nicknamed 'Little Sweetie', Ms Wang was a fan of 1970s comic-book character called 'Candy Candy', created by Japanese illustrator Yumiko Igarashi.
She asked Igarashi to create another comic character called Nina Nina, this time based on her own life.
The result was a comic book that spanned her life from a five-year-old girl in Shanghai to her love affair and marriage to Teddy Wang, as well as a life-sized statue in a Marilyn Monroe pose in the lobby of Chinachem's headquarters in Mody Road.
After passing by the statue, which stands on a glass pedestal, yesterday staff members ran the gauntlet of photographers and reporters who wanted to know what they had thought of their boss.
'Very kind,' was a common response from staff members, who admitted they had never met her.
The rank-and-file workers were not told officially of their employer's death. A Ms Tse said that she had heard the news of Wang's death on the radio, while another employee said the first she knew of the chairwoman's death was from reporters.
A Ms Cheung, who works for a company that leases a floor in the building, said she sometimes had trouble getting into lifts if Wang was around.
'I often saw her in the lift lobby with her bodyguards. She preferred to take lifts by herself,' Ms Cheung said, adding that the bodyguards stopped others from entering lifts carrying Wang.
Tales of Ms Wang's frugality and her reported tendency to hoard her fortune also appeared to colour some employees' opinions of her.
One woman said: 'She took her father-in-law to court to fight for her husband's money. She died and did not give the money to her family... She looked after other people, but not her family.'
