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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless