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{{ToApprove|editor=Stephen Ewen, M.Ed. (author)|url=http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Bonny_Hicks&diff=100019455&oldid=100019454|group=Literature|date=January 14, 2006}}
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{{Image|Bonny Hicks.jpg|right|300px|Cover of Bonny Hicks' first book.}}
[[Image:Bonny Hicks.JPG|thumb|222px|right|'''Bonny Hicks''' from the back cover of her 1990 book, ''Excuse me, are you a model?'']]
'''Bonny Susan Hicks''' (1968–1997) was a [[Singapore]] mixed-ancestry model and writer. After garnering local fame as a model, she gained 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.<ref name="journal">{{cite journal| author=Ismail S. Talib| title=Singapore| journal=Journal of Commonwealth Literature| date=September 2000| volume=3| issue=35| page=105| url=http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/3/95.pdf| url-access=subscription| access-date=27 December 2006| archive-date=29 May 2009| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090529234137/http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/3/95.pdf| url-status=live}}</ref> 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.


'''Bonny Hicks''' ([[January 5]], [[1968]] &ndash; [[December 19]], [[1997]]) was a [[Singapore]]an [[model]] who gained her greatest notoriety for her contributions to Singaporean [[post-colonial literature]] and the anthropic philosophies conveyed in her works. Her first book, ''Excuse Me, are you a Model?'', is recognized as a significant [[milestone]] in the [[Literary history|literary]] and [[cultural history]] of Singapore. She followed it with ''Discuss Disgust'' and many shorter pieces in press outlets. Her future plans were cut short when she was killed at age twenty-nine on [[December 19]], [[1997]], when [[Silkair Flight 185]] [[airline crashes|crashed]] on the [[Indonesian]] island of [[Sumatra]], killing all 104 on board. After Hicks's death she was eulogized in special publications, including the book ''Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks'' by [[Tal Ben-Shahar]]. Her authorial and social legacy marked particularly Singaporean society.
Hicks died at age 29 on 19 December 1997 aboard [[SilkAir Flight 185]] when it crashed into the [[Musi River (Indonesia)|Musi River]] on the Indonesian island of [[Sumatra]], and according to the [[National Transportation Safety Board|NTSB]], is believed to be an act of suicide and mass murder by the Singaporean pilot. All 104 passengers aboard the flight died. After Hicks' death, numerous publications including the book ''Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks'' by [[Tal Ben-Shahar]] featured her life and thought.<ref name="cnn">{{cite news|title=Divers battle muddy water at Indonesian crash site|accessdate=27 December 2006|publisher=CNN|year=1997|work=World News|url=http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9712/20/singapore.plane.615pm|archive-date=12 June 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612162415/http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9712/20/singapore.plane.615pm/|url-status=live}}</ref>


==Background and Modeling==
Although Hicks was deemed controversial by many during her lifetime because of her willingness to openly discuss [[human sexuality]], Singaporean literary scholars today deem her voice as a pivotally important one for interpreting contemporary Singaporean society. Hicks' legacy today is one of an important transitional social figure between old and new Singapore during its period of broad-scale societal changes under the forces of [[globalisation]]. Her death resulted in the loss of a Singaporean national voice that was both growing and important yet internally conflicted. Criticisms by Singaporean traditionalists during her modelling and authoring careers continually vexed Hicks' conscience and helped drive her to re-evaluate her life. Hicks ultimately made a sustained series of traditionalist choices during the latter years of her life.<ref name="ips">{{cite journal| author=Institute of Policy Studies (Singapore)| title=Yearly Publication| journal=Times Academic Press for the Institute of Policy Studies| year=1991}}</ref>
{{TOC}}
==Early life==
Hicks was born in 1968 in [[Kuala Lumpur]], Malaysia, to a British father, Ron Hicks, and a [[Cantonese]]-speaking Singaporean-[[Han Chinese|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 in Singapore|Malays]], [[Indians in Singapore|Indians]], and [[Chinese Singaporean|Chinese]] of various dialect groups.<ref name="tu">{{cite web|title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life|accessdate = 27 December 2006|publisher=Harvard University|year=1998|author=Tu Wei-Ming|url=http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html|archivedate=21 November 2005}}</ref> Although Hicks was [[biracial]], she identified as Chinese during her early childhood, speaking Cantonese and watching Chinese-language television at home.


Hicks was born on January 5, [[1968]]. She described herself as a Singaporean of "mixed" parentage, with her father being [[Briton|British]] and her mother [[Han Chinese|Chinese]]. She identified her formative [[social environment]] as a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual environment that included [[Malays]], [[Indian]]s and Chinese of various [[dialect group]]s.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
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]].<ref name="tnp20">{{cite news|last=Maureen|first=Koh|title=Mum spends birthdays at crash site|location=Singapore|publisher=The New Paper|date=26 August 2008}}</ref> Throughout her teens, Hicks lived with her mother on Sentosa Island,<ref name="mermaid">{{cite web|url=http://www.postcolonialweb.org/singapore/literature/poetry/chia/mermaid.html|title=Mermaid Princess|accessdate=27 December 2006|publisher=The Literature, Culture, and Society of Singapore|year=1998|author=Grace Chia|archive-date=31 December 2006|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061231175554/http://www.postcolonialweb.org/singapore/literature/poetry/chia/mermaid.html|url-status=live}}</ref> and intermittently with her {{transl|zsm|porpor}} (grandmother) with whom she enjoyed a particularly close relationship.<ref name="truth">Tan Gim Ean, "A Bonny way to tell the truth" ''New Straits Times'', 30 May 1992, 28.</ref>
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref> For seven years of her childhood, Hicks resided on Singapore's [[Sentosa Island]] with her mother, who was caretaker of a [[bungalow]] on the island [[resort]].<ref name="mermaid">{{Cite web
  |url=http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/singapore/literature/poetry/chia/mermaid.html|title=Mermaid Princess
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=The Literature, Culture, and Society of Singapore
  |year=1998
  |author=Grace Chia
  |format=HTML}}</ref> Hicks never met her father, who she described as having rejected her "by way of [[British High Commission]]".<ref name="covgirl">{{Cite web|url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm|title=Cover Girl from first to last|accessdate=2006-12-29|publisher=The Straits Times (Singapore)|year=Dec. 28, 1997|work=Life Section|format=HTML}}</ref>


After completing her [[Advanced Level]]<ref name="covgirl">{{cite journal
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.<ref name="covgirl">{{cite web|url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm|title=Cover Girl from first to last|accessdate=29 December 2006|publisher=The Straits Times (Singapore)|date=28 December 1997|work=Life Section|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927205924/http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm|archive-date=27 September 2007|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref name="covergirl">Rahman, Sheila, "Don't judge a covergirl by her looks," ''New Straits Times'', 2 Sep 1990, 10.</ref>
  |author=Lim Richard
  |title=Cover Girl from first to last
  |journal=The Straits Times (Singapore)
  |year=Dec. 28, 1997
  |url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm}}</ref> she managed against odds to enter the world of modeling at age nineteen. A year later she began writing about her life-experiences and ideas.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref> She had modeled for five years when, coinciding with the 1992 release of her second book, ''Disguss Disgust'', she left the industry to take a job as a [[copywriter]] in [[Jakarta]], [[Indonesia]]. At that time, Hicks stated she had never wanted to be a model in the first place.<ref name="change">{{Cite web
  |url=http://www.recyclingpoint.com.sg/Articles/1992may27ModelBonnyoptsforachange.htm
  |title=Model Bonny opts for a change in scene
  |accessdate=2006-12-29
  |publisher=The Star (Malaysia)
  |year=May 27, 1992
  |author=Majorie Chiew
  |format=HTML}}</ref>


==Literary Contributions==
Hicks' early years were marked by "few friends". She stated she made no real friends after age 15—that is, until she met [[Pat Chan|Patricia Chan Li-Yin]], a person who would become a pivotally important person to Hicks' life and career.<ref name="Excuse Me, 7">''Excuse Me'', 7.</ref> Now a magazine editor and talent agent, Chan had retired from being a Singaporean sports hero, a decorated female swimmer.<ref>{{cite web| url=http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1376_2010-04-29.html| accessdate=2013-12-19| title=Patricia Chan Li-Yin| archive-date=24 April 2019| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190424053230/http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1376_2010-04-29.html| url-status=live}}</ref>
===''Excuse Me, are you a Model?''===


Hicks's initial work, ''Excuse Me, are you a Model?'', was published in Singapore in 1990. All 12,000 first print-run copies sold out in three days, prompting its publisher to declare her work "the biggest book sensation in the annals of Singapore publishing".<ref name="flame">{{Cite web
==Finding fame==
  |url=http://www.flameoftheforest.com/about/about_us.html
===Discovery and first mentor===
  |title=About Flame of the Forest Publishing
Chan "discovered" the nineteen-year-old Bonnie Hicks shortly after Hicks completed her [[Advanced Level (UK)|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 herself and contributed to ongoing buzz and publicity.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="covergirl"/>
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Flame of the Forest Publishers
  |year=2006
  |format=HTML}}</ref> The book is Hicks's autobiographical exposé of the modeling and fashion world and contains frequent candid musings from Hicks about [[human sexuality]], a subject not traditionally broached in Singaporean society.


''Excuse Me, are you a Model?'' caused such controversy in Singapore that it prompted Hicks into "self-exile" in Jakarta, Indonesia, where she maintained her primary residence until her 1997 death.<ref name="oldwoman">{{Cite web|url=http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=69d262ae17f88a668e8e5c4977b74608&_docnum=43&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkVb&_md5=5e1176bc0d0202b8106b126ffaa6d431|title=Still life: Old woman bathing by a dirty canal|accessdate=2006-12-30|publisher=The Straits Times (Singapore)|year=December 28, 1997|author=Bonny Hicks|work=Sunday Plus Cover Story|format=HTML}} A subscription to [[LexisNexis]] is required to view source.</ref> <ref name="sweetdreams">{{Cite web|url=http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=69d262ae17f88a668e8e5c4977b74608&_docnum=44&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkVb&_md5=3d6276a237a3b57df8a0c9bfab16c77a|title=Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines|accessdate=2006-12-30|publisher=The Straits Times (Singapore)|year=December 28, 1997|author=Bonny Hicks|work=Sunday Plus Cover Story|format=HTML}}</ref> Reflecting on her publishing experience five years after release of the book, Hicks wrote,
===Modeling===
[[File:Bonnie-Hicks-Singapore-GO-Magazine-Covers.png|thumb|Hick's on the two covers of the defunct ''GO Magazine'', which began her modelling career.]]
Hicks' modelling career began by showcasing her appearance on the September 1987 cover of a now-defunct Singaporean fashion monthly, ''GO''. She shortly followed her first appearance with another. She continued with multiple appearances on other covers, print advertisements, catwalk appearances in designer clothes, and in a music video for a top-10 hit by the Singaporean [[Independent music|indie]] band The Oddfellows.<ref>For info on the band, see http://www.nlb.gov.sg/blogs/libraryesplanade/music/baybeats-observation-deck-band-profile-the-oddfellows/ {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304045614/http://www.nlb.gov.sg/blogs/libraryesplanade/music/baybeats-observation-deck-band-profile-the-oddfellows/ |date=4 March 2016 }}</ref>


<BLOCKQUOTE><div style= "font-size:95%;">
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?''<ref name="tu"/> 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.<ref name="change">{{cite web|url=http://www.recyclingpoint.com.sg/Articles/1992may27ModelBonnyoptsforachange.htm |title=Model Bonny opts for a change in scene |accessdate=29 December 2006 |work=The Star (Malaysia) |date=27 May 1992 |author=Majorie Chiew |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20061006094558/http://www.recyclingpoint.com.sg/Articles/1992may27ModelBonnyoptsforachange.htm |archivedate=6 October 2006 |url-status=dead}}</ref> 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.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="truth"/><ref name="covergirl"/><ref name="Excuse Me, 7"/>
What was intended as an innocent memoir of my coming of age was labelled a kiss-and-tell book.


I was baffled, shocked and frightened. However, there was no time for those feelings, as I tried busily to put right every sentence that was quoted out of context, to stand my ground and defend what I stood for.
===Brief marriage===
 
Before her move to Indonesia, Hicks was married briefly to a former member of the [[Republic of Singapore Air Force]]. Hicks left him for Richard "Randy" Dalrymple, an American architect, by whose side she died aboard SilkAir Flight 185. Hicks' first husband was a former colleague of the pilot of the plane in which Hicks perished. This connection would later become a troubling focus of the investigation into the crash that took Hicks' life—her murder, as was shown in the events that followed.<ref name="latimes">{{cite journal
The book was not judged. It was I who was judged. I was judged for the way I had chosen to live my life, judged for my moral values.
  | title=SilkAir
  | journal=Los Angeles Times
  | date=5 September 2001}} Dalrymple's architecture in Singapore was featured in: Dalrymple, Richard. "Pavilions for a Forest Setting in Singapore." ''Architectural Digest'' (4/91), 48 (4).</ref>


My audience was clearly divided into two extreme camps. The first made up of teenagers or young adults who related to me and wrote me a multitude of fan mail telling me how they had found in me a voice that spoke their inner thoughts.
==Literary contributions and controversy==


The second consisted of an older group, mostly women, who found me despicable and damaging to their feminist cause. To them, I was a bad and immoral example to the questioning and impressionable young.
===''Excuse Me, Are You a Model?''===
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>
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 [[human sexuality|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 Hick's 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"—an accurate claim.<ref name="flame">{{cite web
|url        = http://www.flameoftheforest.com/about/about_us.html
|title      = About Flame of the Forest Publishing
|accessdate  = 27 December 2006
|publisher  = Flame of the Forest Publishers
|year        = 2006
|url-status    = dead
|archiveurl  = https://web.archive.org/web/20070106020706/http://www.flameoftheforest.com/about/about_us.html
|archivedate = 6 January 2007}}</ref>


The book was later described by [[English literature]] scholars as an important work in the "confessional mode" of the [[genre]] of [[post-colonial literature]],<ref name="post-col2">{{cite book  
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 writing|confessional]] mode of the genre of [[post-colonial literature]].<ref name="post-col2">{{cite book
   | title=A Historical Companion To Postcolonial Thought In English
   | title=A Historical Companion To Postcolonial Thought in English
   | last=Poddar, Prem  
   | last=Poddar, Prem
   | coauthors=Johnson, David  
   |author2=Johnson, David
   | date=2005
   | year=2005
  | pages=518
   | publisher=Columbia University Press
   | publisher=Columbia University Press
   | id=0231135068}}</ref> and as a significant milestone in Singapore’s literary and cultural history.<ref name="journal">{{cite journal
   | isbn = 0-231-13506-8
  | author=Ismail S. Talib
  | page=518}}</ref> 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.<ref name="journal"/>
  | title=Singapore
  | journal=Journal of Commonwealth Literature
  | year=95
  | volume=3
  | issue=35
  | page=105
  | url=http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/3/95.pdf}} A subscription is required to view the link.</ref>
 
===''Discuss Disgust'' and Press Articles===


After Hicks's much publicized entry into Singapore's literary scene, she published her second and final book, ''Discuss Disgust,'' wherein she continued to broach issues not traditionally spoken of openly in Singapore. Deemed by most scholars to be a semi-autobiographical account of Hick's troubled childhood years, the [[novella]] portrays the world as seen through the eyes of a child whose mother is a [[prostitute]].<ref name="discussdisgust">{{cite book  
===''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 even broached the taboo of sexual abuse, both subjects that were not normally openly spoken of in Singapore during the time.<ref>Interview and review by [[Koh, Buck Song]], "Little girl lost", ''The Straits Times'' 21 March 1992.</ref> 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).<ref>Tan Gim Ean, "That's why mummy is a tart" ''New Straits Times'', 30 May 1992, 28.</ref> While public understanding was greater than let on, traditionalist social pressures meant that few people publicly 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|trauma-lens]] of her childhood.<ref name="discussdisgust">{{cite book
   | title=Discuss Disgust
   | title=Discuss Disgust
   | last=Hicks
   | last=Hicks
   | first=Bonny
   | first=Bonny
   | date=1992
   | year=1992
   | publisher=Angsana Books
   | publisher=Angsana Books
   | id=9810035063}}</ref>  
   | isbn = 981-00-3506-3}}</ref>
<ref name="post-col">{{cite book  
<ref name="post-col">{{cite book
   | title=Encyclopedia of post-colonial literatures in English
   | title=Encyclopedia of post-colonial literatures in English
   | last=Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, eds.
   | last=Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, eds.
   | coauthors=Wei Li, Ng
   | author2=Wei Li, Ng
   | date=1994
   | year=1994
   | pages=656-657
   | pages=656–657
   | publisher=Routledge
   | publisher=Routledge
   | location=London
   | location=London
   | id=0415278856}}</ref>
   | isbn = 0-415-27885-6}}</ref>


Hicks was also a frequent contributor to the Singaporean press and other outlets.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
==="The Bonny Hicks Diary"===
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
Hicks was also a frequent contributor to Singaporean and regional press outlets.<ref name="tu"/> 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 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.<ref name="covgirl"/>
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref> Her frankly-written bi-monthly column in Singapore's ''The Straits Times'', in which she frequently discussed her difficult childhood on Sentosa Island, incited critics over feelings that Hicks was not a proper role model for young, impressionable girls. Yielding to the pressure, the ''Times'' pulled her column after about a year, although it continued to run other pieces by Hicks on occasion, noting that she exhibited in them a continually deepening level of thought.<ref name="covgirl">{{cite journal
  |author=Lim Richard
  |title=Cover Girl from first to last
  |journal=The Straits Times (Singapore)
  |year=Dec. 28, 1997
  |url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm}}</ref>


==Philosophy==
===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 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 .<ref name="truth"/>


===Positive Psychology===  
==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 to 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.<ref name="discussdisgust"/>
<ref name="post-col"/> Of this tumultuous period Hicks confessed,
<blockquote>
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.<ref name="canwait">{{cite book |title=Heaven can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks |last=Ben-Shahar |first=Tal |year=1998 |publisher=Times Books International  |location=Singapore|isbn = 981-204-991-6}}</ref></blockquote>


Hicks's anthropical [[philosophy]] of life that featured loving, caring and sharing, emerged clearly in her writings, and attracted the attention of Singaporeans and others worldwide, including scholars.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
===New mentors, new growth===
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
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.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="tu"/>
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref>  
 
Prior her 1997 death, Hicks carried on an approximately year-long correspondence about philosophical and spiritual matters with [[Tal Ben-Shahar]], a [[Positive psychology|positive psychologist]] and popular [[Harvard University]] professor. The correspondence later became basis for a 1998 book by Ben-Shahar.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref>


===New Confucianism===
One of Hicks' new mentors was [[Tal Ben-Shahar]], a [[Positive psychology|positive psychologist]] and popular professor of psychology at the time at [[Harvard University]]. Hicks reached out to Ben-Shahar after being exposed to his writings, and the two corresponded about philosophical and spiritual matters for approximately one year, on up until Hicks' 1997 death. The correspondence later became basis for a 1998 book by Ben-Shahar, in which he narrated Hicks' profound growth during the year.<ref name="tu"/>


Hicks had also became a serious student of [[Confucianism|Confucian humanism]] prior her death. She was particularly attracted to the thought of another Harvard professor, [[Tu Wei-Ming]], a [[New Confucian]] philosopher. Hicks attended Wei-Ming's seminars and the two corresponded. Added to the influence of Ben-Shahar, Hicks began to exhibit increased New Confucian influence upon her thinking, and soon expressed dismay in the Singaporean press about "the lack of understanding of Confucianism as it was intended to be and the political version of the ideology to which we are exposed today". Just prior Hicks's death she submitted a piece to Singapore's ''[[The Straits Times]]'', "I think and feel, therefore I am", which was published posthumously on December 28, 1997.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
Hicks had also become a student of [[Confucianism|Confucian humanism]], and she was particularly attracted to the thought a second Harvard professor, [[Tu Wei-Ming]], a [[New Confucian]] philosopher, who became a second new mentor to Hicks. Hicks attended Tu's seminars and the two corresponded over some months. With Tu's influence added to that of Ben-Shahar's, Hicks began to exhibit an increased New Confucian influence upon her thinking, and she soon turned in her occasional ''Straits Times'' columns to criticising Singaporean society from the theme. In one piece, she expressed dismay about the "lack of understanding of Confucianism as it was intended to be and the political version of the ideology to which we [as Singaporeans] are exposed today." Just before Hicks' death she had submitted what Editor Richard Lim recognised as her most mature column ever to ''The Straits Times''. The daily posthumously published "I think and feel, therefore I am", on 28 December 1997.<ref name="tu"/> In it Hicks argued,
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}</ref> In it Hicks stated:


<BLOCKQUOTE><div style= "font-size:95%;">
<blockquote>Thinking is more than just conceiving ideas and drawing inferences; thinking is also reflection and contemplation. When we take embodied thinking rather than abstract reasoning as a goal for our mind, then we understand that thinking is a transformative act.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> The mind will not only deduce, speculate, and comprehend, but it will also awaken, will enlighten and inspire.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />Si, is how I have thought, and always will think.<ref name="tu"/>
Thinking is more than just conceiving ideas and drawing inferences; thinking is also reflection and contemplation. When we take embodied thinking rather than abstract reasoning as a goal for our mind, then we understand that thinking is a transformative act.
</blockquote>


The mind will not only deduce, speculate, and comprehend, but it will also awaken, will, enlighten and inspire.
Tu asserts that Hicks' use of the Chinese character ''Si'' was "code language," readily understood by her Chinese-speaking English readers, to convey New Confucian thought. The piece, Hicks' last, reflects the maturing and deepening engagement in philosophy and spirituality that she had clearly been enveloped in under tutelage of her new mentors during her last year of life.<ref name="tu"/>


Si, is how I have thought, and always will think.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
==Redefining herself==
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}
</ref>
</div>
</BLOCKQUOTE>


Wei-Ming asserts that the piece, Hicks's last, reflected her maturing and deepening engagement in philosophy, and that her use of the Chinese character ''Si'' was understood by her Chinese-speaking English readers to convey New Confucian thought.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
===Move to Indonesia===
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
When Hicks penned ''Excuse Me, are you a Model?'', her intent was to write a first book to which people would ''react''. Whether those reactions were positive or negative was not her young mind's first concern. Only public ''indifference'', the antithesis of public ''reaction'', would impede her achievement of fame and popularity, she believed—a message Pat Chan had surely instilled in Hicks from the start. Hicks described her own early motivations:
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}


==Future Plans==
<blockquote>I wanted to be something all young girls aspired to be, I wanted to be that model that men lusted after, I wanted to be that model that people would recognise on the streets. I wanted to be that model that clients would never stop demanding for, I wanted to be that model, that face, that would launch a thousand ships. I wanted to be a star.<ref>''Excuse Me'', 86.</ref></blockquote>


Shortly before Hicks's death, she had applied to numerous universities in [[England]] and the [[United States]], including Harvard University. She reported she had received one acceptance but was awaiting other possible acceptances before deciding where to attend.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
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. It was never to be due to her untimely death.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="tu"/><ref name="covergirl"/>
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}}
</ref> <ref name="covgirl">{{cite journal
  |author=Lim Richard
  |title=Cover Girl from first to last
  |journal=The Straits Times (Singapore)
  |year=Dec. 28, 1997
  |url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm}}</ref>  


Hicks was [[engaged]] to [[United States|American]] [[architect]] Richard Dalrymple, who died on Silkair Flight 185 along with Hicks and all others on the flight.<ref name="latimes">{{cite journal
===Heading to university===
  | title=SilkAir
Part of Hicks' plan was to attend [[higher education|university]]. Although Hicks publicly downplayed her lack of higher education, she privately expressed regret that she had not studied past her [[GCE Advanced Level|A-levels]], a fact traditionalist critics had used against her and her writings with no small frequency. During the year leading up to her 1997 death, Hicks applied to numerous universities in Britain and the United States, including [[Harvard]]. During her application processes Hicks called upon her Harvard mentors to exert influence on her behalf, which certainly helped overcome any negative effects that remained from Hicks' unremarkable academic record during her youth. At the time she applied, Hicks could present herself as an exceptional candidate to any university she wished to attend, a veritable shoo-in. Here was a young woman who had overcome a very difficult upbringing to become a nationally known model-turned-author, and whose mind, spirit, and insights had authentically impressed the two high-level academicians who had become the predominant mentors of her life transition and [[Recommendation letter|letter of recommendation]] writers. Hicks soon reported through the Singaporean press that she had received one university acceptance, refusing to say where, stating that she was awaiting other possible acceptances before ultimately deciding where to attend.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="tu"/><ref name="covgirl"/>
  | journal=The Los Angeles Times
 
  | year=Sept. 5, 2001}} Dalrymple's architecture in Singapore was featured in: Dalrymple, Richard. "Pavilions for a Forest Setting in Singapore". ''Architectural Digest'' (4/91), 48 (4).</ref>
===Marriage and family plans===
In keeping with traditionalist Singaporean pressures placed upon her, Hicks had begun to mature her image regarding her personal relationships and sexual reputation, whether her actual deeds fully deserved the reputation or not. She made plans to marry, settle down, and have children. Shortly before her death, Hicks became engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Richard "Randy" Dalrymple, an American architect of some regional prominence because of his unique structures in Singapore and Jakarta, once featured in ''[[Architectural Digest]]''.<ref>See for example the April 1991 and November 1993 issues.</ref> 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 ==
{{See also|SilkAir Flight 185}}
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.<ref name="ips"/><ref name="latimes"/><ref>Dalrymple's architecture in Singapore was featured in: Dalrymple, Richard. "Pavilions for a Forest Setting in Singapore." ''Architectural Digest'' (4/91), 48 (4).</ref><ref name=asn>{{ASN accident|id=19971219-0}}</ref>
 
Later, divers confirmed Hicks' death at the crash site after recovering some of her [[Personal property|personal effects]], including her wallet and credit cards.<ref name="pilot">"[http://pachome1.pacific.net.sg/~silkair.mi185/smhpilot.htm The pilot who wanted to die] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110722012332/http://pachome1.pacific.net.sg/~silkair.mi185/smhpilot.htm |date=22 July 2011 }}", ''Sydney Morning Herald'', 10 July 1999.</ref>
 
===Aftermath===
Hicks' death at age twenty-nine 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.{{cn|date=March 2021}}
 
==Legacy==
===Post-modern author===


==Death==
Hicks is a transitional yet often still-controversial figure who lived and died a tragic death amid an important period of debate over changes between traditional and globalised Singapore. Both in life and in death, her status as a writer came to eclipse her status as a model. Today she is most recognised for her contributions to Singaporean post-colonial literature that spoke out on subjects not normally broached in her society, and the anthropic philosophy contained in her writings.<ref name="tu"/> Describing the consensus of Singaporean literary scholars in 1995, two years before Hicks' death, Ismail S. Talib in ''The Journal of Commonwealth Literature'' stated of ''Excuse me, are you a Model?'': "We have come to realize in retrospect that Hicks's autobiographical account of her life as a model was a significant milestone in Singapore's literary and cultural history". This recognition preceded Hicks' death, and in light of the controversy, and even the societal shunning she faced because of her early writings, took her and many around her by surprise. It also helped fuel the life transition she underwent prior her death.<ref name="journal"/><ref name="ips"/><ref name="covergirl"/>


Hicks was on-board [[SilkAir]] Flight 185, a scheduled passenger service from [[Jakarta]], [[Indonesia]] to [[Singapore]].  On [[December 19]], [[1997]], the ill-fated flight [[airline crashes|crashed]] into the [[Musi River (Indonesia)|Musi River]] on the [[Indonesian]] island of [[Sumatra]], killing all 104 on board. The aircraft broke into pieces before impact and the debris was scattered over several kilometers. No bodies or body parts were recovered.<ref name="aviation">{{Cite web|url=http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19971219-0|title=Silkair Flight MI 185|accessdate=2007-01-14|publisher=Flight Safety Foundation|year=19 Dec. 1997|work=Accident description|format=HTML}}</ref> <ref name="ap">{{cite journal | author=Geoff Spencer | title=Most passengers still strapped in their seats |journal=Associated Press |year=Dec. 21 1997}}</ref>
===Interpreting a life cut short===


==Aftermath of Death==
As answers and unanswered questions continued to trickle out from the flight investigations, literary scholars, both in Singapore and elsewhere, began their own investigations of Hicks' writings. Some did so anew, while others did so for the first time.<ref name="ips"/>
<div style="text-align: right;">''''"The brevity of life on earth cannot be overemphasized. I cannot take for granted that time is on my side&mdash;because it is not.... <BR>Heaven can wait, but I cannot." <BR><BR>- Bonny Hicks''''
<BR>
<div style="text-align: left;">


Hicks's death at age twenty-nine shocked Singaporeans and others worldwide, and prompted a swirl of activity as people sought to interpret the meaning of a life that seemed tragically cut short. Meanwhile, literary scholars both in Singapore and worldwide began examining Hicks's works either anew or for the first time.<ref name="journal">{{cite journal | author=Ismail S. Talib | title=Singapore | journal=Journal of Commonwealth Literature | year=95 | volume=3| issue=35 | page=105| url=http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/3/95.pdf}} A subscription is required to view the link.</ref><ref name="post-col2">{{cite book | title=A Historical Companion To Postcolonial Thought In English | last=Poddar, Prem | coauthors=Johnson, David | date=2005 | pages= 518 | publisher= Columbia University Press | id=0231135068}}</ref><ref name="post-col">{{cite book | title=Encyclopedia of post-colonial literatures in English | last=Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, eds. | coauthors=Wei Li, Ng | date=1994 | pages=656-657 | publisher=Routledge | location=London | id=0415278856}}</ref>
[[Tu Weiming]] characterized Hicks' life and philosophy as providing a "sharp contrast to [[Hobbes]]' cynic[al] view of human existence", and stated that Hicks was "the paradigmatic example of an autonomous, free-choosing individual who decided early on to construct a lifestyle congenial to her idiosyncratic sense of self-expression". More than anything, Tu said, "She was primarily a seeker of meaningful existence, a learner".<ref name="journal"/><ref name="post-col2" /><ref name="post-col"/>


[[Tu Wei-Ming]] characterized Hick's life and philosophy as providing a "sharp contrast to [[Hobbes]]' cynic view of human existence", and stated that Hicks was "the paradigmatic example of an autonomous, free-choosing individual who decided early on to construct a lifestyle congenial to her idiosyncratic sense of self-expression." More than anything, Wei-Ming said, "She was primarily a seeker of meaningful existence, a learner".<ref name="tu">{{Cite web
Singaporean post-colonial author [[Grace Chia]] interpreted Hicks' life with a poem, "Mermaid Princess", that [[parody|parodies]] the traditional Scottish folk song, "[[My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean]]." An excerpt of the poem characterises Hicks as one who:
  |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html
  |title=Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life
  |accessdate=2006-12-27
  |publisher=Harvard University
  |year=1998
  |author=Tu Wei-Ming
  |format=HTML}} </ref>


Singaporean post-colonial author Grace Chia eulogized Hicks's life in a [[poem]], "Mermaid Princess", that [[parody|parodies]] the traditional [[Scotland|Scottish]] [[folk song]], "[[My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean]]". An excerpt of the poem characterizes Hicks as one who
<blockquote><div style= "font-size:95%;">
<BLOCKQUOTE><div style= "font-size:95%;">
spoke too soon
spoke too soon
<BR>too loud
<br>too loud
<BR>too much out of turn
<br>too much out of turn
<BR>too brutally honest
<br>too brutally honest
<BR>too empowered by your sense/x/uality
<br>too empowered by your sense/x/uality
<BR>too much of I, I, I, I --
<br>too much of I, I, I, I
<BR>I think
<br>I think
<BR>I know
<br>I know
<BR>I understand
<br>I understand
<BR>I love
<br>I love
<BR>I, I, I, I.<ref name="womango">{{cite book | title=Womango| last=Chia| first=Grace| date=1998| publisher=Rank Books| location=Singapore| id=9810405839}}</ref> <ref name="mermaid">{{Cite web|url=http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/singapore/literature/poetry/chia/mermaid.html|title=Mermaid Princess|accessdate=2006-12-27|publisher=The Literature, Culture, and Society of Singapore|year=1998|author=Grace Chia|format=HTML}}</ref>
<br>I, I, I, I.<ref name="mermaid"/><ref name="womango">{{Cite book |last=Chia |first=Grace |title=Womango |publisher=Rank Books |year=1998 |isbn=981-04-0583-9 |location=Singapore}}</ref>
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>
</div></blockquote>
''The Straits Times'' eulogized Hicks by recalling her life and contributions to the paper, and publishing an excerpt of the essay "Whistling Of Birds" by [[D. H. Lawrence]].<ref name="covgirl">{{cite journal | author=Lim Richard |title=Cover Girl from first to last |journal=The Straits Times (Singapore) |year=Dec. 28, 1997 | url=http://www.limrichard.com/arc1997/arch_c2.htm}}</ref>  
 
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 (song)|Fire and Rain]]'' by [[James Taylor]]. "Sweet dreams and flying machines, and pieces on the ground," as if sung into his readers' memories in Taylor's highly somber tone, seemed to perfectly encapsulate much of the retrospective feeling across Singapore about Hicks' life and sudden death.<ref name="covgirl" />


On the first anniversary of Hicks's death, in December 1998, [[Tal Ben-Shahar]] published ''Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks'', in which he weaved together Hicks's year's-worth of letters to him with his return letters and interspersed them with philosophical musings. The book is composed as an extended [[postmodern]] "conversation" between two seekers intensely journeying together in a quest for meaning and purpose. The book takes its title from a seemingly prophetic portion of a piece Hicks submitted to ''The Straits Times'' just days before her death. In it she stated, "The brevity of life on earth cannot be overemphasized. I cannot take for granted that time is on my side&mdash;because it is not.... Heaven can wait, but I cannot".<ref name="canwait">{{cite book |title=Heaven can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks |last=Ben-Shahar |first=Tal |date=1998 |publisher=Times Books International  |location=Singapore|  |id=9812049916}}</ref>
On the first anniversary of her death, in December 1998, Tal Ben-Shahar published ''Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks'', in which he wove together his and Hicks' year-long correspondence with his own philosophical musings. The book is an extended [[postmodern]] "conversation" between two seekers journeying intensely together in a quest for meaning and purpose. It takes its title from an article Hicks submitted to ''The Straits Times'' just days before her death, which ever after took on a hauntingly prophetic air. In it she wrote: "The brevity of life on earth cannot be overemphasized. I cannot take for granted that time is on my side—because it is not&nbsp;... Heaven can wait, but I cannot".<ref name="canwait" /><ref name="ap">{{Cite news |last=Geoff Spencer |date=21 December 1997 |title=Most passengers still strapped in their seats |agency=Associated Press}}</ref> In an earlier ''Strait Times'' piece that memorialised her grandmother, Hicks confessed that she believed in [[Afterlife|life after death]].<ref name="tu"/>


<div style="text-align: left;">
===Non-racialism===
==Legacy==
 
Especially among Singaporean youth, who in the years since Hicks' death have become increasingly uncomfortable with their country's traditional backdrops of [[Racialism (Racial categorization)|racialism]], Hicks is recognized as a person who learned to cross cultural boundaries, who found a comfortable niche in the betwixt-and-between of contesting cultural traditions, and who lived as one who was [[race-blind]] to see people for who they really were.<ref name="tu" />


<div style="text-align: right;">''''"We have come to realize in retrospect that Hicks’s autobiographical account of her life as a model was a significant milestone in <BR>Singapore’s literary and cultural history".<BR><BR>- Ismail S. Talib''''
===Memorials===
<BR>
<div style="text-align: left;">


Amidst a backdrop of [[racialism]] in Singapore, Hicks is recognized as a person who learned to cross cultural boundaries, who found a comfortable niche in the betwixt and between of dominant cultural traditions, and who became [[race-blind]] to see
A memorial in honour of the victims of SilkAir Flight 185 stands beside the Musi River crash site in Indonesia. Another is at [[Choa Chu Kang Cemetery]], Singapore.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://home.pacific.net.sg/~silkair.mi185/speech.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20021008141709/http://home.pacific.net.sg/~silkair.mi185/speech.htm |url-status=dead |archive-date=8 October 2002 |title=Families of SilkAir MI185 Association – Memorial Dedication Ceremony Speech |publisher=Home.pacific.net.sg |accessdate=16 July 2010 }}</ref>
people as they really were.<ref name="tu" /> In 2000, The Singapore Council of Women's Organisations opened The Bonny Hicks Education & Training Centre in her honor.<ref name="womenorg">{{Cite web |url = http://www.scwo.org.sg/cms/content/category/4/78/54/ |title=Bonny Hicks Education & Training Centre | accessdate=2006-12-26 | publisher=Singapore Council of Women's Organizations | format=HTML}} Photos of the inside of the Centre are viewable at http://www.scwo.org.sg/cms/content/view/19/44</ref> <ref name="newpaper">{{cite journal | author=Janice Wong | title=Hard to follow in these steps | journal=The New Paper | year=May 04, 1997| url=http://web.archive.org/web/20050204065936/http://www.janice-wong.com/col00-05-04.htm}}</ref>
<BR><BR>
Much more than in her role as a model, Hicks is recognized for her milestone early contributions to Singaporean post-colonial literature that spoke out on subjects not normally broached, and for the maturing philosophy contained in her writings which were tragically cut short.<ref name="tu">{{Cite web | url = http://web.archive.org/web/20051121022527/http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html  | title = Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life | accessdate = 2006-12-27 | publisher = Harvard University | year = 1998 | author = Tu Wei-Ming | format = HTML}}</ref> Describing the consensus of Singaporean literary scholars in 1995, two years prior Hicks's death, Ismail S. Talib in ''The Journal of Commonwealth Literature'' stated of ''Excuse me, are you a Model?'', "We have come to realize in retrospect that Hicks’s autobiographical account of her life as a model was a significant milestone in Singapore’s literary and cultural history".<ref name="journal">{{cite journal  | author = Ismail S. Talib | title = Singapore | journal = Journal of Commonwealth Literature | year = 95 | volume = 3 | issue = 35 | page = 105 | url = http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/3/95.pdf}} A subscription is required to view the link.</ref>


==References==
==Attribution==
<references />
{{WPAttribution}}


[[Category:1968 births|Hicks, Bonny]]
==Footnotes==
[[Category:1997 deaths|Hicks, Bonny]]
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Plane crash victims|Hicks, Bonny]]
[[Category:Singaporean writers|Hicks, Bonny]]
[[Category:Singaporean models|Hicks, Bonny]]
[[Category:Post-colonial literature|Hicks, Bonny]]

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Cover of Bonny Hicks' first book.

Bonny Susan Hicks (1968–1997) was a Singapore mixed-ancestry model and writer. After garnering local fame as a model, she gained 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.[1] 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, and according to the NTSB, is believed to be an act of suicide and mass murder by the Singaporean pilot. All 104 passengers aboard the flight died. After Hicks' death, numerous publications including the book Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks by Tal Ben-Shahar featured her life and thought.[2]

Although Hicks was deemed controversial by many during her lifetime because of her willingness to openly discuss human sexuality, Singaporean literary scholars today deem her voice as a pivotally important one for interpreting contemporary Singaporean society. Hicks' legacy today is one of an important transitional social figure between old and new Singapore during its period of broad-scale societal changes under the forces of globalisation. Her death resulted in the loss of a Singaporean national voice that was both growing and important yet internally conflicted. Criticisms by Singaporean traditionalists during her modelling and authoring careers continually vexed Hicks' conscience and helped drive her to re-evaluate her life. Hicks ultimately made a sustained series of traditionalist choices during the latter years of her life.[3]

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.[4] 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.[5] Throughout her teens, Hicks lived with her mother on Sentosa Island,[6] and intermittently with her porpor (grandmother) with whom she enjoyed a particularly close relationship.[7]

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.[8][9]

Hicks' early years were marked by "few friends". She stated she made no real friends after age 15—that is, until she met Patricia Chan Li-Yin, a person who would become a pivotally important person to Hicks' life and career.[10] Now a magazine editor and talent agent, Chan had retired from being a Singaporean sports hero, a decorated female swimmer.[11]

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 herself and contributed to ongoing buzz and publicity.[3][9]

Modeling

File:Bonnie-Hicks-Singapore-GO-Magazine-Covers.png
Hick's on the two covers of the defunct GO Magazine, which began her modelling career.

Hicks' modelling career began by showcasing her appearance on the September 1987 cover of a now-defunct Singaporean fashion monthly, GO. She shortly followed her first appearance with another. She continued with multiple appearances on other 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.[12]

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?[4] 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.[13] 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.[3][7][9][10]

Brief marriage

Before her move to Indonesia, Hicks was married briefly to a former member of the Republic of Singapore Air Force. Hicks left him for Richard "Randy" Dalrymple, an American architect, by whose side she died aboard SilkAir Flight 185. Hicks' first husband was a former colleague of the pilot of the plane in which Hicks perished. This connection would later become a troubling focus of the investigation into the crash that took Hicks' life—her murder, as was shown in the events that followed.[14]

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 Hick's 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"—an accurate claim.[15]

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.[16] 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.[1]

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 even broached the taboo of sexual abuse, both subjects that were not normally openly spoken of in Singapore during the time.[17] 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).[18] While public understanding was greater than let on, traditionalist social pressures meant that few people publicly 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 trauma-lens of her childhood.[19] [20]

"The Bonny Hicks Diary"

Hicks was also a frequent contributor to Singaporean and regional press outlets.[4] 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 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.[8]

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 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 .[7]

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 to 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.[19] [20] 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.[21]

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.[3][4]

One of Hicks' new mentors was Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychologist and popular professor of psychology at the time at Harvard University. Hicks reached out to Ben-Shahar after being exposed to his writings, and the two corresponded about philosophical and spiritual matters for approximately one year, on up until Hicks' 1997 death. The correspondence later became basis for a 1998 book by Ben-Shahar, in which he narrated Hicks' profound growth during the year.[4]

Hicks had also become a student of Confucian humanism, and she was particularly attracted to the thought a second Harvard professor, Tu Wei-Ming, a New Confucian philosopher, who became a second new mentor to Hicks. Hicks attended Tu's seminars and the two corresponded over some months. With Tu's influence added to that of Ben-Shahar's, Hicks began to exhibit an increased New Confucian influence upon her thinking, and she soon turned in her occasional Straits Times columns to criticising Singaporean society from the theme. In one piece, she expressed dismay about the "lack of understanding of Confucianism as it was intended to be and the political version of the ideology to which we [as Singaporeans] are exposed today." Just before Hicks' death she had submitted what Editor Richard Lim recognised as her most mature column ever to The Straits Times. The daily posthumously published "I think and feel, therefore I am", on 28 December 1997.[4] In it Hicks argued,

Thinking is more than just conceiving ideas and drawing inferences; thinking is also reflection and contemplation. When we take embodied thinking rather than abstract reasoning as a goal for our mind, then we understand that thinking is a transformative act.
     
The mind will not only deduce, speculate, and comprehend, but it will also awaken, will enlighten and inspire.
     
Si, is how I have thought, and always will think.[4]

Tu asserts that Hicks' use of the Chinese character Si was "code language," readily understood by her Chinese-speaking English readers, to convey New Confucian thought. The piece, Hicks' last, reflects the maturing and deepening engagement in philosophy and spirituality that she had clearly been enveloped in under tutelage of her new mentors during her last year of life.[4]

Redefining herself

Move to Indonesia

When Hicks penned Excuse Me, are you a Model?, her intent was to write a first book to which people would react. Whether those reactions were positive or negative was not her young mind's first concern. Only public indifference, the antithesis of public reaction, would impede her achievement of fame and popularity, she believed—a message Pat Chan had surely instilled in Hicks from the start. Hicks described her own early motivations:

I wanted to be something all young girls aspired to be, I wanted to be that model that men lusted after, I wanted to be that model that people would recognise on the streets. I wanted to be that model that clients would never stop demanding for, I wanted to be that model, that face, that would launch a thousand ships. I wanted to be a star.[22]

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. It was never to be due to her untimely death.[3][4][9]

Heading to university

Part of Hicks' plan was to attend university. Although Hicks publicly downplayed her lack of higher education, she privately expressed regret that she had not studied past her A-levels, a fact traditionalist critics had used against her and her writings with no small frequency. During the year leading up to her 1997 death, Hicks applied to numerous universities in Britain and the United States, including Harvard. During her application processes Hicks called upon her Harvard mentors to exert influence on her behalf, which certainly helped overcome any negative effects that remained from Hicks' unremarkable academic record during her youth. At the time she applied, Hicks could present herself as an exceptional candidate to any university she wished to attend, a veritable shoo-in. Here was a young woman who had overcome a very difficult upbringing to become a nationally known model-turned-author, and whose mind, spirit, and insights had authentically impressed the two high-level academicians who had become the predominant mentors of her life transition and letter of recommendation writers. Hicks soon reported through the Singaporean press that she had received one university acceptance, refusing to say where, stating that she was awaiting other possible acceptances before ultimately deciding where to attend.[3][4][8]

Marriage and family plans

In keeping with traditionalist Singaporean pressures placed upon her, Hicks had begun to mature her image regarding her personal relationships and sexual reputation, whether her actual deeds fully deserved the reputation or not. She made plans to marry, settle down, and have children. Shortly before her death, Hicks became engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Richard "Randy" Dalrymple, an American architect of some regional prominence because of his unique structures in Singapore and Jakarta, once featured in Architectural Digest.[23] 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

See also: SilkAir Flight 185

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.[3][14][24][25]

Later, divers confirmed Hicks' death at the crash site after recovering some of her personal effects, including her wallet and credit cards.[26]

Aftermath

Hicks' death at age twenty-nine 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.Template:Cn

Legacy

Post-modern author

Hicks is a transitional yet often still-controversial figure who lived and died a tragic death amid an important period of debate over changes between traditional and globalised Singapore. Both in life and in death, her status as a writer came to eclipse her status as a model. Today she is most recognised for her contributions to Singaporean post-colonial literature that spoke out on subjects not normally broached in her society, and the anthropic philosophy contained in her writings.[4] Describing the consensus of Singaporean literary scholars in 1995, two years before Hicks' death, Ismail S. Talib in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature stated of Excuse me, are you a Model?: "We have come to realize in retrospect that Hicks's autobiographical account of her life as a model was a significant milestone in Singapore's literary and cultural history". This recognition preceded Hicks' death, and in light of the controversy, and even the societal shunning she faced because of her early writings, took her and many around her by surprise. It also helped fuel the life transition she underwent prior her death.[1][3][9]

Interpreting a life cut short

As answers and unanswered questions continued to trickle out from the flight investigations, literary scholars, both in Singapore and elsewhere, began their own investigations of Hicks' writings. Some did so anew, while others did so for the first time.[3]

Tu Weiming characterized Hicks' life and philosophy as providing a "sharp contrast to Hobbes' cynic[al] view of human existence", and stated that Hicks was "the paradigmatic example of an autonomous, free-choosing individual who decided early on to construct a lifestyle congenial to her idiosyncratic sense of self-expression". More than anything, Tu said, "She was primarily a seeker of meaningful existence, a learner".[1][16][20]

Singaporean post-colonial author Grace Chia interpreted Hicks' life with a poem, "Mermaid Princess", that parodies the traditional Scottish folk song, "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean." An excerpt of the poem characterises Hicks as one who:

spoke too soon
too loud
too much out of turn
too brutally honest
too empowered by your sense/x/uality
too much of I, I, I, I –
I think
I know
I understand
I love
I, I, I, I.[6][27]

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, and pieces on the ground," as if sung into his readers' memories in Taylor's highly somber tone, seemed to perfectly encapsulate much of the retrospective feeling across Singapore about Hicks' life and sudden death.[8]

On the first anniversary of her death, in December 1998, Tal Ben-Shahar published Heaven Can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks, in which he wove together his and Hicks' year-long correspondence with his own philosophical musings. The book is an extended postmodern "conversation" between two seekers journeying intensely together in a quest for meaning and purpose. It takes its title from an article Hicks submitted to The Straits Times just days before her death, which ever after took on a hauntingly prophetic air. In it she wrote: "The brevity of life on earth cannot be overemphasized. I cannot take for granted that time is on my side—because it is not ... Heaven can wait, but I cannot".[21][28] In an earlier Strait Times piece that memorialised her grandmother, Hicks confessed that she believed in life after death.[4]

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, who found a comfortable niche in the betwixt-and-between of contesting cultural traditions, and who lived as one who was race-blind to see people for who they really were.[4]

Memorials

A memorial in honour of the victims of SilkAir Flight 185 stands beside the Musi River crash site in Indonesia. Another is at Choa Chu Kang Cemetery, Singapore.[29]

Attribution

Some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia.

Footnotes

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Ismail S. Talib (September 2000). "Singapore". Journal of Commonwealth Literature 3 (35).
  2. Divers battle muddy water at Indonesian crash site, World News, CNN. Retrieved on 27 December 2006.
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Institute of Policy Studies (Singapore) (1991). "Yearly Publication". Times Academic Press for the Institute of Policy Studies.
  4. 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 4.12 Tu Wei-Ming (1998). Celebrating Bonny Hicks' Passion for Life. Harvard University. Archived from the original on 21 November 2005. Retrieved on 27 December 2006.
  5. Maureen, Koh. "Mum spends birthdays at crash site", The New Paper, 26 August 2008.
  6. 6.0 6.1 Grace Chia (1998). Mermaid Princess. The Literature, Culture, and Society of Singapore. Retrieved on 27 December 2006.
  7. 7.0 7.1 7.2 Tan Gim Ean, "A Bonny way to tell the truth" New Straits Times, 30 May 1992, 28.
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Cover Girl from first to last. Life Section. The Straits Times (Singapore) (28 December 1997). Retrieved on 29 December 2006.
  9. 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Rahman, Sheila, "Don't judge a covergirl by her looks," New Straits Times, 2 Sep 1990, 10.
  10. 10.0 10.1 Excuse Me, 7.
  11. Patricia Chan Li-Yin. Retrieved on 2013-12-19.
  12. For info on the band, see http://www.nlb.gov.sg/blogs/libraryesplanade/music/baybeats-observation-deck-band-profile-the-oddfellows/ Template:Webarchive
  13. Majorie Chiew (27 May 1992). Model Bonny opts for a change in scene. The Star (Malaysia). Archived from the original on 6 October 2006. Retrieved on 29 December 2006.
  14. 14.0 14.1 (5 September 2001) "SilkAir". Los Angeles Times. Dalrymple's architecture in Singapore was featured in: Dalrymple, Richard. "Pavilions for a Forest Setting in Singapore." Architectural Digest (4/91), 48 (4).
  15. About Flame of the Forest Publishing. Flame of the Forest Publishers (2006). Archived from the original on 6 January 2007. Retrieved on 27 December 2006.
  16. 16.0 16.1 Poddar, Prem (2005). A Historical Companion To Postcolonial Thought in English. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-13506-8. 
  17. Interview and review by Koh, Buck Song, "Little girl lost", The Straits Times 21 March 1992.
  18. Tan Gim Ean, "That's why mummy is a tart" New Straits Times, 30 May 1992, 28.
  19. 19.0 19.1 Hicks, Bonny (1992). Discuss Disgust. Angsana Books. ISBN 981-00-3506-3. 
  20. 20.0 20.1 20.2 Eugene Benson & L.W. Conolly, eds. (1994). Encyclopedia of post-colonial literatures in English. London: Routledge, 656–657. ISBN 0-415-27885-6. 
  21. 21.0 21.1 Ben-Shahar, Tal (1998). Heaven can Wait: Conversations with Bonny Hicks. Singapore: Times Books International. ISBN 981-204-991-6. 
  22. Excuse Me, 86.
  23. See for example the April 1991 and November 1993 issues.
  24. Dalrymple's architecture in Singapore was featured in: Dalrymple, Richard. "Pavilions for a Forest Setting in Singapore." Architectural Digest (4/91), 48 (4).
  25. Template:ASN accident
  26. "The pilot who wanted to die Template:Webarchive", Sydney Morning Herald, 10 July 1999.
  27. Chia, Grace (1998). Womango. Singapore: Rank Books. ISBN 981-04-0583-9. 
  28. Geoff Spencer. "Most passengers still strapped in their seats", 21 December 1997.
  29. Families of SilkAir MI185 Association – Memorial Dedication Ceremony Speech. Home.pacific.net.sg. Retrieved on 16 July 2010.