It is Eleanor Wong – lawyer-playwright-lecturer-and-general intellectual about town – galloping down the stairs to meet you with a warm grin.

At 44, she still has an air of fun about her.

“So, what would you like to do?” she asks in her alto voice as we stand in the brightly lit lobby trying to figure out lunch plans.

She is clad in her usual get-up of black T-shirt, belted blue jeans and black boots, and her tanned, lightly freckled face is devoid of make-up.

Small stud earrings glint in her ears, and her sassy short hair has been snipped into wispy strands (at Ritz Salon, she reveals when you ask).

She cuts a confident figure as she shows you enthusiastically around the new campus.

Since 2003, she has been an associate professor at the faculty, developing its legal skills programme where she helps hone students’ writing and communication skills.

Never straying far from the public eye, she has been in the media a fair bit this past year, thanks to her controversial play, The Campaign To Confer The Public Service Star On JBJ, at the inaugural Singapore Theatre Festival in August.

Last year, she co-wrote a book of poems, Y Grec, with her old friend Madeleine Lee, based on their trip to Greece.

And three months ago, an anthology of her early plays – simply titled Earlier – was published.

As you grill her about her life story, she candidly admits that she has a postmodern habit of mixing up her memories and telling childhood anecdotes which end up entirely debunked by her parents.

“My terrible fictitious history... Are there real memories at all? I don’t know,” she muses with a chuckle.

Her relaxed friendliness is quite at odds with the no-nonsense public image she projects.

Ask her why some people find her intimidating and she offers: “Because I am seemingly loud and assertive? But most of my friends find me easy-going and non-judgmental.”

Sure enough, actress Pam Oei, 34, who played the lead role in JBJ, says: “The first few times I met her, there was a very charming quiet style about her. You think: ‘Wah, very cool.’ She sits in a corner and exudes her aura.

“That’s before you find out that she can actually be quite noisy and has this big belly laugh.

“When she’s in the audience, I know.”

Wong’s contemporary, playwright Ovidia Yu, 45, says affectionately: “She can be quite manja and think that people don’t like her plays.”

Actress Tan Kheng Hua, 43, says: “At the heart of it all, she’s a big floppy puppy – loyal, clumsy, cuddly, goofy, trusting, loveable, cute as hell.”

Pushing boundaries

WONG has penned more than a dozen plays since 1986, and they often examine the conflict between the personal and political in Singapore.

She considers Exit (1990), a satire about Singapore’s brain drain, and The Joust (1991), which examines the clash between autocratic and populist ideologies, as the best of her shorter works. Of her longer plays, JBJ and Jointly And Severably (2003), the conclusion to her acclaimed trilogy about a lesbian lawyer, are her favourite.

It is tough to pin her playwright’s voice down, for it spans genres and styles – from poignant realism to Beckett-esque black humour and Brechtian detachment.

But it is a voice that is assuredly analytical, dealing with concepts with the curiosity of a child.

She says she has deliberately remained unaffiliated with any theatre company because “being able to match a piece to the right company and director is quite nice”.

You ask her what keeps her going as a member of the arts community here, and she says it is the hope of relevance.

“Having something to say that might mean something to someone, change how they see things, or at least make them ask different questions.”

Law over literature

BORN on Feb 6, 1962, she was delivered by Dr Benjamin Sheares, later to become Singapore’s second president, in Gleneagles Hospital.

The elder of two daughters of a medical professor father who taught neuroanatomy and a secondary school literature teacher mother, Eleanor Wong Siew Yin says she was a “determined girl” growing up.

She attended Methodist Girls’ School where she excelled, but was “not always the brainiest or most hardworking, thankfully”.

When she was 10, the family – including younger sister Catherine, now 42 and a science teacher – spent a year in Melbourne where her father was posted to.

That proved to be a turning point.

Exposed to the learn-at-your- own-pace Australian education system, she found it hard to fit back into Singapore.

“That was the start of unhappiness over why things should be a certain way. In Primary 5, when we were learning Tom Sawyer, I asked my teacher: ‘Why can’t we just act it out?’ But, of course, cannot. Literature was meant to be read at your desk.”

After her A levels at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, she chose to read law over literature in NUS because she “thought it’d be a peek into the value system of a group of people”.

She still believes that her original view of law was correct.

The flipside, however, “is that it paints a picture of human beings that is not always that flattering”.

As a law student, she won the prestigious international Philip C. Jessup moot competition, clinching the Best Orator honour.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) as a deputy public prosecutor.

She recalls: “I was just so happy to be learning and growing, in the middle of all these fun cases. I used to love hanging out with the police officers and hearing their stories. So they used to look after me and make sure that I didn’t make stupid mistakes.”

In contrast, a senior colleague, one year ahead of her, would demand that the officers make his coffee and fetch him an umbrella if it rained, she remembers.

One day in 1986, Wong was tipped off by the police officers and her boss, CAD’s former director Glenn Knight, to stay back because a big case was breaking – Malaysian politician and businessman Tan Koon Swan was about to be charged for the high-profile Pan-Electric Industries scam. The case would eventually culminate in the sentencing of Tan to two years’ jail and a $500,000 fine.

Meanwhile, her senior colleague was left out of the loop and went home at 5pm on the dot.

Wong was given the job of manning the phones and fielding media queries about the case, and that was the start of her “so-called charmed career”.

She says: “I’ve never under-estimated luck, serendipity and just having good opportunities as impetuses in my doing well. That little extra is this: Did you behave in a way before that predisposes people into giving that opportunity to you?”

As for Mr Umbrella? He’s still in the civil service somewhere. Sounding amused, she says with a shrug: “It could have been him, but he screwed it up.”

Finding balance

SHE might have led a charmed life, but there were two instances where she momentarily lost control of her work-hard, play-hard lifestyle.

Once, in her final year in university, she pushed herself so hard with her extra-curricular activities and schoolwork that she ended up crying uncontrollably out of sheer fatigue during a rehearsal for a university talent-time show.

Another emotional melt-down took place in 1987, when two founder members of the theatre group Third Stage were arrested under the Internal Security Act for participating in a conspiracy to overthrow the Government.

“Some part of me – it was not as though CAD was doing anything – felt responsible for the system. It was very disappointing,” she says.

She quit the department – in part disillusioned by the arrests but also for personal reasons she prefers not to air – and left Singapore to read her master’s degree in law at New York University.

She spent about a decade living and working in law firms abroad.

She says with a sanguine smile: “Some may argue that the temperate life is not worth living. But I’ve come to appreciate that understanding one’s physical and emotional boundaries is beneficial for yourself and those around you. What if I snap, and I can’t come back?”

When she returned to Singapore in 1992, she gave an interview to Life! which angled on how Wong, at 30, was at a crossroads – the golden girl tarnished by doubt and insecurity.

She still remembers the article, and says: “Maybe people look at that early trajectory and think I’m one of those who just knew where I was going from an early age.

“But I’ve always taken things as they come. So much of it is out of your hands and that’s nothing to bemoan. That’s something exciting and fun about life.”

Along the way, she has made some surprising left turns, such as leaving the profession for a stint as a strategist and staff trainer at media company Right Angle Communications in 2001, and then entering academia in 2003.

Some people may see her decision to teach as a lack of ambition. But, she counters, what she is doing now is more impactful as she is moulding a new generation of legal eagles.

Was it easy giving up life in the super-charged lane, you wonder?

She ponders the question then says: “I’ll never want to pretend that I don’t pamper myself and like material things. But that extreme level of chasing after money, most of us really don’t need that. Once that part of it was clear, it was easy.”

And in the middle of a discussion on the challenges of being a successful woman in a male-dominated society, she says: “The fact that I may not have always progressed smoothly in my career, may not have to do with gender, but that... I’m me, lah.

“Beyond a certain point, I don’t always feel like marching to a similar drum beat, because it’s boring.”

Being thoughtful

HAVING never married, Wong says she has no urge to be a mother or start a family.

Her own relationship with her parents and sister is one of affection from afar – she meets them thrice a year: at Christmas, Chinese New Year, and her parents’ joint birthday celebrations in late August.

She says it’s just a pattern they fell into while she was working abroad. For the past 15 years, she has lived in a three-storey terrace cluster-house in Bukit Timah, but says that she has cluttered herself into one bedroom, with her two cats Moby and Buttercup ruling the remaining space.

A year ago, she traded in her beat-up Mercedes-Benz for a red, zippy Mini Cooper.

Her old friend from university, Action Theatre’s Ekachai Uekrongtham, 42, who directed many of her early plays, observes that Wong has the look of someone who is very happy with her life these days.

He notes that she has been doing projects like translating Laotian laws into English with the help of the country’s translators and legislators, and says: “When she talks about her Laos project and her university programme, her eyes glow. It’s nice to see that what she’s doing is going to have a lasting impact both in and outside of Singapore.”

A few days later, you e-mail her: If Eleanor Wong were a concept to be debated, what would the motion be?

“Wah, cheem question,” she writes back.

Then her answer: “This house believes that being thoughtful is better than being proven right.”

It’s a statement that leaves you puzzling over it on different levels.