IN 2005, theatre practitioner Li Xie won the National Arts Council's (NAC) Young Artist Award and was invited to the Istana to attend the reception.

Most people would grab the chance to rub shoulders with the Who's Who of the arts scene at this prestigious event. Not Li, 35, the associate artist with local Mandarin theatre company Drama Box where she acts, writes and directs.

Instead of enjoying it, she escaped to the Istana kitchen and watched the food being prepared, emerging only when the ceremony got under way.

The former radio deejay has a reputation in the media and arts scenes for being rebellious, and it would be tempting to attribute her strange behaviour that night to a case of wanting to be different, or even to being attention seeking.

So what was the real reason for her temporary disappearance? 'I'm a very shy person,' she says in a soft, melodious voice.

Looking slightly embarrassed, she continues: 'I don't know how to socialise. My heart will beat very fast when I'm in a crowd.'

Early this year, Women's Weekly magazine named her as one of the Great Women Of Our Times. She tells you with a laugh that she hid in the toilet for 20 minutes until the ceremony started.

We are having this interview in the living room of her rented house in the eastern part of Singapore, which she shares with her dog, a four-year-old Jack Russell terrier named Bianco, and two friends.

She wears a spaghetti top over a pair of slacks and her shoulder-length hair is tied up, revealing thin shoulders and fair skin. Her well-defined features, including her arched eyebrows and slightly protruding front teeth, combine to form an intelligent look.

A one-on-one chat with her is satisfying as she is candid and straightforward, with a formidable arsenal of witty one-liners and refreshing perspectives.

But her fear of crowds explains why she has been consistently absent from the Life! Theatre Awards ceremony despite being nominated four times and winning the Best Supporting Actress award last year for her performance in Happy, a Mandarin drama about Irish playwright Oscar Wilde.

'I don't like to network. What are you supposed to say to each other?' she says. 'But I enjoy meeting the man in the street. I love talking to cleaners and people in the coffee shops because I'm interested in them.'

This revelation, that she is painfully shy, is a surprise as Li's public persona is very much that of a bold and outspoken character, a wild child who seemingly thrives on challenging authority and social norms.

FLASHBACK 'I miss a lot about radio except being watched and blacklisted. I wish I could go back and create 'havoc' again' - On missing her radio days 'Maybe 50 years later, when I'm so poor I have to scavenge for Coca Cola cans' - On whether she regrets giving up an university education 'If you want to buy the book to know more about me, then good luck to you. People change. The person I am now will be a different one next year' - On whether her book is autobiographical 'I had many toys, especially Barbie dolls. How I loved cutting their hair and messing them up' - On her childhood

Cheeky combination

AFTER all, she is no stranger to controversy.

In 1998, barely a few months after being crowned the most creative and most humorous presenter at MediaCorp's inaugural Golden Mike Awards, she quit Yes 93.3FM abruptly to go into theatre full time.

'I was tired of sitting in front of a microphone talking about showbiz news for six years. It made me feel really redundant on earth,' says Li, who is single.

Previously known by her Chinese name Lin Baobao, she stopped using it and adopted the new moniker, Li Xie, a cheeky combination of her mother's surname and the Chinese word for evil.

'When pronounced in Cantonese, it means 'You are evil'. The dark side of human nature intrigues me,' she says.

On why she went for a stage name, she adds: 'There was a lot of baggage associated with my real name.' She breaks into a hearty laugh and adds: 'I did it basically for fun, lah.'

In 2000, her play The Vaginalogues featured a slide showing a black and white picture of a woman's vagina. She acted in and wrote the play, inspired by American playwright Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues.

The NAC wanted the slide to be pulled out but she refused and the council withdrew the $8,000 grant given to Drama Box for the play. It was staged anyway, to rave reviews.

'I wanted to stand by what I felt was right. I do give in sometimes, as long as it doesn't affect the integrity of my work,' she says.

When she was a part-time deejay at Radio 1003, the Chinese station was fined $15,000 by the Singapore Broadcasting Authority in 2002 after she added personal comments during the news bulletin.

The comments were on topics such as the United States' threat to deploy nuclear weapons, oil price hikes, then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to a war shrine and priests who commit sexual offences, among other reports.

She quit shortly after. Asked if she would still do what she did then on air, she replies: 'Rules are meant to be broken, but I didn't break them cleverly. I didn't know the consequences.'

Does she regret her actions? She considers the question, then says evenly: 'I regret hurting people in the process, but I'm not apologetic about what I said.'

She may still sound defiant, but those who know her well say she has mellowed a lot in recent years.

Drama Box artistic director Kok Heng Leun, 40, who has known her for over 10 years, describes her as 'intelligent, passionate, emotional and strong willed'.

'She has opinions of her own, which I think is important as an artist, and dares to express them,' he says. 'She can be irrational at times when provoked but has learnt over the years to sit back and reflect.'

Her close friend Jackie Liu, 42, editor-in-chief of the weekly entertainment magazine i-weekly, who worked with her at Yes 93.3FM, says she can be quite difficult to work with.

'She is like an untamed horse because she doesn't follow orders. But her bosses didn't come down hard on her because they valued her talents,' he says.

Even her attempts to mask her shyness were done a tad defiantly. Li says she used to reject assignments that required her to host outdoor shows, going so far as to walk into her manager's office to coolly hand in a leave form just to wriggle her way out of it.

But Liu says that while Li remains 'full of character', age has smoothened out some of her rough edges.

'She has learnt how to spare a thought for others and do things she might not necessarily like for the good of the larger picture.'

One example of her change is agreeing to interviews. While she used to avoid publicity - she hates being photographed and tolerates only side profiles - she has loosened up noticeably in the past year.

This new media-friendly stance has been more apparent since she published her Chinese book, literally translated as Leave Your Head Behind, in August.

She has appeared on radio and magazines to plug her maiden collection of short stories, poems and paintings. 'It took me a while to realise that over-protecting yourself sometimes suffocates life, but over-exposure is also suicidal,' she muses.

'Choosing to be low profile slows down my career, but it is a choice true to myself, so, serves me right. Now, I understand how to play the game.'

She even has a blog set up by her publisher.

She tells you how, when she turned 30 and was moving house, she decided to discard her diaries and old photographs. 'I burnt them in those incense burners below my flat. I looked at every photograph, then threw them one by one into the fire, in a very detached manner,' she says.

Doesn't she feel that old photographs are an important part of her past?

'If you need a photograph to help you to remember, then that memory is not so important in the first place,' she counters.

A few days after the interview, she e-mails twoimage files, saying she managed to find two remaining childhood photos hidden in an old book.

Will she burn these too? 'No lah, I will keep them just to amuse my friends at my funeral, haha,' she writes.

Making ends meet

BORN Lim Poh Poh on Jan 12, 1972, she has an elder brother and a younger sister.

Her paternal grandfather was a very rich businessman who sold bak kwa (barbecued meat) and she remembers living in a mansion in the River Valley Road area with the extended family and lots of maids and chauffeurs.

But the family business went bust and her family moved into a three-room flat in Ang Mo Kio when she was about 13.

Her father became a labourer and her mother did odd jobs to make ends meet. So she had to look after her sister, who is eight years younger than she is.

'There was once when my parents had no money to pay the electricity bills and the power was cut,' she recalls. Her parents are now retired.

She studied at St Nicholas Girls' School and went on to Hwa Chong Junior College, where she was active in the student council and Chinese Society.

She was offered a place at the National University of Singapore's Arts faculty but decided against furthering her studies after pondering over it for a night.

'I was very stubborn. I felt I didn't need a degree to do well in life.' Then, with a smile, she adds: 'Maybe I just like to make things difficult for myself.'

So she became a waitress at a Crystal Jade restaurant for a few months. 'I discovered another world. These people didn't go to university, but they were making a living in their own way too.'

She then taught at a school for intellectually disabled children for about eight months before joining MediaCorp as a deejay in 1992.

It was a dream job that gave her the space to unleash her creativity and she swiftly became one of the hottest new names on the airwaves.

Then in 1998, she surprised everyone by switching to a career in theatre. 'Heng Leun was the only director I knew then. He asked me if I wanted to try acting, and so I joined Drama Box,' she says of her decision.

She gave up a four-figure salary for a paltry three-figure one, but she was happier.

When she did her first solo performance, Sour Relationship, playing a woman falling accidentally from her apartment window to her death, she realised that theatre can 'create social changes, though in a painstakingly slow way'.

'It drives you to question the dysfunctional and absurd world, what it means to us and how to deal with it. Theatre is not just art, it is about life. We see theatre everywhere, every day,' she says.

In the past nine years, she has been writing, directing and acting in various critically acclaimed plays like The Vaginalogues (2000), Shithole (2004) and Little White Sailing Boat earlier this year.

On her foray into directing, she says: 'I don't want to be just an actress. I want to be a creator.'

Lianhe Zaobao's Beijing correspondent Han Yong Hong, 35, who used to be the paper's theatre critic and is also her former schoolmate, says Li is a very hardworking and humble person.

'In Li Xie, I see rebellion, courage, the thirst for seeking our historical roots and a very grassroots trait. It is very rare in theatre and we need practitioners like her,' she says.

These days, Li's income comes from voice-over jobs for advertisements, writing a column for i-weekly and conducting workshops for schools.

The wild child appears to have found her calling in theatre and she says the most satisfying accomplishment to date is 'becoming more human'.

'Hopefully, I've become more humane too,' she says.

Indeed, being rebellious, controversial, and yes, shy, is all part of being human.