One of Kuan’s aunts took pity on him. “She felt bad for me because I didn’t even have time to do my laundry, so she went back to Changhua and within a month she’d found me a fiancee,” says Kuan. “When I had time after the Autumn Festival, I went back home with a friend and met her for the first time. The day afterwards we got engaged.” The couple have been married for more than 30 years and have five children. Kuan Wu Hsiu-sheng (官吳秀勝) still does most of the bookkeeping for Shuntai.
In the mid-1970s arcade games and 24-hour convenience stores began to appear and Shuntai took a big hit. “We were doing really well before and then afterwards there was a big difference,” says Kuan. “We sold things like marbles and raffle boards. They couldn’t compete with arcades. For kids, drawing numbers for a prize just didn’t seem as fun as a video game.”
But Kuan stubbornly held on to the simple toys and candy in his store, even though they were quickly becoming obsolete in the eyes of children. When asked why he didn’t switch gears and modernize his business, Kuan explains that he still loves the toys he grew up with but couldn’t afford as a youngster. “I loved playing with marbles and yuanpai [圓牌, round playing cards with cartoon characters], but we couldn’t buy them,” says Kuan. He made his own playthings, folding paper “footballs” to flip through goals placed on a table and making up different games for rubber bands.
In the mid-1990s, however, Shuntai’s merchandise suddenly went from “old-fashioned” to “retro.” A magazine feature led to a flurry of newspaper articles and TV spots. Publications and bloggers still visit Shuntai to take photos and indulge in nostalgia.
“Sometimes we have old customers who bring in their own kids. And since we’ve been around for a while, we have customers who bring in their grandchildren,” says Kuan.
Kuan still happily demonstrates old-time toys for customers, flipping over a pile of yuanpai, winding up tin toys, spinning wooden tops, showing the right way to make off with your opponent’s marbles and lining up rubber cockroaches and rats (which customers often purchase to play pranks on teachers, co-workers and spouses).
“He is really passionate about toys,” says Kuan Wu as she watches her husband arrange a row of plastic spiders. “Otherwise he’d have stopped doing this a long time ago.”
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