The six months she spent in the hospital after the accident were excruciating not only physically, but emotionally.

“After the operation, I kept trying to move my body, but couldn’t. It felt heavy, like stone. I was frustrated.

“And I kept worrying about the kids,” she says of her children, then two years old and four months old.

After five months in hospital, she finally got to see Isabelle and Olivia, her two young daughters. What was meant to be joyous turned out to be tainted with heartache.

“The older one could still remember me, but the younger one did not. My husband placed my then nine-month-old daughter on the bed beside me. I wanted to kiss her, but she struggled and kicked me.

“She put out her arms and wanted the maid,” she says, a tinge of anguish cracking her stoic composure.

“I resolved then that I had to build up the trust again. Even though I’m not hands-on with showering her, feeding her or changing her diapers, I realised I must make her know that I’m her mother,” she says.

Still, she admits that there were moments of despair and periods when she felt like giving up.

“After I returned home from the hospital, I felt like a corpse. Only my head was alive. I felt useless, ugly and unwanted,” she says.

It was a far cry from the attractive, accomplished woman she used to be.

The slender and stylish Qingdao native came here from China in 1995 with some friends to see what Singapore had to offer, and if she could make a life for herself here.

Her beautiful face and love for dressing up made her a natural head-turner.

Determined to carve out a career for herself, she signed up for private night classes which trained her to pass the O levels and subsequently, A levels.

In the day, she worked as a Chinese tutor to pay for her school fees.

She also met and married her Hong Kong-born husband, Mr Vincent Tong.

After passing her A-level examinations, she landed a contract teaching job at a primary school here, andwas pursuing a diploma in Education at the National Institute of Education when the accident happened.

Mr Tong, who was driving the car at the time, is still racked with guilt.

“There is not a day that goes by where I don’t think about that accident,” he says.

“Initially, I was like the walking dead. I would do anything if I could reverse the situation, or gladly take her place. It waslike a knife cutting intomy heart.”

But Madam Zhang doesn’t blame her husband of almost two decades.

“I knew in my heart that he loves me deeply and he would give up his life for me. It was just an accident,” she says.

After the accident, she could do nothing on her own. She needed help even to scratch an itch.

“It was like starting from zero. I needed catheter tubes to pass urine. I needed people to feed me,” she says.

For a year after leaving the hospital, she would not step out of her home.

When she finally did, she received stares from strangers, which affected her daughters. “They asked me,‘Mummy, why do people look at us when we go out? It’s very embarrassing.’

“I told them that there’s nothing I am ashamed about. ‘Even though I’m disabled, I try my best. You should be proud of me’,” she says.

These days, mother and daughters are close. “They save money and buy my husband and I presents for our birthdays, or on special occasions like Christmas.

“And whenever it’s time to have dinner, they will ask permission before starting without me. Usually they will wait for me to start together,” she says.

Looking back, it was her husband and two children who kept her going, she says.

Thoughts of giving up came but went just as quickly because she felt responsible for the children.

“I didn’t want my husband to worry,and I didn’t want everything I was used to in my previous life to change because of the accident.”

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