Pop Stop begins this week with the curious case of Lei Hong (雷洪). The star of the popular FTV soap opera Mom’s House (娘家) and winner of last year’s Golden Bell Award (金鐘獎) for best male actor has a complaint of four “wives” that wouldn’t look out of place in Big Love or The Last Emperor.
Four wives, you say? That’s right, and they all live together under the same roof in Taipei. To maintain harmony, Lei says, he refuses to spend an entire night with just one wife.
However, not all is happiness at the Lei homestead. The 61-year-old announced last week that he had decided to take a fifth “wife” — a revelation that immediately drew criticism from his mother, the media and his other four wives.
Oddly enough, Lei’s taking on a new roommate wasn’t the issue that angered the other four wives, because they have already accepted the new wife into the family, according to reports in the China Times, Apple Daily, Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) and other media outlets.
It was Lei’s decision to make the wedding ceremony a public affair that caused strife at home. It turns out that holding a public wedding ceremony in Taiwan comes dangerously close to making the nuptials legally binding, unlike the arrangements with his other four consorts, which are presumably unregistered.
Lei has since canceled the ceremony.
It should be noted that Lei has sired seven sons and one daughter. His eldest son is 40, as is his youngest wife.
The surreal family affair hit a fever pitch over the weekend when Lei called a press conference to apologize for his inappropriate behavior. The mea culpa saw him bowing several times and slapping his own face in penance for being a bad influence on society. He said he hadn’t slept or eaten in two days, his blood pressure had reached 180 and he was on several different kinds of medication.
Pop Stop thinks that lack
of sleep, high blood pressure
and pill popping would be par for the course for anyone with five partners.
And now news of a sixth wife: Yesterday’s tabloids reported that Lei was once legally married to yet another woman — the mother of his 40-year-old son. They divorced four decades ago
The character Lei plays on TV only has two wives — proving once again that the truth is stranger than fiction.
In other wedding gossip, Yu Ke-hsin (喻可欣) is getting significant mileage out of her fling with Andy Lau (劉德華).
Ever since Lau publicly acknowledged his relationship with Hong Kong star Carol Choo (朱麗倩) a few weeks ago, Yu has been in the news reliving memories of her own three-year relationship with the Canto-pop star, which ended way back in the mid-1980s.
This includes flogging a 2004 expose she wrote about the affair, a work that intimately describes their first meeting, Lau’s wild pursuit of the (at the time) young Taiwanese actress and how she was deflowered five days later.
Yu is also trying to auction off stuffed animals and a yellow heart-shaped pillow Lau gave her. As of press time there were no takers.
The Apple Daily wanted to know if Lau pursued Choo like he did Yu. “It’s different,” she said. “Andy Lau was chasing me while Choo was sticking with him.”
Finally, Big S (大S) — aka Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛) — showed off her snarky side this past week at a screening for the movie On His Majesty’s Secret Service (大內密探靈靈狗), which was attended by its director Wang Jing (王晶).
When asked by reporters why she hasn’t gone to Hollywood to develop her career, the starlet, who is known for her eye-raising comments, said that Tinseltown only employs Chinese actors for movies because they are cheaper, an obvious slight directed towards singer Jay Chou (周杰倫).
The Chairman was recently picked to portray the Green Hornet’s sidekick in an upcoming Hollywood remake of the 1960s television program.
According to the Liberty Times, Big S went on to comment that, like Bruce Lee (李小龍), who played the original sidekick, Chinese actors always come back to Asia.
At the same screening, younger sister Little S (小S) — real name Dee Hsu (徐熙娣) — giggled that she would bare her breasts for Wang, a less-than-subtle hint that she wants to star in one of the director’s movies.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
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