Remember former Singaporean porn star Annabel Chong? She has made a career in tech

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.

Being famous wasn't fun

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.

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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.

Sexism in the tech industry

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.

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"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.

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'If they're going to find out, they're going to find out'

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."

bryanlim@asiaone.com