First it was Zhao Wei
At the World Chinese Music Awards last weekend in Shanghai, security, which in China is usually zealous if not always competent, was unable to prevent fans from stretching out their hands and molesting Ken Chu, Gigi and Nicholas Tse as they walked the red carpet into the venue. Nicholas even suffered a cut that drew blood. Things went from bad to worse for Gigi when the award she won broke in half and part of it dropped onto her knee making it hard for her to walk.
TAIIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Cecelia Cheung had her own run in with an out-of-control fan at a show in Chongqing when a man rushed the stage, grabbed her and touched her breasts before he was jerked off stage by security [outrageous, ed]. Hong Kong's gossip media that trail Cecilia round the clock insinuated that she may have brought the attack upon herself with her supposedly strange behavior of late. By strange, they mean her increasingly outlandish clothes, tattoos, Buddhist bead bracelets and the voodoo doll she was photographed with a couple weeks ago. There were rumors in the city's papers that she was using the voodoo doll to take revenge on her former boyfriend Nicholas Tse, who dropped her like a dirty tissue for Faye Wong (
TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
As annoying as the crazed fans in China may be, it seems that the mainland is where the big bucks are for stars these days, according to The Great Daily News (
Not surprisingly, Jay is also at the top of the heap in album sales. The most recent summer sales figures show Jay as having sold 305,000 copies of his latest album, which was named after his mother Ye Hui-mei (
Though not stars on the level of Jay and company, yet still household names in Taiwan -- partly because of a four-person sex scandal dating from last year -- ?the rock band Chairman (
Another Taipei show to look forward to that Pop Stop has learnt about from the owners of Room 18 is British R&B sensation Craig David. The venue is set for the National Taiwan University gymnasium, on Oct. 24. The organizers wouldn't say whether Craig would show up at their club after the show.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would