As dull as it may sound, marriage is the keyword in this week’s gossip rags, as a bevy of female stars are rumored to be either getting engaged or are ready to enter a state of matrimony. The one that sounds most genuine involves celebrity sweetheart Patty Hou (侯佩岑), who has not been coy about gossip journos’ inquiries about her engagement party last Friday.
The paparazzi from Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) and Apple Daily quickly published reports profiling Hou’s fiance; on Wednesday. His name is Ken Huang (黃伯俊). He is 35 years old, resembles Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) slightly and makes an annual income of more than NT$12 million at Citigroup Global Markets Inc. However, the two rival newspapers have yet to agree on whether or not the man in question is an heir to family assets worth tens of billions of NT dollars. A positive answer will definitely make the modern-day fairy tale more dreamy: A beautiful woman lives happily ever after with her prince charming and his moneybags
Gossip hounds should already know about the three-carat engagement ring that Huang gave to Hou after they had been seeing each other for just four months, as well as Huang’s rumored romance with actress Ruby Lin (林心如).
Apart from the report of the Huang-Hou pairing, other nuptial news flashes have been rigorously denied by the parties involved. Did Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) become engaged to her German architect boyfriend Ole Scheeren on Christmas Eve? The 45-year-old actress’s agent says no. But gossip insiders assert the couple will get hitched soon.
How about the engagement party celebrating the union of veteran belle Rosamund Kwan (關之琳) of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s IT tycoon Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) held last Saturday? Never happened? And anyway, Chen was still married last time local paparazzi checked. As for Hong Kong’s former diva Cherie Chung (鍾楚紅), the 49-year-old widow personally denied the speculation about her upcoming wedding with a certain wealthy businessman from Singapore.
While Hou has found her Mr Right, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) is getting cozy with fast-rising model Godfrey Kao (高以翔), whose previous claim to fame was his pair of delectable pinkish nipples, which he flagrantly exposed in his photo book. It’s only a matter of time before intimate comparisons will be made between Kao and Tsai’s old flame Jay Chou (周杰倫).
So what is the Mando-pop king, self-made film director and occasional actor doing with his love life? Not much. Unless you count the banter and teasing exchanges between him and supermodel-turned-actress Lin Chi-ling (林志玲) during the promotions for the fantasy adventure The Treasure Hunter (刺陵).
The way Pop Stop sees it, the real-life flirting between the two is more convincing that the on-screen romance that they share in the movie, which was killed by the embarrassingly coy lines and dumb jokes that filled the clunky script.
Finally, model-turned-housewife Hung Hsiao-lei (洪曉蕾) and her CEO-husband Wang Shih-chun (王世均) offer an example of a dreamy celebrity marriage gone sour. An outburst of violence erupted on Christmas Eve when a young man accidentally bumped into an inebriated Wang at a Cash Box KTV (錢櫃) outlet. According to a witness, Wang then beat the man to the ground with a beer can and kicked one of the man’s female friends in the head while shouting “don’t you know who I am.” Wang apologized afterwards and no charges were brought against him.
One month earlier, a widely circulated rumor claimed that there had been incidents of spousal abuse between the model couple, though both parties have denied the accusation.
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
It is jarring how differently Taiwan’s politics is portrayed in the international press compared to the local Chinese-language press. Viewed from abroad, Taiwan is seen as a geopolitical hotspot, or “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” as the Economist once blazoned across their cover. Meanwhile, tasked with facing down those existential threats, Taiwan’s leaders are dying their hair pink. These include former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among others. They are demonstrating what big fans they are of South Korean K-pop sensations Blackpink ahead of their concerts this weekend in Kaohsiung.
Taiwan is one of the world’s greatest per-capita consumers of seafood. Whereas the average human is thought to eat around 20kg of seafood per year, each Taiwanese gets through 27kg to 35kg of ocean delicacies annually, depending on which source you find most credible. Given the ubiquity of dishes like oyster omelet (蚵仔煎) and milkfish soup (虱目魚湯), the higher estimate may well be correct. By global standards, let alone local consumption patterns, I’m not much of a seafood fan. It’s not just a matter of taste, although that’s part of it. What I’ve read about the environmental impact of the
Oct 20 to Oct 26 After a day of fighting, the Japanese Army’s Second Division was resting when a curious delegation of two Scotsmen and 19 Taiwanese approached their camp. It was Oct. 20, 1895, and the troops had reached Taiye Village (太爺庄) in today’s Hunei District (湖內), Kaohsiung, just 10km away from their final target of Tainan. Led by Presbyterian missionaries Thomas Barclay and Duncan Ferguson, the group informed the Japanese that resistance leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) had fled to China the previous night, leaving his Black Flag Army fighters behind and the city in chaos. On behalf of the
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