Singaporean model (1968-1997)
Bonny Susan Hicks (5 January 1968 – 19 December 1997) was a Singaporean model and writer. After garnering local fame as a model, she gained worldwide recognition for her contributions to Singaporean post-colonial literature and the anthropic philosophy conveyed in her works. Her first book, "Excuse Me, Are You A Model?", is recognised as a significant milestone in the literary and cultural history of Singapore. Hicks later published a second book, "Discuss Disgust", and many shorter pieces in press outlets, including a short-lived opinion column in a major Singaporean daily that was pulled due to public dissent from Singaporean traditionalists.
Hicks died at age 29 on 19 December 1997 aboard SilkAir Flight 185 when it crashed into the Musi River on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The U.S.'s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) expressed the likelihood that the crash was an act of suicide and mass murder by the troubled Singaporean pilot. All 97 passengers and 7 crew members perished.
After Hicks' death, numerous publications including the book "Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks" by Tal Ben-Shahar featured her life and thought. Although she was deemed controversial by many during her lifetime because of her willingness to openly discuss human sexuality, Singaporean literary scholars during the last years of Hicks' life saw in her a pivotally important voice for interpreting their contemporary society.
Hicks' legacy is one of an important transitional social figure between traditionalist Singapore and the broad-scale societal changes that occurred in the country under the forces of globalisation as the 21st century approached. Her death resulted in the loss of a Singaporean national voice that was both growing and important yet internally conflicted while socially confrontive. Criticisms by Singaporean traditionalists during her modelling and authoring careers continually vexed Hicks' conscience and drove her to re-evaluate her life during her later years. Hicks ultimately made a sustained series of traditionalist choices during her final years of life.
Early life.
Hicks was born in 1968 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to a British father, Ron Hicks, and a Cantonese-speaking Singaporean-Chinese mother, Betty Soh. Her parents separated shortly after her birth and Soh relocated to Singapore in 1969 with her infant daughter. There, Hicks' formative social environment was multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and included Malays, Indians, and Chinese of various dialect groups. Although Hicks was biracial, she identified as Chinese during her early childhood, speaking Cantonese and watching Chinese-language television at home.
When Hicks was twelve, her mother accepted a job as a caretaker of a bungalow in Sentosa, Singapore, and they relocated to the island away from a Singaporean Housing and Development Board flat in Toa Payoh. Throughout her teens, Hicks lived with her mother on Sentosa Island, and intermittently with her (grandmother) with whom she enjoyed a particularly close relationship.
Hicks never met her father. At aged sixteen, she traced his whereabouts through the British High Commission, with whom he was stationed on Singapore during Hicks' conception. Married with children from his new arrangement, and likely keeping his past muffled from his new family, Hicks' father returned word via fax to her that he wanted nothing to do with her. Despite Hicks' superficial joking whenever publicly questioned about it, her father's rejection of her remained deeply hurtful to Hicks throughout her life.
Hicks' early years were marked by "few friends" and she stated that she made no serious friends after age 15—that is, until she met Patricia Chan Li-Yin, but even then things were hard to define. After Chan retired from being a Singaporean sports hero, a decorated female swimmer, she became a magazine editor and talent agent. After Hicks' and Chan's paths crossed, Chan become a pivotally important person in Hicks' life and career. The relationship was often confused and complicated by even Hicks' own account.
Finding fame.
Discovery and first mentor.
Chan "discovered" the nineteen-year-old Bonnie Hicks shortly after Hicks completed her A levels at the Hwa Chong Junior College. Hicks and Chan enjoyed a close, multi-leveled, complicated relationship that was both professional and personal. Hicks referred to Chan as "Mum", and some surmised that there was perhaps more to the relationship. Stemming from ambiguous statements Hicks later made in her first book, (e.g., "I was in love with Pat Chan"), Singaporeans widely speculated whether the two were involved in a lesbian relationship. While the statements in Hicks' book could be interpreted as indicating only an intimate mentoring relationship with Chan, whom Hicks clearly idealized and greatly admired, she continued to be ambiguous on the subject whenever questioned. This created a sense of mystery about Hicks' persona and contributed to her ongoing buzz and publicity.
Modeling.
Hicks' modelling career began with a showcase in the September 1987 cover of a now-defunct Singaporean fashion monthly, "GO". In a short while, she expanded into other modelling outlets, including ones in Indonesia. She continued to expand her appearances on magazine covers, print advertisements, catwalk appearances in designer clothes, and in a music video for a top-10 hit by the Singaporean indie band "The Oddfellows". Things looked bright.
A year into Hicks' modelling career, she began writing about her life experiences and ideas stemming from her modelling. By age twenty-one she had completed her first book, "Excuse Me, are you a Model?" She continued to model for five more years and in 1992, at the age of twenty-four, released her second book "Discuss Disgust". Hicks then left modelling to take a job as a department lead and copywriter in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time, Hicks reiterated a statement she had made in her first book: that she had never wanted to be a model in the first place. Instead, her dream since age thirteen had been to be a writer. It was then that she had begun keeping a diary of her feelings and experiences, a practice she continued throughout her life. Hicks drew from her documented memories in each of her writings.
Literary contributions and controversy.
"Excuse Me, Are You a Model?".
Hicks published her first work" Excuse Me, Are You a Model?" in Singapore in 1990. The book is her autobiographical exposé of the modelling and fashion world and contains frequent, candid discussion about her sexuality, a subject that was not traditionally broached in Singaporean society at the time. The work stirred significant controversy among Singaporeans who held traditional literary and moral standards. Traditionalists considered Hicks' work a "kiss and tell" book that disclosed "too much too soon" from an independent woman still in her early twenties. Singaporean youth, on the other hand, had a starkly different view; twelve thousand copies were sold within two weeks, prompting the book's publisher to boast Hicks' work as "the biggest book sensation in the annals of Singapore publishing."
During the years leading up to her death, Singaporean English literature scholars had begun to recognise more than just a simple generational divide in the reactions to Hicks' book, and were describing it as "an important work" in the confessional mode of the genre of post-colonial literature. Well before Hick's book was deemed "a significant milestone in Singapore's literary and cultural history," Singaporean young people had already established a localized literary movement, following Hicks' lead. Local markets soon became inundated with the autobiographies of fame-seeking youth, many not yet in their twenties.
"Discuss Disgust".
In 1992, two years after Hicks' controversial entry into Singapore's literary scene, she published her second and last book, "Discuss Disgust." The novella, literarily more sophisticated but never as popular as her first book, portrays the world as seen through the eyes of a child whose mother is a prostitute. In it, Hicks continued to openly discuss sexuality, and in veiled terms broached the taboo of sexual abuse, both subjects that were not normally openly spoken of in Singapore during the time. Adding fuel to the controversy surrounding Hicks, a widely read local traditionalist columnist dubbed "Discuss Disgust" as "another one of those commercial publications which pack sleaze and sin into its hundred-oddpages" (sic). While an understanding of "Discuss Disgust" was much greater than was let on among even traditionalists critics, social pressures meant that few people openly accepted the novella for what it actually was: Hicks' semi-autobiographical account of "her own" troubled childhood years, an only partially veiled yet immediately unsuccessful cry for the public to reinterpret her early adult years through the psychological trauma of her childhood years.
"The Bonny Hicks Diary".
Hicks was also a frequent contributor to Singaporean and regional press outlets. Her frankly-written bi-monthly column in "The Straits Times", "The Bonny Hicks Diary", in which she often discussed her childhood on Sentosa Island, further incited traditionalists' feelings that Hicks was an improper role model for young, impressionable girls, whom traditionalists felt were being morally corrupted by Hicks. Yielding to public traditionalist pressure, spurred initially by a letter writing campaign to the paper, the "Times" pulled her column within a year. The paper's esteemed editor, Richard Lim, subsequently voiced regret over what he considered a politically motivated decision by the paper. Pushing back as far as practicable, Lim began running frequent "special" columns by Hicks. Having taken a mentoring interest in Hicks' development as a writer since her first publication, Lim was uniquely authoritative when he publicly noted the deepening of Hicks' writings as she matured.
Third Book?
At the time of "Discuss Disgust"'s release, Hicks reported to "The Straits Times" that she had been working on a third book, one that centred on correspondence between herself and an unnamed female housemate. Hicks wrote of her social observations of the United States during a two-month visit, using it as a springboard to make social commentary about Singapore. While the book idea further revealed Hicks' preference to write with a certain person in mind it never materialised, not even in draft form or as personal papers released posthumously.
Life transition.
Introspection.
During Hicks' heyday, few had begun to adequately situate her life and works within the larger societal changes that had enveloped Singapore at the time under forces of rapid globalisation—changes that, by then, were simply far too advanced and powerful to altogether stop the clock upon by the traditionally successful means of shaming and ostracising. For the most part, traditionalists simply reacted from gut-level fear against Hicks, or a simplified characterisation or straw man of her, whom they perceived as a "notorious" moral threat willing to degrade Singaporean society for personal fame and financial gain. Even though the criticisms were not entirely fair—they certainly contained at least a kernel of truth—their accumulation had long been taking a toll upon Hicks' perseverance, eroding away at even her senses of identity, purpose, and wholeness, and thus her basic senses of faith, hope, and peace about the future. While she yet continued to milk opportunities for self-promotion, as Pat Chan had early on taught her to do, it was becoming clearer and clearer that Hicks had for some time been deep within a season of personal introspection, and had been laying plans for a significant life and career transition that appeared to be informed by the values of Singaporean traditionalists. Whilst she was perhaps conceding a victory to her traditionalist critics amid her life transition, her life change was caused at least as much by her own personal maturing away from the years and seemingly unrestrained values of her youth, although there was certainly an interplay of both external and internal forces that prodded her along.
Overall, Hicks's self-promotional success efforts had begun to painfully wane; so, she took pause and introspectively re-evaluated her life. Of this tumultuous period Hicks confessed,
I experienced great happiness and great sorrow in my life. While the great happiness was uplifting and renewing, the sorrow ate at me slowly, like a worm in the core of an apple. I realised then that stable happiness was not mine until I could eliminate the sorrow too. The sorrow which I experienced was often due to the fact that my own happiness came at a price. That price was someone else's happiness.
New mentors, new growth.
Despite Hicks' confession that she had harmed others along her path to fame, and her intention to reverse the trend, she all along had her supporters—those who comprehended her on a level deeper than the mere fandom she had so often sought to instigate toward herself, and who saw in Hicks a young lady not trying to offend but to initiate critical conversations within a culture that was often far too resistant to anything beyond the familiar. To