This week's edition of TVBS Weekly broke some big news when it reported that Wu Bai (
The singer emerged to confirm their marriage, but corrected the report by announcing that the two actually tied the knot in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2003. The couple had kept their marriage a secret because, according to Wu Bai, "telling everyone wouldn't be fun." He denied, however, that the announcement was made because they were expecting a kid.
Last week the gossip rags in Taiwan and Hong Kong thought they'd struck gold when they released photos of Taiwanese pop diva Chang Hui-mei (A-Mei,
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Next Magazine (
Speaking of Tsai, she released a new album titled J-Game over the weekend. Ever since her emphatic split with Jay, when he was spotted in Japan with TV anchorwoman Patty Hou (
Finally, model fever in Taiwan has elicited a backlash, and leave it to bad boy rocker Chang Chen-yue (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
S.H.E. had a close brush with politics over the weekend, when a newspaper in Lanzhou, China, reported that the band had said that they weren't Chinese, but were Taiwanese. Not wanting to attract any part of the nationalist hysteria that's raged in China over the past several weekends, the girl band moved quickly to defuse the potential controversy by confirming that they had never been to Lanzhou and never been interviewed by any paper based there. They also noted in an open letter to the Great Daily News (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern