DRESSED IN A grey sweatsuit with no makeup, Tracy Quan queues quietly in an Upper East Side Starbucks on a breezy New York Sunday. The caffeine seems to have kicked in by the time she finds a seat, fuelling the stream of literary, political and sexual banter you might expect from a novelist and sex columnist whose writing is inspired by her work as a high-class prostitute with more than 3,000 clients over 20 years.
Her views spill out at such a rate that politics, art and prostitution become indistinguishable, which is precisely Quan's point. 'Physical work can be much more fulfilling, and I missed the pace of being in the market,' she says. 'But now that my book is in stores, I don't feel that empty space in my life any more. Hustling a book is as exciting and challenging as hustling your body.'
Nowadays, the thirtysomething Quan describes herself as a post-feminist. At the age of 10, she called herself a feminist, and says she's been evolving ever since. She also considers herself a 'lingerie liberal' - a libertarian entrepreneur who likes Bottega Veneta handbags and shoes and Wolford body suits.
She describes her first book, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel (Crown), as '100 per cent fiction and 100 per cent autobiographical'. Like Quan's sex column for Salon.com, the novel chronicles the struggles of a US$600-a- date call girl to balance a career with the needs of her unsuspecting fiance, a Wall Street banker eager to tie the knot. The book also segues into the burgeoning prostitutes' rights movement in New York, in which Quan is heavily involved.
The paperback is in its sixth printing. After its release in 2001, about a dozen copycat titles appeared, exploring the lives of male and female prostitutes and strippers. Julia Roberts and Darren Star (creator of the popular TV series Sex and the City) are involved in a Nancy Chan film script.
Copies of the Japanese translation sold out within a week of its release last year. But Quan's plans for a bigger Asian audience have been thwarted by mainland self-censorship. More than a year after mainland publisher Citic bought the rights, the Chinese translation is in limbo still. Two months ago, Quan told the South China Morning Post's Cityseen column that the Chinese edition would be out soon. But those hopes soon faded. Citic editor Hu Dawei says printing Quan's novel would be too risky, because its sexually explicit content is 'contradictory to the propaganda of the party'. Citic says it's adopting a wait-and-see attitude, and will consider publishing only when party policy has softened.