Awards ceremonies in Taiwan — whether of the beauty pageant, music, television or film variety — are generally occasions for jealousy, name-calling and all around caterwauling. So it was with some surprise that there was little controversy reported at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (金馬獎), presented on Saturday night. The awards are considered the Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars.
Taiwan’s Leon Dai (戴立忍), who garnered five awards for his No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (不能沒有你), a black-and-white film about a father down on his luck who struggles to retain custody of his daughter, was the biggest news.
More important for gossip observers, however, was the hug Dai gave actress Guey Lun-mei (桂綸鎂), when she presented him with the award for Best Screenplay.
Dai, 43, and Guey, 26, have been rumored to be lovers for years, but kept their relationship under wraps. Under the microscopic scrutiny of gossip rags, a hug comes with a lot of significance (or at least a pretext for reporters to write whatever they want).
So tongues started wagging on Saturday night when the two embraced — for the first time in public, reported the Apple Daily.
As Dai walked off stage, one wag asked about the hug. “Especially warm (特別溫暖),” he replied. Which logically, for this paparazzo, led to a question about marriage. Dai responded with a shrug and a laugh.
The Liberty Times speculated that the age difference between the two celebs prevents them from going public with the relationship.
And speaking of leaps of logic, Apple was making a few of its own when it snapped pictures of sometimes-entertainer Allen Chao (趙樹海) and model Sonia Sui (隋棠) having dinner, in a report which suggested that the Chao is keeping love in the family.
Chao is the father of Mark Chao (趙又廷), who stars with Sui in the cop drama Black & White (痞子英雄). The two young actors have filmed a couple of love scenes together.
When asked if Chao knew that Sui was dating actor Yao Yuan-hao (姚元浩), he angrily responded,“Whether or not she has a boyfriend, it’s not my business. I’m her elder.” To which Sui added, “He is my father and I am his daughter.”
Meanwhile, netizens are giving TV host and pop singer Pauline Lan (藍心湄) a hard time, according to an Apple report. And it’s not over the 45-year-old’s notorious affairs with younger men. They claim that the outfit Lan wore for a photo shoot shown on TVBS and published in the Apple Daily was nearly identical to the mostly see-through costume worn by Britney Spears in her video Toxic.
But Lan’s “outfit,” which consists of a few strategically placed crystals, in the snaps — which look like the product of an epic Photoshop session — makes Britney’s Toxic duds look practically Amish by comparison.
“I just want to show audiences what the body of a 45-year-old woman looks like,” she said. “Are my breasts okay?”
Further up the cup-size alphabet, television host Chen Jin-pei (陳今佩) has lost 39kg in the past two years (and went from an H cup to an E). The 58 year-old, known in the entertainment world as the “Great White Shark” (大白鯊), told reporters that she trimmed down for a love interest in China.
Pop Stop wonders if Chen will take a leaf out of Taiwanese actress Vivian Hsu (徐若瑄) flab-fight book.
While on the set of the film Hot Summer Days (全城熱戀), which is set to hit theaters in February, Hsu found a way to rid herself of the copious amounts of sushi she was forced to eat for her role as a love-struck heiress, reported Sina.com.
“I didn’t want to gain weight. So when the director stopped filming, I’d throw up the sushi,” she said.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
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
Jan. 12 to Jan. 18 At the start of an Indigenous heritage tour of Beitou District (北投) in Taipei, I was handed a sheet of paper titled Ritual Song for the Various Peoples of Tamsui (淡水各社祭祀歌). The lyrics were in Chinese with no literal meaning, accompanied by romanized pronunciation that sounded closer to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) than any Indigenous language. The translation explained that the song offered food and drink to one’s ancestors and wished for a bountiful harvest and deer hunting season. The program moved through sites related to the Ketagalan, a collective term for the
RSS