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.
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
Fifty-five years ago, a .25-caliber Beretta fired in the revolving door of New York’s Plaza Hotel set Taiwan on an unexpected path to democracy. As Chinese military incursions intensify today, a new documentary, When the Spring Rain Falls (春雨424), revisits that 1970 assassination attempt on then-vice premier Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). Director Sylvia Feng (馮賢賢) raises the question Taiwan faces under existential threat: “How do we safeguard our fragile democracy and precious freedom?” ASSASSINATION After its retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) imposed a ruthless military rule, crushing democratic aspirations and kidnapping dissidents from
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