Doreen was one of those girls who are so impossibly pretty that the sole purpose of their existence must be to provoke envy in others! We, her fellow students in a Convent school in Malaysia more than fifty years ago, were certainly guilty of that probably most deadly of the Seven Deadly Sins. Her beauty was of the kind that didn’t need the enhancing effects of clothes, ornaments, make-up. Playing netball in a white cotton shirt and baggy navy blue cotton shorts (the nuns didn’t allow tight-fitting or colourful ones), her hair tied up by a handkerchief in a pony tail, her face wet with sweat, Doreen still managed to get the attention of the boys who passed by the playing field on their way to or from the nearby Christian Brothers’ school.

One boy, a skinny, timid-looking fellow, was known to pass by several times on his way to class whenever Doreen was playing netball. It must have been the same fellow who wrote swooning notes to her, that were intercepted by stern Sister Saint Dominic who warned Doreen that nonsensical behaviour would not be tolerated.

But Sister need not have worried about Doreen. A single child of a divorced mother, she had from a young age understood her mother’s ambition for her, and that was to marry well, indeed, to marry no less than a millionaire who would give her the ultimate life of the tai tai, replete with cars, chauffeurs, maids, every possible luxury. Her road in life’s journey would be red carpet all the way.

Her astonishing beauty would be the gateway to that road. If you were to itemize Doreen’s beauty, you might begin with the eyebrows and eyes that reminded people of Elizabeth Taylor, move on to the lush hair and lips, and then you might pay her a compliment that was at the same time a disparagement of her race: ‘How come you don’t at all look Chinese?’

I had heard, long after we had left school, that Doreen had gone to Singapore with her mother. And then I heard about her tragedy. She had been courted, as was expected, by numerous men in Singapore, all belonging to society’s higher echelons of the rich, famous and influential. She eliminated all but two—an extremely successful Singaporean businessman, and a Cambodian prince, a member of the royal family. Her mother would have preferred the solidly reliable businessman to the playboy prince. But it seemed Doreen became enamoured of the charmer, married him and went to live with him in his rambling estate in Cambodia, for a while enjoying a life of feudal privilege and splendour.

Then the Khmer Rouge struck. Pol Pot’s men in their black cotton pajama-like uniforms and cotton neck scarves herded thousands of their fellow Cambodians into the countryside to do hard labour, or simply be killed off. In a crazed dream of a return to the purity of an agrarian society, Pol Pot had his men single out the wealthy and the educated for their first victims. Doreen was among them. I had also heard that her mother who happened to be visiting her then, was caught in a cataclysm that the world could only watch in horror.

I kept thinking of Doreen’s hands. They were the daintiest hands I had seen, with long tapering fingers that for a while were adorned with the most expensive jewels, and were now hardened and calloused with working in the fields for hours under a scorching sun. Doreen finally died of typhoid or some other disease. Her mother presumably died too, or was killed. Her husband and young son managed to escape to Paris. I learnt all this from a Cambodian writer whom I had met at a writers’ conference in Hong Kong.

Doreen, at the height of her beauty, and reaching a fork in her road, must have paused and wondered which turning she should take. There had been other, smaller forked roads in her life, including that one when she had to decide whether to reject or respond to those swooning notes (I heard that one of her admirers had gone on to become a business magnate, entered politics and risen to be a top-ranking minister. Could he have been the timid letter-writer?)

But the last road at which Doreen paused to make her decision was the most unforgiving of all, for it had no turning back.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...