The unrelenting character assassination of Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) by the Hong Kong media seems to have rubbed off on the kids who should be her fans. On Monday night she and Andy Lau (劉德華) held a press conference to publicize the new movie Big Guy (
Not long ago, Cecilia was the media's sweetheart. So what brought about this spectacular fall from grace? Pop Stop recently reported that Hong Kong paparazzi had snapped shots of her with a voodoo doll, which was presumed to represent her ex Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒). She's also been spotted dressed in bombastic clothes and made a big splash at a concert in China two weeks ago where she provocatively spread her legs in a choreographed routine not unlike Madonna's fabled Like a Virgin performance at the MTV Music Awards.
Given the chauvinistic standards of the gossip rags, her supposedly unseemly behavior has been attributed to her breakup. But the only truly odd behavior on her part, as far as Pop Stop can discern, was her retraction this week of an earlier announcement that she had a foreigner boyfriend, which was reported in Hong Kong's edition of the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) and in The Great Daily News (大成報) as yet another case of her having gone off the rails. It was all a joke, she said. Ha ha.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Gigi Leung (梁詠琪) was reported in the current edition of Next Magazine (壹週刊) as having turned down a part in the next Johnny To (杜琪峰) film after the director had openly criticized her lackluster performance in Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走向右走), which he directed.
No matter how poorly He Li-hsiu (河莉秀) acts, the sultry South Korean starlet, whose main gimmick is that she started her life as a boy [and had a sex change], always overshadows the other actresses. Her limelight snatching rubbed actress Wu Pei-tsi (吳佩慈) up so badly this week that at a press conference about the show they both star in called Honey (親愛的), Wu lashed out complaining that she was, in fact, the star. "Why are her photos always so pretty [on the promotional posters] and the other actors' just ones taken at rehearsal?" Wu said. She even snapped at He's tendency to wear revealing blouses and dresses. "Ai ya, her chest can be made as big as she wants it to be."
This weekend's major pop event will be Lee Hom Wang's (
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
Tonight in front of the Presidential Office Shunza (順子) is billed to take the stage as part of the Double Ten Day celebrations. The selection of singers for any event related to celebrating Taiwan has been sensitive ever since A-mei (阿妹) was barred for a year from performances and product endorsements in China after she sang the national anthem at President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) inauguration in 2000. But Shunza was quoted in local papers as saying she's "not scared at all" of any repercussions from across the strait. Easy for her to say, she has an American passport.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
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 Tseng 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
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50