Pneumatic media personality Yaoyao (瑤瑤), real name Kuo Shu-yao (郭書瑤), is climbing off the DD-list with her best-selling new album — but her ascendance in the charts has reportedly reduced one pop rival to tears and another to a hissy fit.
Singer Angela Chang (張韶涵) burst into tears at a recent press event, which our sister paper The Liberty Times attributed to the fact that her latest album, 5th Season (第五季), has been superseded by Yaoyao’s Hug of Love: Farewell to 18 (愛的抱抱:告別18歲) in Taiwan’s music charts.
To be fair, Chang has plenty of reasons to cry that have nothing to do with her rival, who was previously best known for riding a mechanical horse braless in a commercial. The pop star and actress is in the midst of a well-publicized feud with her mother and father, who say she is a negligent daughter and left them mired in poverty even as she enjoys the limelight. Chang, on the other hand, accuses her parents of mismanaging her earnings.
Since news of the family scandal broke last month, Chang has pleaded with the media to leave the matter alone and refused to answer further questions. Last weekend marked her return to the public eye after keeping a low profile for nearly a year and a half, with a performance and autograph signing session to promote 5th Season.
Unfortunately, Chang started sniveling after just two songs. Afterwards she denied that Yaoyao’s dominance in the charts had caused the tears, and said she was just touched by the continuing support and affection of her fans.
“It’s been 10 years since I was first signed to a record label. I care less about sales numbers than the affirmation of my fans,” Chang said.
“If there is a talented new singer out there, people should support him or her,” she added.
Fellow pop singer Peter Pan (潘裕文), however, was less gracious. The singer’s latest album, Dreamer (夢.想.家), received good reviews, but has lagged in the charts. His record label issued a pouty statement after the numbers were in, bemoaning the fact that there is no accounting for taste among listeners. Pan himself sarcastically asked fans for a “loving hug,” a play on the title of Yaoyao’s album. Yaoyao’s own label called the kvetching “pointless.”
“Everyone thinks they are number one, so why don’t they just proclaim themselves number one?” it said in a statement.
While Yaoyao’s album topped Taiwan’s two major music charts, Penny Lin’s (林韋君) twin peaks were getting some attention of their own. Next Magazine worked itself into a lather over its beachside photo shoot with the model and soap actress. The gossip rag gloried in the fact that Lin had insisted on going surfing even though the photographer said the waves were too rough; celebrated when the stick-on bra Lin was wearing underneath her bikini top fell into the ocean; panted as said top rolled upwards and Lin’s right breast was nearly exposed; and muffled its regret when Lin modestly held the surfboard in front of her chest.
The rest of Next Magazine’s fluff piece reported that Lin, who split with her boyfriend three months ago, was spotted in a tete-a-tete with actor Wallace Huo (霍建華) at a nightclub. Lin insisted that Huo “just came by to say hi,” though he clearly had more than that to say, because the chat lasted for three hours.
Hopefully Lin will have more luck in love than fellow actress and model Kelly Lin (林熙蕾, no relation), who recently split from her fiance, singer and actor Ken Zhu (朱孝天). The break-up came several days after the duo announced they were delaying their wedding and just a few months after Lin and Zhu finally went public with their four-year relationship. Various media reports said that Lin was unhappy with Zhu’s income and stalling career. The actor is currently appearing on MoMo Love (桃花小妹). Lin thought the TV series would turn her fiance’s life around. But instead, he has allegedly fought with crewmembers and showed up to work hungover.
Reports of Zhu partying in nightclubs while filming in Taichung were allegedly the final straw for Lin. The couple met in 2005 when Zhu was at his peak, starring in hit series Meteor Garden (流星花園) and performing with popular boy band F4. “She had no idea Zhu would so quickly burst into fatness, become stagnated in his career and find less and less work, while her own light grew brighter,” The Liberty Times tartly wrote.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
Apr. 13 to Apr. 19 From 17th-century royalty and Presbyterian missionaries to White Terror victims, cultural figures and industrialists, Nanshan Public Cemetery (南山公墓) sprawls across 95 hectares, guarding four centuries of Taiwan’s history. Current estimates show more than 60,000 graves, the earliest dating to 1642. Besides individual tombs, there are also hundreds of family plots, one of which is said to contain around 1,000 remains. As the cemetery occupies valuable land in the heart of Tainan, the government in 2018 began asking families to relocate the graves to make way for development. That
RSS