Inside The Doll House

Ping lived in a two-storey house in Tanglin Road, three doors down from the Chinese embassy. Ping's neighbours lived in houses that had smaller houses inside them for their very large cars, and smaller houses within those houses for the drivers of those cars, who were usually from countries that Westerners called "exotic", and where the average Singaporean family went for vacations just because they could get there by bus or train, without paying a fortune in airfare.

Ping, who had no brothers or sisters, spent her afternoons attempting to rearrange Swarovski crystal miniature animals into awkward positions in their glass cabinent, wondering if her mother would one day sense something different. Other creative additions she hoped would catch her mother's eye were the Crayola strokes she had been steadily adding to her parents' numerous oil paintings of fruitbowls over the past 238 days. These art pieces had been flown in from all the countries in Europe her parents had ever visited, including one her mother bought at the Vienna airport during a three-hour stopover.

Every evening, Ping was allowed to eat dinner in front of the television, and had watched Happy Days on Malaysian television channels so often that she had even learnt the Islamic evening prayers that interrupted each episode by heart.

Her latest hobby was trying not to sleep in the same room twice, to find out how each of the 21 rooms were different. Each time her parents left on business trips, which was very often, she would move. So far, she had tried sleeping in their bedroom, her mother's shoe closet, even on the floor of the kitchen with the family's golden retriever. Just two nights ago, Ping had pretended she was on a camping trip, and zipped up in her sleeping bag to spend a night under the stars on her front lawn. The soft patch of carpet grass she had chosen to sleep on had once been a lap pool then a koi pond, before her parents finally got tired of the maids never cleaning it right and filled it up with soil to turn it into an orchid garden. Even then, Ping had gotten uncomfortable on the ground, midway through the night, and found her way into the backseat of her father's Rolls Royce, where the housekeeper found her the next morning.

By the age of seven, Ping was breakfasting on eggs benedict, lunching on sushi and dining on steak tartare. At the age most Singaporeans, including Twink and Aoife, still thought meringues might be Christmas decorations, Ping was having them for dessert.

But the one thing Ping never did was play with her 18 Barbie dolls, who lived in what looked like a smaller version of her own home, except it was pink with a yellow roof, and its entire front opened out to the side so the dolls could be moved around from room to room.

This neat feature was something Twink discovered as she excitedly released a catch at the side of the large house.

The dolls' wardrobe is bigger than even Granny's whole collection of kebayas! thought Aoife, who was getting a little worried that she might not make it to the bathroom on time should she suddenly need it, as she usually got an urge to whenever she felt she unsure of the location of the nearest toilet.

"My mother bought me the whole set for my birthday last year," said Ping, who then showed her playmates a dress she had that matched exactly that of one of her dolls. "She bought the material and had these tailored for me and my Malibu Barbie."

"I cannot believe everything is so new!" said Twink.
"Well, I hardly get any time to play with them."
"I'll play with them!" Twink squeaked, her voice beginning to sound like a real-life version of what Aoife imagined Lois Lane from her Superman comics might do when she uncovered a secret plot that made her speech bubbles suddenly contain a lot of exclamation marks.

The Guard To The Doll House

Men in uniforms always made Aoife feel as though they should know a lot, simply because she thought it would otherwise be an awful waste of so much gold embroidery and hours of ironing for just anyone.
Yet all her encounters with men in uniforms had proven otherwise. Once, she asked the uniformed gatekeeper at school if she could sit in the school canteen to wait for Granny, who had been a whole 30 minutes late to pick her up after school.
"No."
"Why?"
"Just cannot ok? Principal don't allow."
"Why?"
"Cannot means cannot lah."
"Why?"
"Just cannot."

So Aoife had waited outside, terrified of getting run over by maniac trishaw riders or surly bus drivers speeding down the narrow lane outside the school gate. By the time Granny showed up, late from her afternoon mahjong session, Aoife's legs were aching from squatting by the drain. Another time, a guard who wore a smartly pressed blue uniform with dark blue lapels and (also) gold embroidered stripes had refused to allow Aoife into a classmate's condominium unit because Aoife had forgotten the unit number.

"You no know unit number, you cannot go in," he had said, unsympathetically shaking his head and peering down his nose from under his hat.
"My friend's name is Shahirah, and she is having a birthday party by the pool," she had explained, struggling to recall the exact name of the block and her classmate's address.
"What's your I/C number?"
"I don't have an identity card yet. I have to wait until I'm 12. But I'm only seven. I'm tall for my age."
"Like dat ah? Ok. Like this I must go and call the pool guard first. You not down here resident. I must check."
"Ok."

Who gave them these uniforms so they could look so important even though they never did anything all that important, is what Aoife wanted to know, and if they couldn't help people out, why did they bother wearing them? Why did they always act as though she was planning to do something wrong? Thirty years later, Aoife would again stare into the face of that same security guard when his picture made the front page of the newspapers for his involvement in a terrorist plot to blow up the underground train system in Singapore.

So when Ping invited Aoife and Twink over after school that day, and she saw a man in a white uniform sitting at a guardhouse to a side of a very large gate, Aoife felt her pre-test pangs in her stomach and neck sweat a little; the same feeling she had got right before her first big maths exam, just a few months ago. "Are you sure she wanted me here?" she had asked Twink, who had repeatedly assured her reluctant friend she had indeed been invited to Ping's house after school so they could all play with Ping's Barbie doll house and full Barbie wardrobe complete with Malibu Barbie beach wedges.
"I don't like pink."
"Aiyah. Don't be such a spoilsport."
"I don't like Ping."
"But don't you want to see her doll house?"
"What for?"
"Stop asking dumb questions. Everybody loves Barbie," snarled Twink.

Everybody but me, thought Aoife. She never did understand the fuss about a yellow-haired doll with so few clothes, who had a boyfriend who always so many clothes he looked like Lee Majors from The Six Million Dollar Man. Or why the doll always seemed to have a crik in her neck that made her tilt her head to one side, but yet always wore a disturbing grin anyway. Or why they never had a Barbie with brown hair and eyes wearing a kebaya or a cheongsam or a sari or something (this was, after all, years before Oriental Barbie was ever conceived, of course).

"Are you hear to see Miss Ping?" he asked.
"Yes, please sir," said a suddenly polite Twink. "Could you please tell her that Lee Ting and Aoife are here?"
"Certainly. Step right in."