looks as though television actor Yao Yuan-hao (姚元浩) is not paying off the right people. The Apple Daily reported that Yao, the boyfriend of model Sonia Sui (隋棠), planned to hold a surfing competition for youngsters in Ilan last weekend but was shocked when 30 or so tattooed men dressed in black showed up with surfboards and a heavy dose of attitude.
The report said that on the morning of the competition, Yao received an anonymous phone call telling him to cancel the competition. Or else.
Clearly not one to cave in to threats, Yao simply called on local police to remove the pesky gangsters, who intentionally stood in front of the judges so as to obstruct their view. But the coppers said they couldn’t do anything because it was a public beach. Miffed, Yao had no choice but to cancel the competition.
Perhaps Yao didn’t read a report in last year’s Next Magazine that speculated Sui worked in a hostess bar for a few days to pay off her mother’s debts. Pop Stop wonders if there is a connection.
And speaking of celebs paying off debts, Yuki Hsu (徐懷鈺) went off to perform in China in April to help pay down the mortgage on her family’s home as well as to revive her declining career.
But the 31-year-old singer got more than she bargained for at Very 88 (非常88), a pub in Hangzhou (杭州) with a hostess club atmosphere. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the ogling eyes and the wink-wink, nudge-nudge expressions of those present, she quickly finished her set and headed back to Taiwan, according to a report in Next.
Now, ordinarily, this might compel a person to look closer at her contract before signing. But not Hsu. At the beginning of this month she was back in China, and this time it was rumored that she wasn’t even told where she would be performing.
Upon arriving at the “gig,” she was ushered into a private room containing a handful of inebriated businessmen and a few hostesses.
Pop Stop was pondering Hsu’s run of bad luck, both in terms of singing and advances made on her by Chinese men, until we saw her tasteless Bad Girl video on YouTube. It features a skimpily clad Hsu gyrating around a stage with half naked men. It’s not surprising that drunken businessmen in China might expect Hsu to put on a show for them.
“It wasn’t my fault.” These were the words spoken by Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) in reference to the lurid photographs taken of her and Israeli fiancee Aviv “Vivi” Nevo earlier this year at a beach resort in St Barts.
Zhang made the comments while attending the Cannes Film Festival, where she was a judge. “I didn’t do anything harmful,” she said, a fact that seems to be backed up by her continued popularity. Yahoo Kimo released statistics for the most hits per person between January and April and Zhang came out on top.
In other wedding news, plastic surgeon and alleged lothario Li Jin-liang (李進良) is finally tying the knot with Hu Ying-chen (胡盈禎), the daughter of entertainer Hu Gua (胡瓜).
The announcement served as a perfect excuse for Next to exhume some of his old skeletons.
The magazine’s sense of timing is impeccable. Nothing appeals more to short attention spans and puts gossip into a shallower perspective than a few lines (accompanied by a photograph or graphic) detailing the shenanigans of Taiwan’s glitterati.
Readers of Pop Stop will recall Li’s escapades last year when he entertained two friends and three hostesses at a Taipei hotel. Or, before that, when he was accused of sexual harassment by a Japanese porn star. Oddly, neither of these episodes made the cut in this week’s edition of Next. What did was a night out last Christmas with a woman named Mao Mao (毛毛), and the suggestion of infidelity it implied.
According to an interview that Hu gave on a TV talk show on May 14, however, she questioned the veracity of that report because she was present with Li and Mao Mao.
On the same show, she cheekily thanked the gossip rag for running all these stories about them because it’s free advertising for Li’s plastic surgery clinic. It also helps her to keep an eye on her husband, she said.
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
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