Taiwan's Belarusian bikini babe

Margarita Laurouskaya (瑪格莉特) is the Belarusian babe of Taiwanese television. She's become a regular on a popular Saturday night variety program. She's shot commercials for vodka drinks, karaoke machines and a dozen other products and been bikini-clad photo fodder for a shelf-full of magazines and newspapers. She even has a biography scheduled to hit bookstands later this month. Not bad for someone who got her start as a fish.

Well, a mermaid, actually. She came to Taiwan about four years ago from Belarus Athletic University along with a few classmates to join a team of synchronized swimmers that would perform nightly shows at a Taichung theme park that might be better described as a burlesque.

Troupes of girls predominantly from former Soviet bloc states -- jin si mao (金絲貓), or "gold silk cats" as they're known -- are offered visas to work as dancers at the park. At less-reputable venues they might be asked to perform acts off stage as well.

"My mother was working in a company where she could check all about the place where I was supposed to work and about Taiwan," she said in an interview this week. "She did a lot of checking and felt it was a legitimate show. So I came."

She and her classmates chose to abandon their university studies because the show would have them earning more in six months than they'd make in a year in Belarus. And so Margarita became a mermaid and had her picture blown up large on the show's poster.

"It was easy," she said of her experience in the show. "In Belarus we train to do this from when we're little and now we can do it here and make money. We don't have this kind of stuff in my country. We just do championship stuff. So everyone looks for work at water parks in Japan, France, America ? and Taiwan."

But after eight months in a scaly Spandex mermaid suit, Margarita was swum out. She returned to Belarus for about six months but decided her prospects were better back in Taiwan.

"I didn't want to jump from here ? to here," she said using her hands to indicate a precipitous drop.

But success in Taiwan meant having to learn the language. She'd met an agent, Kelly Chin (金玉珮), who said she could get her on television if she could speak Chinese. So Margarita holed-up in her apartment, leaving only to eat, attend Chinese class and for occasional modeling assignments. The rest of the time she spent watching television -- not for entertainment as much as education.

"I would really listen to what they were saying. This is how I learned Chinese," she said. "But you can't just learn the language, you have to learn the culture too."

Her break came a year later when Apple Daily (蘋果日報) ran a full-page pictorial on synchronized swimming that featured her. Taiwan's popular television host, Chang Fei (張菲), got one look at Margarita the mermaid and reeled her in.

She's been swimming, dancing and donning an endless array of bikinis on Chang's show every week since the beginning of this year -- earning a reported NT$200,000 a month for her troubles -- and was rumored to have danced her way into Chang's heart.

So is there anything going on between she and Chang?

"No."

Isn't he interested in her?

"I don't know," she said, then turned to ask her agent, Chin, who chaperoned her interview. "Is Chang Fei interested in me?"

"He's that way with all the girls," Chin says.