Does Jay Chou (周杰倫) have a new squeeze? The superstar and his mom were recently spotted dining with a young woman, with tabloids reporting that the pretty lady grabbed food for the King of Mando-pop with her chopsticks.
The Chairman quickly dismissed the rumors, joking at a press conference that it’s been so long since he’s had a girlfriend that the media freaks out if they see an attractive female in his vicinity.
Gossip rags identified the woman in question as model Connie Luo (羅康妮), who quickly found herself under a microscope. The Apple Daily reported that although Luo’s manager says she was born in 1985, Luo herself told the newspaper 1984. The confusion was compounded when a former classmate declared online that not only is Luo practically an old maid at 28, but also wore braces in school. The horror!
Photo: Taipei times
Pop singer Huang Kuo-lun (黃國倫) and wife Nancy Kou (寇乃馨) also found themselves picked over by the media last week when they were accused of turning their wedding banquet into an over-the-top money-making venture.
The Liberty Times (The Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported that even before the banquet, Kou had earned the sobriquet “the queen of cash grabbing.” With an “astonishing head for business,” the TV host sent out 900 invitations and “worked her connections” to make sure that 50 of those went to business tycoons like Terry Gou (郭台銘).
But even with Gou’s reported gift of NT$200,000 (US$6,700), the duo finished up in the red — and that doesn’t mean swimming in red envelopes (紅包). The Apple Daily reports that the two expected to reap NT$5,000,000 in gift money, but only received NT$3,500,000. They reportedly spent NT$7,000,000 on the lavish event, which included a concert.
The two married in a quiet ceremony in Jerusalem earlier this year, but the Liberty Times says their greed took off as soon as they started planning their Taiwan banquet. Huang and Kou asked companies to provide them with free xibing (喜餅, traditional wedding treats), gowns, jewelry and transportation.
Perhaps in a bid to deflect attention from the stories that painted them as skinflints, Huang and Kou donated NT$1,000,000 to a child welfare organization immediately after their banquet.
The couple should have brushed the money signs from their eyes and paid more attention to their seating charts. Media reports said that awkwardness ensued when model and TV host Amber Ann (安心亞, real name Liao Ching-ling, 廖婧伶) was seated at the same table as not one, but two men she had been romantically linked with. One was actor Ken Lin (林暐恆) and the other was producer Chen Chih-hung (陳志鴻).
Ann and Lin were spotted on vacation together in Japan this spring, but Lin reportedly dumped Ann in October, breaking her heart and leading her to take a one-month leave of absence from her hosting duties. Ann and Chen were also linked, but she denied the rumors, saying their age difference was too great for a romantic relationship.
The Liberty Times reported that “Ah-Ken” (阿Ken) spent the evening joking loudly while Ann conspicuously ignored him, fiddling with her cellphone and downing red wine.
Actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, otherwise known as Big S) and 29-year-old Chinese restaurateur and multimillionaire Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲) have been bathed in the glow of new love since their own secret wedding last month. Crew members on Hsu’s new film, however, aren’t benefiting from her marital bliss. Hsu has reportedly been showing up late — when she shows up at all — to the set of My Kingdom (大武生), which is currently shooting in Shanghai. Reports say her flakiness has slowed production, but Big S is supposedly too busy “cooking” for Wang in their hotel room.
Director Gao Xiaosong (高曉松) laughed off the gossip as “too gossipy” (太八卦).
“What a story. We rest when we need to and we work when we are supposed to. [Our shooting schedule] has nothing to do with anyone’s cooking or romancing,” he told reporters.
Jan. 5 to Jan. 11 Of the more than 3,000km of sugar railway that once criss-crossed central and southern Taiwan, just 16.1km remain in operation today. By the time Dafydd Fell began photographing the network in earnest in 1994, it was already well past its heyday. The system had been significantly cut back, leaving behind abandoned stations, rusting rolling stock and crumbling facilities. This reduction continued during the five years of his documentation, adding urgency to his task. As passenger services had already ceased by then, Fell had to wait for the sugarcane harvest season each year, which typically ran from
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
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