[Editor’s note: The names and locations of the people in this story have been changed for reasons that should become apparent in a moment.]

“Meet me at the corner of Temple and Tai Chee Lo Street, near the taxi stand,” the voice on the other end of the mobile phone said in Chinese, as we wandered the narrow streets of Mong Kok, the literal beating heart of Hong Kong’s lively local youth shopping and night scene. Dingy, cramped Chinese restaurants overflow with diners who are sitting in front of tacky laminated tables on plastic chairs resembling overturned buckets. Next door, haphazardly arranged shops are filled with towering mounts of jeans, t-shirts, shoes, and hand bags, all of which were dropped shipped directly from the tens of thousands of smoke-vomiting factories just across the border in Mainland China in the mega-industrial complex stretching from Shenzhen to Guangzhou and further north—an area whose pollution is so bad that often the day’s noon sun may be as fiery-orange as if it were sunset.

If you’re in the market for dirt-cheap clothes ($2 t-shirts, $5 jeans), cheap hand bags, scarves, watches, and Chinese trinkets (jade Buddhas, Chairman Mao figurines, designer chopsticks) then Mong Kok is a shopper’s paradise. Actually, if you’re into authentic Dulce and Gibbona bags, Prada threads, or any of the myriad of other global “she-she-fu-fu” fashion brands, then Hong Kong is also for you. If shopping is your passion, Hong Kong is a must see destination with, on one end, more Louis Vuitton shops then Paris and, on the other end, more cheap t-shirts, designer look-a-likes, and cut-rate plastic tennis shoes than a Walmart discount rack. If you can’t find it in Hong Kong, you probably can’t find it anywhere. The entire city is overrun with the hyper-air conditioned Disneyfied shopping malls of the West, as well as the open-air, arbitrarily priced, buyer-beware markets that are found in the rest of the world—all stocked with every conceivable thing you might want to buy: cameras, clothes, shoes, bags, computers, electronics, appliances, antiques, fruit, meat, candy, home furnishings, and—in the case of our search that day—pirated designer hand bags.

The illegally produced ‘pirated’ products trade, once quite synonymous with the very name “Hong Kong” has long since been cleaned up—well, mostly. Walking down the street you won’t find a $10 Tommy Hilfiger handbag just sitting in a shop window, though you might still find a Tonny Hilfinger bag for $8. You won’t see shop keepers out in the open flaunting blatant disregard for the trademark and copyright laws of the West, but if you know where to look you may still be able to find hidden shops selling, among other things, “factory excess.” (That is to say, a factory was contracted to make 100,000 Ralph Lauren watches and, after sending the initial shipment off to Ralph Lauren stores around the world, the factory, “accidentally” turned the machines back on and made 20,000 more of the same watches.) In the hands of such “pirate” shopkeepers these $2000 watches can sell for as little as $50. Are they the real thing? Yes, just not through the proper channels. Is Ralph getting his piece of the profit? I bet not.

All of this is what had my friend Justin and I in search of a set of Louis Vuitton designer bags for his mom and sister. His mom had, in an effort to guide her son with no fashion sense, printed pictures of the bags she had in mind, and Justin and I, with photos in hand, asked a friend to take us to see a woman she knew that said could help us.

At the prescribed time, in the prescribed manner, we met the woman (whose name I never caught) at the designated corner near the taxi stand. She was a short, stout Chinese woman, whose face showed the ware of years raising a child or two while running a street market shop through Hong Kong’s turbulence economy of the last decade. She had a very honest face and wore a white blouse with a blue flower print. She led us through narrow twisting alleys, behind noodle shops, through crowds, and up a flight of stairs to a building, I’m still not 100% sure I could ever find it again (that was probably the point). It was a typical Hong Kong residential building, with floors upon floors piled on top of each other up to the sky, dirt stained staircases with a sardine can elevator that had a rickety old gate that stuck a bit when you tried to close it. The building was entirely residential, with kids running up the stairs, elderly folks lugging bags of groceries to their 22nd floor apartment, and the distinct smell of ginger and fish sauce that typically wafts around nearly every Chinese kitchen.

The woman took us to the door of a small apartment on an upper floor, the kind that in Hong Kong often holds a family of 8 or more—about 400 square feet in size—and everything looked ordinary until she unlocked and pushed opened the front door to reveal that the typical family couch, television, dining table, and every common apartment amenity, had been removed and replaced with rows and rows of cheap pine wood shelves stocked with every conceivable designer brand handbag, purse and watch imaginable. She closed and locked the dead bolt after we entered and we just stood there and stared for a few moments taking in the scene. The room smelled of new plastic and leather and gave the distinct impression of freshness, just like when you sit in a new car. She spoke no English and not knowing where to begin we handed the photos of the bags to the woman. She nodded, headed directly to a shelf across the room and within a minute returned with the exact bag in photo #1. She then looked at the second photo and without hesitation said in Chinese, “This is last year’s model? Do you want this year’s model? It just came out two weeks ago.” We blinked, stunned. “Um, ask her what the difference is?” Justin said to my Chinese friend who was translating. “She says the new model has white straps, the old one has brown straps.” She quickly produced both bags for us to compare.

In the end, we left with bag #1 and the new model of bag #2. What’s even more stunning is the woman not only had exact duplicates of the bags, designer price tags and all, but after we paid the equivalent of $90 for both bags (the “real” bags retail for something like $500 a piece), the woman kindly wrapped the purchases in authentic Louis Vuitton shopping bags. After our purchase, she led us back downstairs, past the boisterous children, past the elderly Chinese couple I could see watching Chinese soap operas in their living room, and through the pungent odor of ginger and fish sauce.

In a few months, if we ever found our way back, which is probably not even possible, we’d find that her bag “shop” had moved—usually once every few months—and finding her again might not even be possible. But, that would be ok, because a group of even more daring sellers set up small stands throughout Mong Kok on the side of the street with nothing more than copies of the latest Louis Vuitton, Rolex, and Omega catalogues yelling at passing tourists, “nice watches!?” You simply walk up, point at the watch you want, negotiate a price, and wait 15 minutes while they run up past the children, past the elderly couple, through the ginger and fish sauce aroma and back down with your newly purchased “factory excess.”

As we headed home (two grown men with two designer ladies handbags) we walked past a street hawker holding plastic sleeves of DVD’s he was selling for $4 a piece. On top of the pile sat a copy of the new Superman Movie, one month before it was slated to hit theaters…

Hong Kong is a shopper’s paradise.

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Click the photo collage below to see some of my photos of “Shopping in Mong Kok”