Bonny Hicks

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.

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? 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.

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. 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.

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 them, Hicks' anthropical philosophy of life that featured loving, caring and sharing was not only refreshing but important, perhaps more than even Hicks herself could appreciate at the time. A growing voice appeared to emerge clearly in her writings, and it attracted many Singaporeans and others, including some scholars. Two of the scholars would become pivotally influential new mentors to Hicks during her major traditionalist life transition, the ultimate result of which, as things would turn out, would be cut short by her untimely death.

Although Hicks never fully attained her stardom goals, and although she later distanced herself from her goals on the matter, Singaporeans broadly took note of the nature of her early attempts at becoming famous. Few people found themselves able to respond to Hicks with a mere shrug, a fact that fueled not only her popularity among her supporters but the controversy that so doggedly followed her among her critics. While tasting the intense and transitory flavor of fame, Hicks' limited life experience could not have led her to anticipate the intensity of the negative reactions that would accompany her attempts under the spotlight, could not have allowed her to surmise the toll that the negative words and societal shunning would take upon her psyche over time. In many ways, her move to Indonesia, which coincided with her plea for greater public understanding as released in her second book, Discuss Disgust, was an attempt to escape the intense controversy she had experienced in Singapore over her first book, Excuse Me, Are You a Model? Whether her departure was something of a victory for traditionalists, a mere admission to herself of her limited constitution to withstand societal disapprobation, an outcome of simply her own maturation, or some combination of the three, cannot be known with certainty. What is clear, however, is that her hope through her move was to find a reprieve from the societal shunning she had been experiencing from traditionalists in Singapore; to move to a place where she could deepen and further redefine herself and perhaps undertake a larger and much wiser relaunching of herself in Singapore. Due to her untimely death, it was never to be. It was to celebrate Christmas with Dalrymple's family that Hicks and Dalrymple boarded SilkAir Flight 185 in Jakarta en route to Singapore, probably their first such visit to the home of Dalrymple's parents as an engaged couple. The young couple never arrived, died en route, as their flight crashed into the Musi River.

Death

Less than thirty minutes into SilkAir Flight 185 with Hicks aboard, the flight began a high-speed nosedive at 35,000 feet toward the Musi River in Southern Sumatra, Indonesia. While mid-air, the plane broke into pieces before being scattered across the river's surface. Local fisherman searched the crash site for survivors with scant hope. Both Hicks and Dalrymple died with all of the rest of the passengers and crew.

Later, divers confirmed Hicks' death at the crash site after recovering some of her personal effects, including her wallet and credit cards.

Aftermath Hicks' death just before her 30th birthday shocked Singaporeans, as well as others around the globe, and prompted a swirl of activity as people sought to interpret the meaning of a life that had been suddenly cut short. Hicks' traditionalist critics as well as her allies both looked afresh, deeper, more carefully, and perhaps with a level of nuance she had prior deserved all along.

Richard Lim, the editor of The Straits Times, interpreted Hicks in a eulogy by recalling her life and contributions to the paper, and by publishing an excerpt of the famous essay "Whistling of Birds" by D. H. Lawrence. Lim began his piece with a line from the famous folk/rock song Fire and Rain by James Taylor. "Sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground," as if sung into his readers' memories in Taylor's melancholic tone, seemed to perfectly encapsulate much of the retrospective feeling across Singapore about Hicks' life and sudden death. In an earlier Straits Times piece that memorialised her grandmother, Hicks confessed that she believed in life after death.

Non-racialism Especially among Singaporean youth, who in the years since Hicks' death have become increasingly uncomfortable with their country's traditional backdrops of racialism, Hicks is recognized as a person who learned to cross cultural boundaries. She lived as person who found a comfortable niche in the betwixt-and-between of contesting cultural traditions and as one who was race-blind, seeing people for who they really were.