Where to start with Hsu Chun-mei (許純美)? Less than a month ago, barely anyone knew who this woman was. Now, it's hard to turn on the TV or flip through a newspaper or magazine without coming across her extravagantly ugly face.
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.
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.
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" (上流美).
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 (張菲), who thinks she's interesting, at least when she's on his show boosting his ratings.
Jacky Wu (吳宗憲), for one, isn't amused by the out-of-left-field emergence of this loud-mouthed woman and earlier this week called her and the media tornado she's generated a symptom of "Taiwan's mental sickness." True to her style, the words had barely left Wu's mouth and she was announcing her intention to sue for defamation seeking NT$200 million in damages.
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 (廣電基金), which acts as a kind of media watchdog, came out in Tuesday's China Times (中國時報) to comment that hiring Hsu as a news analyst was "trampling on news ethics." That hasn't deterred SuperTV, though, from keeping her on the air.
Leon Lai (黎明) and Faye Wong's (王菲) new movie Leaving Me, Loving You (大城小事) opened in Hong Kong and in Southeast Asia last weekend, generating some gossip over Lai and Wong's tandem promotional appearances for the movie. The two were previously rumored to have been a couple, but Lai is reportedly now the boyfriend of actress Shu Qi (舒琪), who is reportedly jealous about some of the more intimate scenes in the film and the duo's promo tour.
The Chinese-language film that's creating the most waves of late, though, is Cellphone (手機) by Feng Xiaogang (馮小剛), currently playing in China. The movie follows the downward spiral of a serial philanderer who is constantly betrayed by his cellphone, which rings at inopportune moments or holds messages that his various lovers ultimately read. The China Daily reported that the film has alerted women to the multifarious cellphone tricks used by cheating husbands to hide their affairs and has triggered family squabbles around the country. In one case in Tianjin, according to the paper, a woman was "knocked senseless" when she demanded to see her husband's phone after seeing the movie.
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