The decision did not go down well with her parents who believed that modelling was not a proper job for a girl.

"I promised my mother that I would not do anything that would make her ashamed of me. I asked her to let me make my own choices," she says.

The scene then, she says, was intimidating.

"Many models at that time such as Tina Tan and Gillian Barker came from good families and a certain social background. For them, it was glamour play," she says. Tan's father was a property developer and her grandfather was rubber tycoon Tan Lark Sye, while Barker's father was the late law minister Eddie Barker.

"With my background, I felt a little inferior and a bit of an outsider. I had to learn all those designer names. I had absolutely no idea," she recalls.

She signed on with Carrie's Models after a year, and tried to move beyond the catwalk to take on photographic assignments.

"It was like being slapped in the face. I was just not what Singapore wanted. My features were different. I have thick lips and a big smile. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they wanted girls with small lips."

There were countless rejections.

"Clients even called my agent in front of me and said, 'Why did you even bother to send her down?'" she lets on. "I'd take a deep breath and walk out and the tears would fall after that. I had to cry outside and not at home because doing this was my own choice."

Fortunately, she was resilient, a trait she thinks she inherited from her mother.

When Mrs Fong-Chalopin was 12, her mother ploughed all that she had saved into a small little terraced house in Chwee Chian Road off Pasir Panjang for the family. But she lost everything when the developer went bankrupt before the house was completed.

"I was only 12. Watching my mother cry day and night at the construction site was not easy," she says. But her old lady, she says, was a fighter. She worked hard, borrowed and managed to pay off enough of the developer's debt to regain the house.

"I learnt then that life is not always fair," she says, adding that this early lesson helped her cope with the many rejections she faced in her early days.