After garnering local fame as a model, she gained worldwide recognition for her contributions to Singaporean post-colonial literature and the anthropic philosophy conveyed in her works.

The U.S.'s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) expressed the likelihood that the crash was an act of suicide and mass murder by the troubled Singaporean pilot.

[2] Although she was deemed controversial by many during her lifetime because of her willingness to openly discuss human sexuality, Singaporean literary scholars during the last years of Hicks' life saw in her a pivotally important voice for interpreting their contemporary society.

Hicks' legacy is one of an important transitional social figure between traditionalist Singapore and the broad-scale societal changes that occurred in the country under the forces of globalisation as the 21st century approached.

Criticisms by Singaporean traditionalists during her modelling and authoring careers continually vexed Hicks' conscience and drove her to re-evaluate her life during her later years.

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.

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.

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.

[16] 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).

Yielding to public traditionalist pressure, spurred initially by a letter writing campaign to the paper, the Times pulled her column within a year.

[7] During Hicks' heyday, few had begun to adequately situate her life and works within the larger societal changes that had enveloped Singapore at the time under forces of rapid globalisation—changes that, by then, were simply far too advanced and powerful to altogether stop the clock upon by the traditionally successful means of shaming and ostracising.

For the most part, traditionalists simply reacted from gut-level fear against Hicks, or a simplified characterisation or straw man of her, whom they perceived as a "notorious" moral threat willing to degrade Singaporean society for personal fame and financial gain.

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.

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."

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, some featured in Architectural Digest.

[26] 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.

[26] 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.

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".

[1][15][19] 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."

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.

"Sweet dreams and flying machines, in pieces on the ground," as if sung into his readers' memories in Taylor's melancholic tone, seemed to perfectly encapsulate much of the retrospective feeling across Singapore about Hicks' life and sudden death.

[citation needed] She lived as person who found a comfortable niche in the betwixt-and-between of contesting cultural traditions and as one who was race-blind, seeing people for who they really were.