'It was a steep learning curve,' she admits. 'But I've never been afraid of learning and making mistakes. If there is an opportunity, I will grab it.'
She readily admits to being ambitious.
'I'm a survivor. I had this thing about proving to people that I could do it despite my lack of a formal education.'
'Anyway,' she adds, 'hard work never kills!'
To focus on her career, she sent her daughter to a Swiss boarding school when the girl was eight years old.
Ms Wong's climb up the corporate ladder came at a price. She had problems with her daughter, and her second marriage crumbled too.
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'For a time, my daughter was angry with me, thinking that I cared only about my career. But when she got married, she finally understood. Now our relationship couldn't be better,' says the grandmother of two.
Married for the last 20 years to an American businessman, Ms Wong spent 25 years in the cosmetics business before going into fashion in the 1980s, a move propelled by her search for wide shoes.
'I'm Hakka,' she says, referring to the migratory Han Chinese who moved from central China centuries ago to settle in the country's south, and other parts of the world.
'We are gypsies, we work hard and we have big feet.'
'Only Salvatore Ferragamo had shoes for my wide feet. I decided to pitch for the agency by writing to them,' says Ms Wong.
She met Mr Leonardo Ferragamo - son of the late Salvatore Ferragamo who founded the eponymous Italian luxury goods empire - not long after and became the brand's distributor in Hong Kong.
On the phone from Italy, Mr Ferragamo recalls their meeting: 'It was one of those rare occasions in life. You meet someone and you know you want to be related to that person in business.
'I had to control my excitement. She was so smart that if I had let her know how I felt, I would have lost my powers of negotiation,' he says with a big laugh.
'She has a charming personality, she has great strength, determination and diplomacy. She is dynamic, she makes things happen,' says Mr Ferragamo, adding that the whole Ferragamo clan has embraced her into its fold.
They liked her so much that they moved her to New York, where she ran the company's flagship stores throughout North America.
Mr Ferragamo says: 'You meet so many people but very few become iconic personalities in the world of business. But she is definitely one of them.'
In 1992, she moved back to Hong Kong and became a founding shareholder in ImagineX.
She had already set her target: taking luxury retail to China.
'I travelled up to China a lot in the late 1970s and 1980s when I had to train girls on how to do make-up. I already felt that there was this big dragon about to awake from its slumber.
'Even though China was nothing but buses and bicycles in those days, there was a feeling that it was going to change. It did, and a lot faster than I actually anticipated.'
In 1994, she opened Maison Mode in Shanghai, the first international store in China to stock brands such as Prada, Cartier, Gucci and Ferragamo.
The store is now long gone but in its place are nearly 300 others, in big cities as well as in far- flung places such as Urumqi. And while Prada and Gucci have left the stable, the likes of Donna Karan, Juicy Couture, Paul & Shark, and Tumi have come on board ImagineX.
She has also been instrumental in steering Ferragamo's expansion in China, where the label now has 58 outlets in 33 cities.
The story of how she stood, nearly 20 years ago, on the Bund in Shanghai - then just a mass of mangrove swamps and padi fields - and told three sceptical Ferragamo brothers that they were looking at their future is now legend in the fashion industry.
She pooh-poohs naysayers who say the global downturn will mean the end of good times for China.