Margarita Laurouskaya (
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.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Troupes of girls predominantly from former Soviet bloc states -- jin si mao (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
"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.
What about the guy Next magazine surreptitiously photographed her with? Margarita managed to look coy in a leopard-print bikini on the magazine's cover two weeks ago and an inside expose showed pictures of her with her "boyfriend" -- a guy far younger and less hirsute than Chang.
"That's my roommate," she explains. "Next magazine and Apple Daily followed me for two weeks trying to find something to write about. But there isn't anything. I'm too busy to have a boyfriend. I don't have time to go out."
Her schedule is taken up, she says, by taping Chang's show on Tuesdays, meeting to decide the content of the next week's show on Friday, and spending all weekend preparing for it. Rehearsals can be all-consuming. Weeks ago, she had to rent a gu zhen (
"The rest of the week, I have modeling shoots and press conferences," she said. "And I have a biography coming out later this month. It's all ready, except for the photos."
But for all the time she spends wearing bikinis in front of cameras, Margarita doesn't consider herself a professional model. Her job, she says, is simply to entertain people.
"I tried doing the serial television programs," she said, "but filming those shows isn't fun. I think you should have fun doing the show. The audience will see that and they'll have fun too."
It's a good philosophy, gauging by the reaction of people who watch her every week.
"Her ballet maybe isn't very professional, but it looks great on television!" said one avid watcher. "She's great because she comes across as nice and sweet and you can tell she really likes Taiwan."
Her goal, she says, is to host a television program of her own, but she doesn't rule out getting involved in film either.
"I just want to be a part in something that is quality," she said, emphasizing the word "part."
Asked if she's afraid that her fame is fleeting, Margarita reveals a side to her personality that likely helped gain her fame in the first place.
"Of course, all this won't last," she said smiling. "But I'm happy and feel very lucky for everything that has happened. I can always teach kids how to swim."
From the last quarter of 2001, research shows that real housing prices nearly tripled (before a 2012 law to enforce housing price registration, researchers tracked a few large real estate firms to estimate housing price behavior). Incomes have not kept pace, though this has not yet led to defaults. Instead, an increasing chunk of household income goes to mortgage payments. This suggests that even if incomes grow, the mortgage squeeze will still make voters feel like their paychecks won’t stretch to cover expenses. The housing price rises in the last two decades are now driving higher rents. The rental market
July 21 to July 27 If the “Taiwan Independence Association” (TIA) incident had happened four years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of an uproar. But the arrest of four young suspected independence activists in the early hours of May 9, 1991, sparked outrage, with many denouncing it as a return to the White Terror — a time when anyone could be detained for suspected seditious activity. Not only had martial law been lifted in 1987, just days earlier on May 1, the government had abolished the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
Hualien lawmaker Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) is the prime target of the recall campaigns. They want to bring him and everything he represents crashing down. This is an existential test for Fu and a critical symbolic test for the campaigners. It is also a crucial test for both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a personal one for party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). Why is Fu such a lightning rod? LOCAL LORD At the dawn of the 2020s, Fu, running as an independent candidate, beat incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and a KMT candidate to return to the legislature representing
RSS