Actress and model Shu Qi (舒淇) says she wouldn’t mind tying the knot, but she can do without kids.
In an interview on CTS (華視), the “Golden Horse Empress” said she’s been receiving a “lot of matchmaking help” and that “marriage doesn’t look too bad nowadays.”
A few tips for prospective husbands: Shu hopes her hubby would agree to her continuing to make films, and having children isn’t high on her list, as she would be happy enough with “godchildren.”
On her movie career, Shu told CTS she enjoys working long hours on set and that she couldn’t be like Hong Kong film star Maggie Cheung (張曼玉), who has said her personal life comes first.
Shu has even sacrificed her famously long locks, which have featured in hair product commercials, for the big screen. For her role in the upcoming Hong Kong film, City Under Siege (全城戒備), Shu had to be persuaded to trim her hair to shoulder length, a decision that took her two weeks to make, reports the Liberty Times [ the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper].
China is not taking “bullshit” from A-mei (張惠妹), who can’t get one of her new songs past its censors. The authorities were offended by the “vulgarity” of her song Black Eats Black (黑吃黑), which appears on her new album Amit (阿密特). The offending lyrics included lines like, “It’s bullshit,” and, “Which girl was it that got cheated yet again, laid down to give you comfort?” (是哪個妹又被騙，躺著給你安慰).
A-mei and her lyricist
A-hsia (阿霞) didn’t want to dilute the song just for the Chinese market, so our “mainland compatriots” will have to do without it on their version of the album. On Internet discussion boards, A-mei fans across the strait are rolling their eyes at the Great Wall of Censorship.
But a few naughty phrases are the least of A-mei’s worries. In a television interview last week with Jennifer Shen (沈春華), she made a rare public acknowledgement of her romance with basketball player Sam Ho (何守正). The conversation inevitably touched upon marriage and children, and A-mei remarked that she has given thought to performing on stage while pregnant.
This apparently offhand remark was twisted in local media headlines such as “A-mei wants to get married and have children,” which caught the singer off guard, according to the China Times.
Ho’s reaction didn’t help. His response to A-mei’s musings about pregnancy: “She didn’t say [whose baby], now did she? Maybe it’s somebody else’s!” This had fans in an uproar, but A-mei dismissed the hoopla as “people not getting his sense of humor.”
Pop Stop doesn’t get Jam Hsiao’s (蕭敬騰) penchant for breaking into nature conservation areas. Last year Hsiao’s production company was fined NT$100,000 for setting fire to a piano at the Kaomei Wildlife Conservation Area (高美野生動物保護區), all for a music video.
This time Hsiao and his crew wandered into an ecological preserve at Yangmingshan National Park (陽明山國家生態保護) to do a photo shoot for an upcoming album, according to the Liberty Times.
The police fined him the equivalent of several parking tickets, but said they were mystified by Hsiao’s willingness to wander around in shorts as the area was populated by snakes.
Not to worry, Hsiao was wearing leggings under those shorts, apparently the latest male fashion fad in Japan, noted the Liberty Times. Too bad those leggings didn’t cover his precious calves. “Why is it that the first time I wear shorts for a promotional shoot, I get attacked by mosquitoes?” he whined.
In other pop news, the 20th annual Golden Melody Awards (金曲獎) ceremony takes place tomorrow, at which two
classic crooners team up to present the Best Mandarin Album award: Hong Kong singer-actor Jacky Cheung (張學友) and Taiwanese singer Judy Chiang (江蕙). Chiang is up for several awards herself.
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
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