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.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
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