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Former working girl Tracy Quan penned the juicy read Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, which is headed for the big screen thanks to Hollywood heavyweights Julia Roberts and Darren Star.

Originally published in 2001 by Crown, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel is being adapted for the screen by Sex and the City creator Darren Star. Julia Roberts’s Shoelace Productions will produce the film and Star will make his directorial debut.

So how did a former working girl who estimates she has slept with over 3,000 men end up penning a witty, clever and clearly marketable novel about a fictional call girl and her tight circle of friends? “When I was a kid, I used to write poetry and really terrible haiku about the weather,” says Quan with a hearty laugh. “My mother actually thought that I was going to be a writer. She was a little surprised [when she learned] I was going to be a hooker instead.”

Photo by Amy Lazar.

The 53 columns were a prequel to the novel, and their online format gave readers a chance to interact with the author via e-mail and message board discussions. “There were strong responses pro and con from the start,” she says. “There were definitely people who hated it, and the reasons were varied.”

Some of the angry e-mails were from Asian Pacific American men, who felt that Quan shouldn’t be writing about sex workers of Asian descent. Others believed Nancy Chan perpetuated stereotypes about Asian women. The World of Suzie Wong comes to mind when talking about Asian prostitutes. Quan was undoubtedly influenced by the novel, which eventually became a film, starring actress Nancy Kwan. Interestingly enough, Quan’s Nancy Chan also goes by the working name of Suzy.

“Prostitutes are a part of every culture, including every Asian culture,” she explains. “If you put a negative spin on that just because one party is Asian, I’d say that’s a racist attitude.

“The angry Asian American guys who contacted me seem to feel that they speak for a kind of Asian monolith, and of course they don’t,” she says matter-of-factly. “They speak for a very specific section of society.” Perhaps geography plays a part. “Men living in Asia seem to be quite unaware of the fact that they’re supposed to hate me.”

While reference is made in the book to Nancy being a mixed-blood Asian Canadian who lives in Manhattan, her ethnicity plays a small — if not backseat — role to her identity as a pricey call girl. Trying to meet her weekly quotas (around $2,000 a week), Nancy bounces around the city from her therapist’s office to dinner with her fiancé Matt, a Wall Street type who is absolutely clueless to her hooker job.

In several instances in the novel, Nancy is referred to as an “Oriental.” While the PC set often finds this term offensive, Quan has a simple explanation to offer before her critics start firing off more e-mails. “I wanted to leave a document behind of how people spoke in 2001,” she says of her novel that took about a year to write. “I wasn’t using these terms to say these are the terms I think we should use.”

Then there are the people who simply adore Nancy Chan. Everyone from working girls to college students to moms in Texas are fans. Critics have praised Quan’s freshman effort and compared it to Belle Du Jour and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Many fans are just relieved to see an APA protagonist appear in a hit column, novel and soon-to-be film. “I didn’t really know how to write from the point of view of a blond,” she explains. “I sort of wrote about someone who was passing for Asian but is actually from the Caribbean. She’s perceived as being Asian.” Coincidentally, Quan’s family is from Trinidad of Chinese heritage. She explains that her relatives are “white, black and everything in between.”

Born “30-something” years ago somewhere in the “northeast U.S.,” Quan didn’t feel like a typical second-generation APA. “In most cases the child interprets Western culture to their parents if they’re my generation,” she says. “That wasn’t the case with us. In some ways my Dad is more Western than I am because of his British colonial upbringing.”

Her computer programmer father and science editor mother raised Quan in a small, Canadian town and divorced when she was around 7. At 14, her mother took Quan and her siblings to Wales to live for a year in a Volkswagen bus. This did not fly well with the future lover of designer goods and Upper East Side apartments. “I ran away and never looked back,” explains Quan.

She ended up in London and moved in with an older reclusive man. She hustled in champagne bars while there and by the age of 16, she moved back to the United States where she continued working, first as an escort and later from her own “book” (trade lingo for a private client list). Quan has only taken brief breaks from working over the last two decades.

Quan has also been an activist and advocate. She has been involved with Prostitutes of New York since 1989, and is affiliated with Network of Sex Work Projects, a group that does work in Asia and especially India. “When I do a television show with an anti-prostitution activist, I feel good about standing up for myself as a former prostitute,” she says. “Someone’s got to do it.”

One of the questions Quan is repeatedly asked is whether or not she would go back to her previous line of work. “Right now I have a pretty normal personal life and I like that,” says Quan, who is currently dating an orchestra conductor. She says: “Going public put a no-turning-back stamp on my career change.”

Back to the film, which is just in the early stages of development, who will play the title role of Nancy Chan? After Lucy Liu’s name is mentioned, the author takes a pause as though she is not familiar with the Charlie’s Angels actress. “I really haven’t had any ideas,” she states. “I only watch the Weather Channel.”

Visit the author’s website at tracyquan.net for more information. Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Nancy Chan Novel is available nationwide and will be out in paperback in 2003.