She was paralysed from the waist down, yet she took pains to dress up.
She wore funky knee-length boots, black velvet chokers and hats with flowers. Her hair-do was trendy and she even had one of those ear-nose clips.
It has been two weeks since hairstylist Amy Low, 26, died in her sleep, but I doubt many Singaporeans have forgotten her.
We had read about her life in newspapers and saw her on television when she received recognition as an "extraordinary person".
Extraordinary, she certainly was, as was her life.
Five years ago, a lorry driven by a drunk hit the car she was in. One friend died and she was left permanently paralysed. Her career as a hairstylist appeared to be over.
She stayed in hospital for 10 months, then went home to her husband and baby son. But her husband soon left her for another woman. She thought of suicide, then decided to make a go at life because of her child.
In 1993, she opened a hair-dressing salon in Toa Payoh with some friends. But it closed down and she took freelance jobs. She also took part in a hairstyling contest, and gave free hair cuts to members of the Handicaps Welfare Association.
On May 19, she attended a weeding, went home, sletp, and never woke up.
After she died, I looked up old newspaper clippings of her. A Life! interview with her in April 1993 raised goosebumps for the poignancy and irony of her words, spoken in halting English.
What stood out in that interview was her spirit. Faced with her multiple tragedies, she could have so easily caved in to fate and stayed at home to languish. But she heaved herself onto her wheelchair, took pains with her appearance, and lived life with seeming gusto.
When her husband left her, she was for a while a factory operator. Of this job, she remarked: "I worked 24 hours a day, although it was not really allowed ... People told me a disabled person could make only $300. So I OT, OT, OT. Then I saved money. Save, save, save. I earned $1,500!"
She decided to start the Toa Payoh salon to show her parents she could be independent, she said.
"My parents are old; one day they will die. I want them to close their eyes and say: `Never mind, I don't need to think of my daughter.' If I have nothing, they will say: `I cannot die, I cannot die! My daughter, who will look after her?' I don't want to hurt my parents. They took care of me after the accident."
She went everywhere alone in her wheelchair, even to the disco. "When the disco music comes, I go first in my wheelchair. I tell the people sitting: `If I can dance, you can dance!' I close my eyes, let the music go into my mind, and I think I'm normal."
She was also, amazingly, forgiving about her husband, whom she had married at 18.
"People say he's no good, but I understand why he did it. He was my first boyfriend, my husband, how could I not understand? I love him very much, until the day I die. I have a tattoo of him. When I die, my ghost must follow him. His happiness is most important. I told him I was sorry, I didn't know I had hurt him so much."
How many of us have not wondered what we would do if fate dealt us a cruel blow?
We could walk out of the house one morning feeling fine, then get hit by a bus and become paralysed or blind. Or we could be stricken by some debilitating disease and lose our limbs.
Would we be able to face the world like Amy Low did, with bravery and magnanimity?
What makes one person strong and optimistic and bounce back from misfortune, while others just give up and despair?
I suppose life would be more tolerable if you are surrounded by people who love and need you. But more than that, how you tackle tragedy depends, I think, on your resolve not to lose your independence and pride.
There is a wheelchair-bound man outside my neighbourhood supermarket, who sells lottery tickets, car park coupons and telephone cards.
He is stationed there on most nights, his neck strained upwards to catch people's attention.
What I cannot understand is why he looks cheerful and is always smiling. Surely he must feel some bitterness when he sees all these able-bodied shoppers brushing past him, family in two and their plastic bags bursting with shopping?
I have never bought anything from him because I cannot bear to look him in the eye. It is not because I do not like what I see, but am afraid of what he might think of me.
On my way to work a few years back, I used to see this girl in a wheelchair along a narrow and busy road leading to the central Expressway. She wore a headband and the determined look of a serious athlete.
She handled her machine with great dexterity and speed, and paid scant regard to the fume-spewing buses, cars and motorcycles whizzing past her.
I did not see her after a while. One evening last week, I was passing by the neighbourhood sports complex when I caught sight of someone in a wheelchair, doing laps in the stadium tracks.
Was that her? There was that same 70-degree bent of the body as the person worked the wheels. If so, I am glad she has found a less dangerous circuit to train in.
In Singapore, the disabled stay mostly out of sight.
I suppose it could be that most public buildings are still unfriendly to those in wheelchair and other walking aids. But I suspect it is because the disabled are made to feel different, as though they do not belong.
Only the really callous hearted, I believe, feel disdain for the disabled. Most people avoid them not because they lack sympathy or empathy, but because they do not want to be caught saying or doing the wrong thing.
How do the disabled regard their normal neighbour? Angry, embarrassed, resigned? I do not know, and would not want to put words in their mouth.
But I once read in Vogue magazine about an American woman, Lucy Grealy, who had lost much of her lower jaw to cancer. She had numerous operations to fix the hole in her face.
In an article, she wrote of how people stared at her openly. With surgery, "my face gets less attention, but people still do double takes when they pass me on the street. In truth, it's a sort of power. I get noticed. People I don't know either approach me and act unnaturally nice or they avoid me altogether. I never fade into the background."
In the 1993 interview, Amy Low spoke of a similar experience.
After she was discharged from hospital, she said: "People stared at me and I cried. Human beings like to stare, but at that time, I felt very scared. The world seemed so different."
She had a message for those who were able-bodied: "Normal people should not look down on disabled people ... Disabled people are strong, they have gone through so much more than normal people have."
I agree, and can only hope that if fate should ever frown on me, I would be able to face the world half as spunkily as she did.