The Sym Choon family of South Australia were a successful middle-class business family and were well-known and highly regarded in the wider Adelaide community. Gladys' parents were John Sym Choon and his wife So Yung Moon, both from Dong Guan county in Guangdong province in southern China. Born the same year, 1867, they were from peasant families, and married in 1888. Sym Choon came to Australia first, arriving in Adelaide around 1890. John Sym Choon started out in Adelaide as a fruit and vegetable hawker. After his early death in 1910s, his widow and children set up various stores in Rundle Street before Gladys established her own China Gift Store, in 1923. She imported napery and fancy goods from China, travelling there for business and travel once a year, establishing herself as the first woman in South Australia to set up her own business and to import from overseas. She was thirty-four when in 1939 she married Edward Chung Gon, from a family of long-standing in the north-east Tasmania Chinese tin-mining community and later, shopkeepers in Launceston. After her wedding, she moved to Hobart to live with Edward, where he ran a similar shop to hers, called Peking Gifts. She continued to stock and supervise her Adelaide store from Hobart, and returning there once a year at Christmas.