Where to start with Hsu Chun-mei
Late last year, Hsu made her first appearance in the news when her five-year-old daughter was found abandoned at a shopping center and she said she'd left the child there because the kid was noisy and annoying. Hsu refused to take the child back into her care.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Inexplicably, she parlayed this moment of fame into appearances on TV talk shows and variety shows, where she noisily held court on topics she is entirely unqualified to talk about and generally made an ass of herself in her hilariously accented Mandarin.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Because no one knew where she'd come from and would ask her about her background, Hsu would fill in the blanks by saying she was from a very rich family in "society's upper crust," earning her the sarcastic moniker "upper-crust beauty" (
Without much to distinguish herself, Hsu has become a TV sensation merely by her flagrant and obnoxious self-promoting style, her bawdy outfits and her penchant for shooting her mouth off, which has drawn fire from practically everyone she's encountered, except for Zhang Fei (
Jacky Wu (
Hoping to capitalize on all the hype, SuperTV has signed Hsu as co-anchor and news analyst on the channel's 6pm news show. But the Broadcasting Development Fund (
Leon Lai (
The Chinese-language film that's creating the most waves of late, though, is Cellphone (
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s