With all the Asian movies and other elements of Asian culture becoming mainstream in North America, some artists in the region have started to favorably judge their chances of breaking into that distant, Holy Grail of a market. This is despite the warning of precedent and more sober contemporary assessments that point to this being, in fact, a pipe dream.
Nevertheless, Jay Chou (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
In a follow-up story to Jay's Los Angeles show, The Liberty Times
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Back in Taiwan, instead of running a beeline toward cultural gaffes, Jay quite simply can do no wrong. An end-of-the-year roll call in Apple Daily (
Meanwhile in TV, the competitive field of variety shows revealed its top dogs for the year, with Hu Gua (胡瓜) reclaiming his top spot from two years ago with five shows on three channels raking in an average of about NT$500,000 in personal earnings per episode. Jacky Wu (吳宗憲), the TV personality now honored with a government public service announcement on TV lampooning him as a drunk driver, came in second, followed by Chang Fei (張菲) and finally Chang Hsiao-yen (張曉燕).
TV host Kevin Tsai (
Another TV host, Peng Chia-chia (
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist