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Henry Lee knows why he has a keen eye for detail. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES

It would have been hard to imagine, but the way Taiwan's media feted the arrival of Henry Lee (李昌鈺), it seems we have our first forensics expert superstar. And as proof of his star status, however short-lived it may be, he was the man in the hot seat on Tsai Kang-yong's (蔡康永) face-to-face interview show on TVBS on Sunday. The show looks like it was modeled after Larry King Live, except that instead of bow tie and rolled-up sleeves, Tsai is dressed up like Pee Wee Herman and in the background the most insipid muzac plays softly while trite summaries of the interviewee's words appear in cutesy bubble characters on the screen.

Most of the interview was a breathless monologue by Lee detailing his grand achievements in the field of forensics, which are admittedly uncontested. He did, however, have one slightly odd take on why he has such a keen eye for forensic detail. Chinese people's eyes, according to Lee, are squinted in a constant intense focus that catches tell-tale signs that Americans (presumably he meant white people) can't pick up with their wide eyes. Well, so much for science.

Anya found out that rehab isn't as fun as ecstasy. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES

Then, getting personal, Lee told of how he and his students battled a racist university administration's conspiracy to keep him from a teaching position. Once he finally was given the position, he was awarded the best professor award three semesters in a row before he asked the administration to honor some other professors so that their feelings didn't get hurt. He attributed his outstanding teaching technique to the "superior rhetorical logic of Chinese people."

In a similar racially tinged vein, Andy Lau (劉德華), who is enjoying a rash of media attention following his win two weeks ago at the Hong Kong Film Awards for best male actor, said in an interview this week that he had been offered but was uninterested in accepting stereotypical roles in Hollywood that belittled his abilities, while bemoaning the fact that hits like Infernal Affairs (無間道) never make it to American screens and that he acts as well as anyone in Hollywood. The remarkably cocksure Andy is almost done shooting his supporting role in Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) Tang-dynasty martial-arts flick House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏), which is set to hit screens some time this summer, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro and Zhang Ziyi (章子怡).

Taiwan's cinema, always dogged by paltry box office results, enjoyed some recognition this week when the French government bestowed the prestigious Chevalier des Arts et Lettres award to Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) for his contributions to film. Tsai enjoys a sizable fan base and generous investors in France and is always a favored winner at the Cannes Film Festival when he submits a movie.

This week saw the release of a memoir by disgraced Taiwanese starlet Anya (安雅), who was arrested at the Taipei nightclub Texound in the summer of 2002 for binging on ecstasy with Hong Kong pop star William So (蘇永康). According to the Apple Daily (蘋果日報), the book details her grim 10-day experience in a roach-ridden Taipei rehabilitation center, where she was not allowed to see a doctor when she came down with a cold and was forced to split and then eat a watermelon with her hands. She complains in her book that the rehabilitation center was more like a jail than a clinic. Should she have been surprised? Anya was also released six days earlier than her sentence had originally stipulated, sparking a controversy that got the director of the rehab fired and prompted a stiff reminder by the minister of justice to local authorities that offenders must fill their rehab terms -- even stars.

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