Gerrie Lim - Searching for Annabel Chong: Demystifying the Legend of Singapores Most Famous Pornstar!

Gerrie Lim is the bestselling author of Invisible Trade: High-Class Sex for Sale in Singapore, his expos of the escort business in Southeast Asia, Invisible Trade II: Secret Lives and Sexual Intrigue in Singapore, an expos of sexual commerce in Singapore, and In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema, his memoir of a decade spent covering the erotica industry in Los Angeles, where he previously lived for fifteen years as a freelance writer contributing to Billboard, Details, LA Style, LA Weekly, Penthouse, Playboy and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent book, Absolute Mayhem, was co-written with pornstar Monica Mayhem and published in 2009, in Australian, American and French editions. This is his seventh book.

OTHER BOOKS BY GERRIE LIM

Inside the Outsider

Invisible Trade

Invisible Trade II

Idol to Icon

In Lust We Trust

Absolute Mayhem

Copyright 2012 by Gerrie Lim

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61608-729-6

Printed in the United States of America

For P.H.

(Once more, with feeling)

I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Oscar Wilde, while passing through US Customs in 1881

A nnabel Chong: her name rings a bell, even as it resonates like a bolt of lightning from the heavens.

Paul Theroux, the novelist and travel writer, describes her as an amazing woman, a demon goddess out of a Chinese folk tale the woman who dared to convert all her desires into reality a fantasy to most men, and a sort of heroine to a lot of women, though they would probably not dare to admit it.

And why would they not dare admit it?

Because Annabel Chong remains the only famous pornstar from Singapore, a young woman who had put her home country on the map back in 1995 when she allowed herself to be filmed having sexual intercourse with a large group of men, each one waiting his turn, all done in the space of ten hours and for the posterity of home video. Reports said there were 251 men but there were actually only 70, though she was penetrated 251 times (with many of the men rejoining the end of the line for second and third rounds).

The film, The Worlds Greatest Gangbang, found itself under scrutiny in 1999, with the release of a documentary film about her life, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Not surprisingly, it garnered massive amounts of ink from both highbrow and lowbrow presses. Novelists like Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk have written about her (the former not so flatteringly, the latter more so). And in Singapore itself, she has long been regarded somewhere between a mythological figure and an urban legend.

But in actuality she did exist, though she wasnt always called Annabel Chong.

She was a precociously book-smart young girl, born Grace Quek in Singapore on May 22, 1972, who had gone to Kings College London on a scholarship to study law. At age 21, she dropped out of law school and went to Los Angeles where she undertook courses in photography, art, and gender studies at the University of Southern California (the same university I attended, even though we were in different faculties and didnt know one another back then).

And then, her life changed forever. She joined the porn industry in 1994, at age 22, an event possibly triggered by something from her recent past. When she was living in London, she had been gang-raped by some guys in an innercity housing estate after disembarking from a subway station.

That kind of thing only needs to happen to you once, for your life to change quite radically. The notion of being the girl in the gangbang probably first took root right there, on that fateful day.

In the documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, made in 1998, she goes to London and revisits the actual scene of the rape, and it surely wasnt a segment of film spliced in accidentally. It was meant to show how the rape issue could be a metaphor, and by extension how Annabel Chong herself could be a Rorschach test, where people tend to interpret her according to their own presumptions and prejudices.

I know all about presumptions and prejudices because, like Annabel, I also left Singapore for similar reasons, in a quest for self-fulfillment through ways we both could never have dreamed of experiencing in our home country. And while I have myself made a long career out of reporting on various aspects of the sex industry, most prominently a ten-year cycle covering the adult film industry, Annabel Chong represented to me the darkest, deepest challenge of my professional life.

Succinctly put, could I suspend my own disbelief and apprehend her fairly, given that we were both of Chinese-Singaporean heritage and the fact that we both left the country largely for reasons of personal dissatisfaction with the status quo and we then both ended up working with adult entertainment?

Well, that was a Rorschach test I didnt need to take. It was obvious whose side of the fence I was on. Yet all the same, I was personally intrigued. For her, it wasnt enough to merely express angst-ridden rebellion by joining the uppermost ranks of the sex industry. She had to do something so ballsy, so far-out, and so out-there that she would surely capture your undivided attention.

Thats what I needed to ponder, and what I needed to understand. And so Ive written this book, based partly on my own relationship with her over the years (featuring, of particular note, three separate interviews done with her in the wake of the 1999 documentary), in an attempt to break new ground while exploring the numerous facets of the Annabel Chong legend: the mythological background of the gangbang genre (based on the Roman empress Messalina), the cult of the Asian pornstar (based on the Asian fever racial fetish), the phenomenon of social engineering in Singapore (based on our respective experiences), the arena of adult entertainment (both in the areas of film and video as well as the Internet) and, in its own glorious finality, the issue of celebrity and the mass-audience fixation with pop-culture outlaws like her.

Because hers was a celebrityhood with a difference. Porn is a form of commodified sex, packaged as a sizzling product for mass market consumption, and so she poses some fascinating questions: What does someone like Annabel Chong say about us, about the culture and society we live in? What is it that draws us to her mythology? Annabel Chong is my hero, someone in Singapore once told me. She dared to go there. I like to think she did it for us, so that we might challenge ourselves to go further in whatever we do in our lives.

Annabel herself went pretty far. In January 2002, AVN (Adult Video News, the official trade magazine of the American adult entertainment industry) published its list of the Top 50 Pornstars of All Time, and the six stars at the top of the heap were Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson, John Holmes, Traci Lords, Linda Lovelace, and Marilyn Chambers. Annabel Chong came in at number 40, along with the following text: