Bonny Hicks

Bonny Hicks from the back cover of her 1990 book, Excuse me, are you a model?

January 5, 1968 – December 19, 1997, a Singaporean catwalk model who gained her greatest notoriety for her contributions to Singaporean postcolonial 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 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 when Silkair Flight 185 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 has particularly marked Singaporean society.

Background and Modeling

Hicks was born on January 5, 1968. She described herself as a Singaporean of "mixed" parentage, with her father being British and her mother Chinese. She identified her formative social environment as a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual environment that included Malays, Indians and Chinese of various dialect groups. 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. Hicks never met her father, who she described as having rejected her "by way of British High Commission".

After completing her Advanced Level 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. 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.

Literary Contributions

Excuse Me, are you a Model?

Hicks's first book, 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". The book is Hicks's autobiographical expose 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. Reflecting on her publishing experience five years after release of the book, Hicks wrote,

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.

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.

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.

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.

The book was later described by literary scholars as an important work in the "confessional mode" of the genre of postcolonial literature, and as a significant milestone in Singapore’s literary and cultural history.

Hicks's second and last book, Discuss Disgust.

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.

Hicks was also a frequent contributor to the Singaporean press and other outlets. 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.

Philosophy

Positive Psychology

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.

Prior her 1997 death, Hicks carried on an approximately year-long correspondence about philosophical and spiritual matters with Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychologist and popular Harvard University professor. The correspondence later became basis for a 1998 book by Ben-Shahar.

New Confucianism

Hicks had also became a serious student of 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. In it Hicks stated:

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.

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.

Future Plans

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.

Hicks was engaged to American architect Richard Dalrymple, who died on Silkair Flight 185 along with Hicks and all others on the flight.

Death

Hicks was on-board SilkAir Flight 185, a scheduled passenger service from Jakarta, Indonesia to Singapore. On December 19, 1997, the ill-fated flight crashed into the 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.

Aftermath of Death

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.

Tu Wei-Ming characterized Hick's life and philosophy as providing a "sharp contrast to Hobbes's cynical 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".

Singaporean post-colonial author Grace Chia eulogized Hicks's life in a poem, "Mermaid Princess", that parodies the traditional Scottish folk song, "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean". An excerpt of the poem characterizes 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.

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.

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—because it is not.... Heaven can wait, but I cannot".

Legacy

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 people as they really were. In 2000, The Singapore Council of Women's Organisations opened The Bonny Hicks Education & Training Centre in her honor.

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. 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".

References