Hello World

The Real-Life Pretty Woman Who Met Her Prince Who Taught Her How to Code

Not all fairy tales have a happy ending

Pretty Woman remains one of the most popular rom-com movies ever to come out from Hollywood. In the 90s version of My Fair Lady with a twist, Vivian the woman who met her prince is a prostitute.

That was an easier comparison than saying that both movies were based on Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw.

But I love both movies, don’t judge me.

I watched Pretty Woman a gazillion times. I know many of the movie’s iconic scenes, the shopping, the Opera, and the surprising ending.

“Big Mistake. Big. Huge. I Have To Go Shopping Now.”

No spoilers, for a 32-year-old movie.

The 90s was, let us say, a bit over the top. And for Annabel Chong, the 90s made her infamous for putting Singapore, a very conservative country in Southeast Asia on the map of adult entertainment.

After doing the film The World’s Biggest Gang Bang how can one ever forget Annabel Chong? A record-setting adult film in the 90s— as she had sex with 251 men, but that was only a marketing ploy. The truth was she had sex with 70 men and did 251 sex scenes in 10 hours.

By the time the movie came out, Annabel Chong is the most famous Singaporean, more iconic that the Merlion, and probably more popular than Singapore’s Founding Father Lee Kwan Yew.

“In Singapore, pornography is filth.” — Grace Quek, the woman behind Annabel Chong the performer.

The Annabel Chong Story

I vividly remember her story, not so much about the film that put her at the top of the adult entertainment business. It was the response she got from many Singaporeans at the time, that it felt she single-handedly eroded the nation’s moral capital.

She was hated. She was called names. She was vilified and compared to an “ex-convict” and “Adolf Hitler.”

In an interview with Vice, you get to know Grace Quek who she says is the Evil Doppelganger incarnate of Annabel Chong, who is ‘dead ’to her.

Who is Grace Quek?

In January 1995, a 22-year-old Quek starred in the adult film World’s Biggest Gang Bang as Annabel Chong. She had sex with about 70 men 251 times in 10 hours.

It set a world record (defeated the next year) and became one of the best-selling adult films of that decade.

The story went mainstream and was reported internationally, splashed across much of the burgeoning internet.

As Annabel Chong, Quek went on Jerry Springer, where he demanded she explain herself, and Esquire granted her a 1995 ‘Dubious Achievement Award’ (“Talk About A Sore Winner,” the headline read). There was a documentary in 1999, a play in 2007, and a 2008 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote sweatily about a fictional porn star trying to surpass Chong’s record for 200 pages. — Excerpt, What Happened to Annabel Chong?

But unlike the character Vivian in the movie Pretty Woman, who was a small-town girl, Grace Quek is a Singaporean who was an A student at Hwa Chong and Raffles, two of Singapore’s top schools.

She was sent to the UK by her parents to study law at King’s College before deciding it wasn’t for her. She dropped out and enrolled at USC in 1994 to study fine arts and a major called “Study of Women and Men in Society.”

And when her parents were unable to support her in the US, she began to do modeling jobs, and by 1994 she was a full-time student and a full-time porn actor.

And with the release of The World’s Biggest Gang Bang in 1995, her name has become legendary in adult entertainment but to Grace, it was more than the fame or infamy.

It was neither rebellion against a country that has strict values of which she calls herself a citizen, or she was calling for attention.

It was a phase in her life that she doesn’t regret at all. She was just a Singaporean woman who wanted to be different, young as she was then she made her point — that society looks down on women who enjoy sex with multiple partners compared to men.

Same numbers, different gender, and the result would be to impress or be labeled as promiscuous.

Recently White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge claims she had sex with 200 people as a result of her playing an MILF on American Pie.

Society is changing; she isn’t being slut-shamed by her remark.

From Porn to Tech

After a disastrous documentary film about her life, which ironically was celebrated at the Sundance Festival, Grace Quek felt it was time for her to move away from her Annabel Chong persona.

And like in the movie Pretty Woman she met her ‘prince’ in a private session and what happened next turned her life around — from porn to tech.

Meeting her own Edward like in the movie Pretty Woman, the prince who came for a role-play sexual encounter instead gave Grace her first lesson on how to code. Her life was about to change after starring in one of the wildest porn movies ever came out in the 90s.

One of those clients had introduced her to the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — he had a thing for teacher-student role play. Dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform, pausing only to deliberately make a mistake or two so that the client could spank her, Quek swiftly built a simple webpage with a button that, when clicked, revealed text that read “hello, world.” — Excerpt, What Happened to Annabel Chong?

She loved coding so much that she took a 10-month engineering crash course at Westwood College in 2001. She never looked back, today she is still coding and in one of her tweets, she is presently working as a senior front-end developer at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Final words

It took Grace Quek years to finally ‘kill’ the performance artist as she was notoriously known as Annabel Chong.

By the time Quek finished her engineering course, which she managed to finance by selling Annabel merchandise on her website, she made her final bow as Annabel Chong.

In 2003 she closed her website down permanently and with it her message to all Annabel Chong’s fans.

Where’s Annabel?

Annabel is dead, and is now replaced full time by her Evil Doppelganger, who is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel, and would prefer to do something different for a change. From her shallow grave, Annabel would like to thank her fans for all their love and support all these years, and to let them know that she will never forget them.

In that case, what is this Evil Doppelganger up to nowadays?

The ED is a diabolical yuppie who is working as a web developer and consultant. She specializes in ASP and .NET with C#, Database Development and also does web design. While the divine Ms Chong was busy doing her Annabel thang, the ED was surreptitiously going to computer boot camp to pick up some skills, so that she can permanently kill off Annabel Chong and begin her new life of peace and relative obscurity. Now she is making a pretty decent living being a horrible geek and all that, proving that there are second chapters in American life, to hell with F Scott Fitzgerald. — Whatever happened to Annabel Chong

Unlike in Pretty Woman, Quek’s prince didn’t stay too long, but Grace Quek never needed a man to claim her life back or be rescued like Vivian, all she needed was to find herself and coding was her saving grace.

On the day she learned how to code, Hello, World, she already said goodbye to Annabel Chong.

Edward: So, what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her? Vivian: She rescued him right back.

Thank you for reading.

Here are some of my stories, all complimentary.

👉The Story Behind Bill Gates Owning More Farmland Than Any American Today — Free Reading.

👉The Only Time Queen Elizabeth Bowed Her Head — Free Reading.

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