Annabelle Chong

Annabelle Chong
November 04, 2020 published at 10:50 AM By Bryan Lim
Screengrab from YouTube, Twitter/GraceQuek
It was 1995 when a 22-year-old Singaporean woman put our little red dot squarely on the map.
As a bright and gifted student who ventured overseas for further studies, one might think that she made some academic achievement.
On the contrary, Grace Quek stirred up major controversy and became infamous for starring as her persona Annabel Chong in the adult film World's Biggest Gang Bang, where she engaged in 251 sex acts with 70 men over 10 hours.
She's left the industry almost two decades ago and has carved out a career for herself in the tech industry.
In a recent interview with Vice Media , Quek, now 47, recounted her brush with coding and how she eventually found her calling.
During a private fetish session (which she did as a side business in 2000) with a client, she was introduced to the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and at the end of it, managed to build a simple webpage.
She told Vice: "Looking back, that was my best hourly rate ever. I never got $800 an hour to write code ever again."
When Quek got a stint at a gentleman's club in San Francisco, she spent her downtime between dances tinkering with the club website's code and improving it. That was when she realised that this was what she wanted to do in life.
Quek had several considerations for stepping away from the spotlight. Firstly, it "wasn't fun anymore", though she noted that "it was never all that fun to begin with".
Secondly, her parents — who were supportive of her work in pornography — were getting harassed and Quek told Vice that she was "kind of" getting stalked.
Having borne witness to what fame can do to a person and how stressful it is, she decided to journey down a different path.
"I [was] like, 'I really don't need this in my life.' I'd rather be able to do something where people treasured me for my ability, for my brains, rather than the way I looked," she said.
Eventually, Quek stopped her touring, dancing, and directing (of porn films), and enrolled in a 10-month engineering crash course in 2001.
After graduating from the course with an associate's degree, Quek started work as a consultant while living off the earnings from her website — where people bought things like autographed DVDs, photographs, and personal souvenirs of Annabel Chong.
When she felt more stable in her job as a web developer in 2003, she shut down her website so it wouldn't damage her credibility.
Quek went on to snag a full-time job at a digital consulting agency where she spent 10 years developing new interfaces and refactoring legacy code for clients in Los Angeles.
"Nobody needs to know who wrote that code. They just need to know the code works," she said.
While she was worried about someone finding out her past, it was the sexism in the tech industry that bothered her more.
She was left to learn the ropes on her own and clients ignored her in favour of a junior male colleague. A married senior manager at a company she was consulting at also came to her cubicle daily, playing his guitar, singing songs he'd written for her, and reciting Chinese poetry.
"I'm trying to prove my worth. I'm trying to get the respect of the engineers around me. It was horrible. And you can hear the rest of the male engineers snickering from their cubes," she recalled.
Complaining wasn't an option either as it would have been her job on the line instead.
She managed to change jobs in 2015 when her company was bought out and she became a senior front-end engineer at a major media company.
Quek said: "It probably took around 10 years of working as a consultant for me to have the courage to step out and interview for a new job. To just go in there as Grace. 'I'm Grace, I'm a software engineer, and I want this job.'"
Some of her new colleagues recognised her, she said, but they didn't kick up a fuss. However, the industry-wide sexism she faced didn't improve despite the change of jobs. The situation only improved dramatically in 2016 in light of the #MeToo movement.
She was at her new job for five years until she was let go three months ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But she has gotten back on her feet with a new position as a senior front-end developer for a major entertainment company.
[embed]https://twitter.com/GraceQuek/status/1308500907508658176[/embed]
Moving forward, Quek is focusing on her career in tech and she might even follow in her parents' footsteps and become a teacher.
Apart from being briefly married in the 90s, Quek is happily single and on good terms with her exes.
"Boyfriends may come and go, but ex-boyfriends are forever. So you might as well have good ex-boyfriends," she said, adding that she's a "live-in-the-moment" kind of person who doesn't have any agenda when it comes to relationships.
She has wondered whether people will find out about her past, but she knows that information is just a Google search away.
As she told Vice: "If they're going to find out, they're going to find out. I can only control what I do. And I'm here to work."

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When a young Grace Kuek ventured overseas to study law at King's College, the universe had other plans for her
Picture this. It's 1995 in a relatively conservative Singapore. A 22 year old woman named Grace using the name Annabel Chong stars in an adult film where she has sex with 70 men 251 times.
The film sets a world record and becomes one of the best-selling adult films of that decade.
Naturally, something of this nature puts Singapore on the map and makes her one of the most famous Singaporeans of the time.
She left the industry almost 20 years ago and has now carved out a career for herself in...engineering?
She's left the industry almost two decades ago and has carved out a career for herself in the engineering and tech industry.
In an interview with Vice , she recalls how she found herself in her current path.
She states that she learnt how to code in a strip club in early 2000. This was soon after she entered the adult film industry.
One of Kuek's private clients had introduced her to the world of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Only because he had a thing for "teacher-student" role play.
Who would've known that ignited the passion in Kuek to start coding for fun? Even when the client was no longer in her life, she continued the learning process and even tried her hand at coding the strip club's website in between jobs.
Well, she left her stage name behind and is now simply known as Grace Kuek.
According to AsiaOne , she enrolled in a 10-month engineering crash course in 2001 and graduated with an associate's degree. She started work as a consultant while selling Annabel Chong merchandise.
She says the biggest problem she's had to face in engineering was the rampant sexism from the men she worked with but that didn't make her give up, she just worked even harder.
After a string of successful job experiences in the industry, she is presently working as a senior front-end developer at Sony Pictures Entertainment.
It's official! I signed my offer letter from Sony Pictures Entertainment today. I feel so #BlessedGratefulThankful and I look forward to joining the Funimation team. I start work next Wednesday! pic.twitter.com/7Blj6xeOyl
Although she does wonder if the people at work have Googled her, she isn't really bothered by the past anymore.
"If they're going to find out, they're going to find out. I can only control what I do. And I'm here to work," she says to Vice.
Cover image sourced from Vice and Twitter

Page views of Annabel Chongs by language
Most Popular Pornographic Actors in Wikipedia Go to all Rankings
Others Born in 1972 Go to all Rankings
Among PORNOGRAPHIC ACTORS In Singapore
Grace Quek (Chinese: 郭盈恩; pinyin: Guō Yíng'ēn), known professionally as Annabel Chong, is a Singaporean former pornographic actress who became famous after starring in an adult film that was promoted as The World's Biggest Gang Bang. The film was commercially successful and started a trend of "record-breaking" gang bang pornography. Four years later, Quek was the subject of the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, in which she was interviewed about her pornography career . Read more on Wikipedia
Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Annabel Chong has received more than 1,716,343 page views. Her biography is available in 20 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 18 in 2019) . Annabel Chong is the 108th most popular pornographic actor (up from 117th in 2019) , the 20th most popular biography from Singapore (down from 19th in 2019) and the most popular Pornographic Actor .
Among pornographic actors born in Singapore , Annabel Chong ranks 1 . After her are Kaylani Lei (1980) .
American Pornographic Actress And Sex Educator
American Pornographic Filmmaker (1950–2015)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

^ "Kelly A. Morris" . IMDb . Retrieved 21 November 2016 .

^ "Sex sobers in controversial Sundance documentary" . CNN . February 10, 1999 . Retrieved 21 November 2016 .

^ McDougall, AJ (2020). "What Happened to Annabel Chong?" . www.vice.com . Vice Media . Retrieved 2021-03-18 . {{ cite web }} : CS1 maint: url-status ( link )

^ Jump up to: a b c " Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (review)" . flickfilosopher.com . 13 February 2000 . Retrieved 21 November 2016 .

^ " Sex: The Annabel Chong Story " . Top Documentary Films . Retrieved 2014-06-06 .

^ Moviemaker.com Straight From the Horse's Mouth: How To Avoid Distribution Hell by Keith Bearden Archived 2006-03-24 at the Wayback Machine

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is a 1999 documentary film directed, filmed, and produced by Canada-based producer Gough Lewis, edited by co-creator Kelly Morris, [1] and produced by Peter Carr.

The film profiles porn star Annabel Chong (born Grace Quek ), then a gender studies student at the University of Southern California , who was also a pornographic actress famous for setting a gang bang record in January 1995. A video of the event was released under the title The World's Biggest Gang Bang . [2]

After the film's release, Quek criticised Lewis for misconstruing multiple events in the film and portraying events in a "misleading" way. [3]

The documentary explores Quek's experiences, presenting her life as a student in Los Angeles , California and London ; her native Singapore ; and in the porn industry . It focuses on her reasons for working in porn, and her relationship with friends and family. [4]

The documentary reveals to the viewers that she was gang raped as a student living in London and describes her many complex emotional issues, including signs of depression , self-harm , [4] and substance abuse . The film also includes footage of a painful conversation in Singapore between Annabel and her mother, who, until then, didn't know about her daughter's porn career. [4]

The documentary became a hit when it was released at the Sundance Film Festival , nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. [5]

The film's North American release was halted or minimized as a result of a court case in the Superior Court of Canada instigated by David Whitten, a B-movie distributor. [6]

In the Guardian, Jonathan Romney (2000) wrote, "Quek's refusal to cohere as a subject is contingent on the fact that there's apparently no one looking at her: director Lewis is curiously absent, as either a character or as an invisible shaping intelligence. But he apparently was a character in her story: in interviews, Quek has denounced him for failing to reveal that he was her lover for a year during the making of Sex, something the film never even implies. That omission contributes to making the film incomplete, if not actually dishonest."

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