The frenzy over Faye Wong’s (王菲) reported miscarriage continues unabated. According to the Liberty Times [the Taipei Times’ sister paper], the media wildfire has spread from Hong Kong and Taiwan to China, where showbiz gossip Web sites speculate that Wong’s husband, Li Yapeng (李亞鵬), was having an affair with Chinese actress Miao Pu (苗圃), which Miao angrily denied.
Rumormongers then speculated that Wong, 39, and Li, who turns 37 tomorrow, were to divorce because the Mando-pop diva did not want to try for another child because of her age. Li’s manager, Ma Jia (馬葭), angrily denied the scuttlebutt as “crazy,” the Liberty Times reports. Wong’s friend, actress Carina Lau (劉嘉玲), echoed Ma’s denial, saying, “I think it’s better for Faye Wong to talk about her matters herself.”
Breathing a collective sigh of relief are the members of girl band S.H.E. and boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海), who found out that the yogurt drinks they endorse in China were not tainted with melamine, said the product’s manufacturer Mengniu (蒙牛). The two groups, which star in commercials for Mengniu, will carry on as planned with a six-concert tour of China, but their record company says whether the groups will continue with product endorsements in the future remains up in the air.
All this talk of tainted milk has got Chang Fei (張菲) thinking — about himself. A Liberty Times report reveals the TV show host’s musings on current events.
On a recent taping of his show Variety Big Brother (綜藝大哥大), Chang declared that he has stopped drinking pearl milk tea (珍珠奶茶), and no longer takes milk in his coffee. Speaking of coffee gave Chang reason to pay tribute to his friend, the deceased comedian Ni Min-jan (倪敏然), best known for his uncanny impersonations of former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮). Chang says Ni was ahead of his time, being the first in Taiwan to come up with the idea of canned coffee over 30 years ago. Milk, mortality, coffee — it all makes perfect sense.
But at least Chang knows his job is to take people’s minds off things like food scares and cross-strait relations. He gave a nod to Taiwan’s homegrown, surprise box office hit, Cape No. 7 (海角七號), noting the “progress of Taiwan’s film industry.” He laughed, he cried and fancied appearing in a blockbuster himself. He praised director Wei Te-sheng (魏德勝), and said, “You could come and ask me to play in your next film.”
It’s no wonder Chang is looking Wei’s way. Cape No. 7 has broken the NT$100 million mark in box office takings, and the movie’s stars are the center of attention. The male lead, Amis pop singer Van Fan (范逸臣), celebrated the movie’s success by fulfilling a promise he made earlier to swim naked at a beach in Kenting (墾丁) if the film grossed more than NT$30 million.
As with many a big screen hit, there has been conjecture of romance among the cast. A Liberty Times report speculates that Fan and the film’s female lead, Japanese actress Tanaka Chie, had engaged in some offscreen method acting.
At a celebration party at Fan’s pub in the eastern district of Taipei, all eyes were on the pair for outward signs of inward stirrings.
But they didn’t leave the party together. After all, Fan does have a girlfriend, the report said before mentioning the rumor that Chie was slated to star in Fan’s latest music video, but was nixed because of objections from Fan’s girlfriend.
And finally, Wang Lee-hom (王力宏) says he isn’t gay. The Mando-pop superstar, who played to 12,000 fans at his Music Man concert in Taipei City last weekend, told the Apple Daily that his mom even asked him once if he were gay, implying that it would be “OK” if he were.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
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