Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
From a Singapore schoolgirl to the nastiest porn star in the world
By Kimberly Chun
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, the recently released documentary on the porn star’s life, deals with an undeniably, well, sexy subject. But in spite of the inherently fascinating Chong, a University of Southern California student—and the former record holder of “the world’s biggest gang bang,” Sex is no Boogie Nights.
How does this woman reconcile her third-wave feminist studies with the objectification of porn; her Christian upbringing as a Chinese girl in Singapore with her toils as a sex worker in the raw, Gen-X gonzo porn genre; and her speeches about sexual freedom as female empowerment with the evident economic exploitation by the adult industry’s overwhelmingly male producers and directors?
The film raises more questions than it answers, teasing out the contradictions in Chong, whose real name is Grace Quek. Director Gough Lewis begins with Quek’s appearance on Jerry Springer. Springer introduces Chong as the woman who did The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. The audience reacts by yelling “oooh” and “ugh,” convulsed with disgust, while Chong smiles and looks happy behind her mask of makeup, in a wig that evokes both Louise Brooks and the stereotypical “China doll.”
We see Quek going to class at USC, looking like your average, hip, spikey-haired, leather jacket-wearing student, then going to her fan club offices, where she chooses photos of herself—face grimacing in mid-orgasm during World’s Biggest—to sign or run on her Web site. The camera follows her into the bathroom as she sits on the toilet, records her waking up and rolling out of bed with a spotty face, and putters after her as she goes clubbing with her cross-dressing best buddy.
The reasons she got into the business are as complex as anything about her: In one instance, she talks about doing porn because she slept with everyone on campus and decided she might as well get paid. In another scene, a friend says Quek did it because she was outraged by a male-identified women studies class. Still, others might see it as a result of a gang rape she experienced as a student living in London. And then there’s the reason Quek gives before squirming onto a dais amid Roman columns, like a Dionysian dish, for World’s Biggest: “All these guys have been writing in wanting to have sex with me, and if that’s not an ego trip I don’t know what is,” she says.
Whatever her motivation, an ad for nude models in the L.A. Weekly led to meetings with directors such as Ed Powers, director of Dirty Debutantes, and John Bowen, the director of World’s Biggest, who talks about taking “this girl with an Asian look and an English accent” and making her into the nastiest porn star ever, who performs particularly extreme acts. The penultimate is the gang bang, which takes on the marathon atmosphere of an Olympic sporting event, as Quek has said in recent interviews, with its scoring aspect and crowds of men (albeit nude rather than decked out in team jerseys).
The event rivets the international media, from Penthouse to Details, and later, Quek pungently refers to the gang bang as her attempt to subvert double standards at programs presented by organizations such as the Cambridge University Debating Society. If a man did what she did, she explains, he would be called a “stud.” A woman would be labeled a “slut.”
Quek didn’t exactly escape that definition. Sex also suggests that Quek plunged into porn as a way of resisting the repression of her Christian upbringing in Singapore. Although she swears she is close to her parents, she didn’t tell them about her sex work until her mother heard about it from some nosy neighbors. After she visits her old school teachers, who exchange knowing glances and hide from the camera, it’s obvious everyone knows about her notorious reputation, and the pressure she feels when she visits Singapore seems palpable.
But does identifying with racial stereotypes, as Quek does when she refers to herself as porn’s latest “fortune cookie” pre-gang bang, and playing into them, equal liberation? Quek’s post-World’s Biggest Gang Bang life hints at substance abuse, self-mutilation, squandered cash and wasted opportunities.
First-time director Gough Lewis goofs some incredible opportunities with technical faux pas. The chronology of the film is confusing, and Lewis doesn’t pursue promising threads. Was Chong ignorant or just fame- and attention-hungry? Was it the drugs talking, or was she simply a psychologically vulnerable young woman? Lewis does little to help the audience come to any conclusions.
Quek’s inexperience as a recent student émigré in London may have played a role in her gang rape, but then most viewers wouldn’t make the connection because Lewis neither asks those questions nor indicates when the rape even occurred. He fails to frame the film’s events with a context, which one might simply chalk up to his simple lack of experience as a documentary filmmaker. But perhaps it was a matter of getting too much access to his subject, and not having enough detachment: It’s been reported that Lewis was involved sexually with Quek and even tried self-mutilation after capturing her actions on video.
But in spite of Lewis’ best attempts to screw up Sex, Quek remains a compelling figure. Her naivete, for instance, is striking. It’s frustrating to hear her talk about not wanting to sue the director of The World’s Biggest Gang Bang for the thousands of dollars he owes her. At one point, Quek says she wasn’t afraid of becoming infected with HIV after the gang bang because “sex is worth dying for,” yet she admits later that if she were to do anything differently she would be more adamant about getting the hordes of anonymous male participants tested for HIV. She makes diva-like demands about getting paid more than her co-stars, but in a world of young dot-com millionaires, it’s astonishing to realize that this obviously intelligent and imaginative woman is only making $1,000 to perform an array of acts that include peeing on a co-star’s face. If this is empowerment, it’s telling that one of the final—dare we say, anticlimactic—shots in the film shows her returning to the adult film industry and hugging her new director, who exchanges a knowing, lecherous look with a fellow pornographer. And if this is simply a job, shouldn’t it involve, if not dignity, then at least getting a fair share in the profits?
It’s worth noting that the extreme Gen X-style porn that she helped usher in, as embodied by the pierced and tattooed director of her new film, still underpays her, and at the film’s close, Quek seems like just another sex worker—full of self-doubts, made-up and mini-skirted, remote from her in-your-face, punkier self—and ready to be directed.
In the end, porn doesn’t seem to be the radical political gesture Quek claims it to be—or even a good job. Still it’s nice to know that today Quek, a former art student, is directing and starring in her own films and preparing to attend graduate school, but let’s save that for the sequel.
By Kimberly Chun
Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, the recently released documentary on the porn star’s life, deals with an undeniably, well, sexy subject. But in spite of the inherently fascinating Chong, a University of Southern California student—and the former record holder of “the world’s biggest gang bang,” Sex is no Boogie Nights.
How does this woman reconcile her third-wave feminist studies with the objectification of porn; her Christian upbringing as a Chinese girl in Singapore with her toils as a sex worker in the raw, Gen-X gonzo porn genre; and her speeches about sexual freedom as female empowerment with the evident economic exploitation by the adult industry’s overwhelmingly male producers and directors?
The film raises more questions than it answers, teasing out the contradictions in Chong, whose real name is Grace Quek. Director Gough Lewis begins with Quek’s appearance on Jerry Springer. Springer introduces Chong as the woman who did The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. The audience reacts by yelling “oooh” and “ugh,” convulsed with disgust, while Chong smiles and looks happy behind her mask of makeup, in a wig that evokes both Louise Brooks and the stereotypical “China doll.”
We see Quek going to class at USC, looking like your average, hip, spikey-haired, leather jacket-wearing student, then going to her fan club offices, where she chooses photos of herself—face grimacing in mid-orgasm during World’s Biggest—to sign or run on her Web site. The camera follows her into the bathroom as she sits on the toilet, records her waking up and rolling out of bed with a spotty face, and putters after her as she goes clubbing with her cross-dressing best buddy.
The reasons she got into the business are as complex as anything about her: In one instance, she talks about doing porn because she slept with everyone on campus and decided she might as well get paid. In another scene, a friend says Quek did it because she was outraged by a male-identified women studies class. Still, others might see it as a result of a gang rape she experienced as a student living in London. And then there’s the reason Quek gives before squirming onto a dais amid Roman columns, like a Dionysian dish, for World’s Biggest: “All these guys have been writing in wanting to have sex with me, and if that’s not an ego trip I don’t know what is,” she says.
Whatever her motivation, an ad for nude models in the L.A. Weekly led to meetings with directors such as Ed Powers, director of Dirty Debutantes, and John Bowen, the director of World’s Biggest, who talks about taking “this girl with an Asian look and an English accent” and making her into the nastiest porn star ever, who performs particularly extreme acts. The penultimate is the gang bang, which takes on the marathon atmosphere of an Olympic sporting event, as Quek has said in recent interviews, with its scoring aspect and crowds of men (albeit nude rather than decked out in team jerseys).
The event rivets the international media, from Penthouse to Details, and later, Quek pungently refers to the gang bang as her attempt to subvert double standards at programs presented by organizations such as the Cambridge University Debating Society. If a man did what she did, she explains, he would be called a “stud.” A woman would be labeled a “slut.”
Quek didn’t exactly escape that definition. Sex also suggests that Quek plunged into porn as a way of resisting the repression of her Christian upbringing in Singapore. Although she swears she is close to her parents, she didn’t tell them about her sex work until her mother heard about it from some nosy neighbors. After she visits her old school teachers, who exchange knowing glances and hide from the camera, it’s obvious everyone knows about her notorious reputation, and the pressure she feels when she visits Singapore seems palpable.
But does identifying with racial stereotypes, as Quek does when she refers to herself as porn’s latest “fortune cookie” pre-gang bang, and playing into them, equal liberation? Quek’s post-World’s Biggest Gang Bang life hints at substance abuse, self-mutilation, squandered cash and wasted opportunities.
First-time director Gough Lewis goofs some incredible opportunities with technical faux pas. The chronology of the film is confusing, and Lewis doesn’t pursue promising threads. Was Chong ignorant or just fame- and attention-hungry? Was it the drugs talking, or was she simply a psychologically vulnerable young woman? Lewis does little to help the audience come to any conclusions.
Quek’s inexperience as a recent student émigré in London may have played a role in her gang rape, but then most viewers wouldn’t make the connection because Lewis neither asks those questions nor indicates when the rape even occurred. He fails to frame the film’s events with a context, which one might simply chalk up to his simple lack of experience as a documentary filmmaker. But perhaps it was a matter of getting too much access to his subject, and not having enough detachment: It’s been reported that Lewis was involved sexually with Quek and even tried self-mutilation after capturing her actions on video.
But in spite of Lewis’ best attempts to screw up Sex, Quek remains a compelling figure. Her naivete, for instance, is striking. It’s frustrating to hear her talk about not wanting to sue the director of The World’s Biggest Gang Bang for the thousands of dollars he owes her. At one point, Quek says she wasn’t afraid of becoming infected with HIV after the gang bang because “sex is worth dying for,” yet she admits later that if she were to do anything differently she would be more adamant about getting the hordes of anonymous male participants tested for HIV. She makes diva-like demands about getting paid more than her co-stars, but in a world of young dot-com millionaires, it’s astonishing to realize that this obviously intelligent and imaginative woman is only making $1,000 to perform an array of acts that include peeing on a co-star’s face. If this is empowerment, it’s telling that one of the final—dare we say, anticlimactic—shots in the film shows her returning to the adult film industry and hugging her new director, who exchanges a knowing, lecherous look with a fellow pornographer. And if this is simply a job, shouldn’t it involve, if not dignity, then at least getting a fair share in the profits?
It’s worth noting that the extreme Gen X-style porn that she helped usher in, as embodied by the pierced and tattooed director of her new film, still underpays her, and at the film’s close, Quek seems like just another sex worker—full of self-doubts, made-up and mini-skirted, remote from her in-your-face, punkier self—and ready to be directed.
In the end, porn doesn’t seem to be the radical political gesture Quek claims it to be—or even a good job. Still it’s nice to know that today Quek, a former art student, is directing and starring in her own films and preparing to attend graduate school, but let’s save that for the sequel.
posted by B at 11:09 PM
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