Welcome to the Pop Stop, where Around Town intentionally dives headlong into the fray of celebrity gossip news and comes back to you with a distilled version of the past week of heartbreaks, successes and misadventures.
In this space we'll also be announcing upcoming concerts, reporting on the latest hot TV shows, commenting on new albums and all that good stuff. But mostly we'll be delivering the straight dope on the colorful lives of the stars who keep the Chinese pop culture machine well greased. We're lucky, then, to be in Taipei, because the shenanigans that the stars get up to in this town never end, and the blood-lusty wolf packs of reporters looking for a scoop are tireless.
Starting things off with a litigious bang, Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) popped the cork on the champagne when she won a NT$1 million libel case on Tuesday against Next Magazine (壹週刊). The magazine had claimed in a Dec. 12, 2001, report that the Vancouver-raised singer was previously the girlfriend of a small-time drug dealer and that she was a wild libertine during her college days. Her indignant denials after the report seem to have been vindicated, to our mild dismay. It seemed like she was finally getting some personality.
But then, charges of untoward drug and sexual indulgence come with a heavy price. Just ask William So (蘇永康) and Anya Wu?吳安雅). Last year they were busted at the Taipei nightclub Texound while loaded up on ecstasy and ever since they've been trying to restore their pubic images, while suffering regular jabs from the media. So felt compelled to title his new album currently fresh off the press So Fresh, in an apparent description of his new detoxed self. Anya, who has been less repentant about her trip to the wild side, was featured in Next two weeks ago with some unflattering extreme close-up photos of her at a promotion event with pasties sticking out from her bra and a curious type of tape at her bikini line.
So and Wu are also conspicuously absent from a line-up of stars including Karen Mok (莫文尉), Coco Lee (李玟), Jay Chou (周杰論) and Wang Lee Hom (王力宏) for a Department of Health anti-ecstasy campaign launched last week. For its campaign the department also overlooked Hong Kong part-time singer, full-time brat Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒), who, in an Internet poll conducted by a Chinese Web site last week, ranked near the bottom of the public's favorite stars. Reasons cited for his low score on the poll were his uncanny ability to be caught on film with women other than his girlfriend Faye Wong (王菲) and his predilection for driving sports cars into highway barriers, both of which he did in the past two weeks, again. Yet his obnoxious behavior didn't stop thousands of screaming teenie boppers from turning up at every stop of Nicholas' one-day, three-city autograph tour of Taiwan last weekend.
Andy Lau (劉德華), who, unlike hometown maverick Nicholas, has a spotless image, made a discrete appearance in Taiwan earlier this week for a film stint and was
photographed en route with a fashionable hip hop towel wrap and a baseball cap on his head. It turns out Andy wasn't announcing his transformation into a rapper, but rather was protecting his newly shaved cranium from the vicious Taiwan sun. Let's just hope they're paying him well.
People all around Taiwan are now looking to fill the void left by the termination of the blazing hot TV series Taiwan Thunderbolt Fire (台灣霹靂火). Keep your ears open in public and you're likely to hear people mimicking the show's hero Liu Wen-tzong (劉文聰) and quoting his deadly serious warning to an enemy: "I'll give you a can of gasoline and a book of matches! Don't you know that when you borrow money from me there's always a price to pay??"(我會送你一罐氣油和一集火.難道你不知道你跟我借錢都要付出代價?)
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.