Bonny Hicks
Bonny Susan Hicks 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 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 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,, 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.