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Annabel Chong was born Grace Quek (pronounced
“quake”) in Singapore, 1972. Her Christian parents
(mum’s a piano teacher, dad’s a schoolteacher) sent her
to convent school and encouraged her to study law but
her “dwindling religious faith and burgeoning sexuality”
were already causing problems. In a traumatic
ritual, she was exorcised in a local church at the age
of 17. In 1991, she moved to London to attend King’s
College and thence to America and the University of
Southern California, where she was so enraged by
feminist theory that she took to porn as a kind of practical
adjunct to her gender studies course.
Although she still has a tendency to address each
question as though it were one of her college essays, to
be fielded with maximum cultural studies jargon, Annabel/Grace
(“‘Who am I?’ is a question I constantly
ask myself”) now seems a great deal more assured than
she does in the film. “It’s rather mortifying to look back
and think to myself, oh my god, was I that vulnerable?”
she admits. “But maybe I was.”
One of the more disturbing scenes shows Annabel
cutting herself, the clear implication being that the
porn industry has driven her to self-harm. In fact, she
says, the sequence was shot on the day that she and
the director split up, and both of them were doing it.
“I don’t know what came over me. It’s not one of the
prouder moments of my life, but when I saw the film I
was really astonished to find that he didn’t include the
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and
entire context.”
Even more worrying, we learn that not only has Bowen
yet to pay her the $10,000 she was promised to take
part in the gang bang, but the assurances she was given
about the men being tested for HIV were untrue. “I was
terribly disturbed by that. I felt extremely betrayed by
the fact that they didn’t take the health precautions I
thought they did,” she says angrily.
Late in the film, it’s revealed that she was gang
raped while in London in 1991. The viewer is invited
to conclude that her penchant for group sex flicks (I
Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team, All I Want For
Christmas is a Gang Bang) is born of a desire to regain
control over this part of her life. She thinks that’s too
simplistic an explanation. “Nobody ever does anything
for any single motivation. I felt that it was a cop out for
Gough to say that A caused B, because there’s actually
more of a story behind the entire rape event. The immediate
outcome of it was that I was sent through the
legal system and National Health Service counselling
system, which was incredibly dehumanising. I felt that
I was nothing but a statistic. Then I looked back on my
entire life in Singapore and realised that all my life I
had been processed. I led the perfect life. I went to all
the right schools, I attended the right social functions,
hung out in the country club, went to church, got the
humanities scholarship. I was the perfect child, but
none of it was really my choice. First thing I did was to
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