Jay Chou (周杰倫) congratulated ex-girlfriend Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) on her “foreign affair” when she was first linked to mixed-race model Vivian Dawson (錦榮) several months ago. Now gossip rags are buzzing that Chou may have a hapa love of his own.
According to Next Magazine (壹週刊), the Godfather, 32, is dating model Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌), who is just 17 years old and of Taiwanese and Australian parentage. A late-night date last month at a nightclub supposedly resulted in the underage Quinlivan breaking “the Cinderella law,” which bans minors from nightclubs after midnight. Her manager denied that the two are romantically involved.
Chou’s love life is competing for media attention with the upcoming wedding banquet of Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S) and Chinese multimillionaire Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲), even though the two eloped back in November.
Photo: Taipei times
The couple arrived in Taipei last week and were immediately set upon by paparazzi at the airport. The media also caught up with the newlyweds when they went out for a Valentine’s Day eve dinner with Barbie’s sister Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, aka Little S), Dee’s husband, the sisters’ mom and family friends including model Makiyo Kawashima.
As soon as Wang saw the crowd of photographers, he took cover behind his wife like a “little man” (小男人), chortled The Apple Daily (蘋果日報).
According to rumors, the Wang-Hsu banquet will take place on China’s Hainan Island, but Mama Hsu wasn’t giving anything away when asked to confirm the location. With a Mona Lisa smile, she said only that an announcement would be made later.
The establishment where the Hsu family ate, Kitcho (吉兆割烹壽司) on Zhongxiao East Road Section 4 in Taipei, must have bad luck with tipsters or an overeager publicist.
The Japanese restaurant was the scene of another celebrity ambush earlier when moneybags Winston Wang (王文洋) dined there with his family.
The outing gave the world its first peek at Wang’s granddaughter Elizabeth Wang (王思涵). The baby’s parents are Winston Wang Junior (王泉仁) and wife Lee Ching-ching (李晶晶).
Once tipped as the most likely successor to the Formosa Plastics (台灣塑膠公司) empire, Wang senior is now the chairman of the Grace T.H.W. Group (宏仁集團). He is probably just as famous for being involved in a string of political and personal scandals, not the least of which was siring a now-teenaged son, Wang Chuan-li (王泉力), with his much younger lover, Annie Lu (呂安妮). Wang senior bought a television station last year, sparking rumors that he is preparing to run in the 2012 presidential election.
Despite being just eight months old, little Elizabeth is already being put under the same microscope as the rest of her family. She might want to call Suri Cruise or the Pitt-Jolie brood for media management pointers. The Apple Daily decided that Elizabeth gets her eyes from her mother, but the shape of her mouth and forehead are just like her dad’s. The newspaper included a handy chart containing all the information you need to know about Elizabeth, including that she was delivered by Caesarean section.
Pop Stop readers may remember the marriage in November of actor Ku Han-yun (顧瀚畇), better known as A-tan (阿丹), to businesswoman and footwear fortune heiress Carol Wang (王曉萍).
Ku was roundly mocked in the press for being a gold digger, especially since his reputation as a small-time Lothario best known for flings with several female stars superseded his acting resume. At the time, Ku announced that he planned to retire from show business and work for his wife’s company as a fashion buyer.
The couple have kept a low profile since the nuptials, but our sister newspaper, the Liberty Times, spotted them at the Breeze Center in Taipei last week. The high-heel loving Wang sported a demure pair of flats and a tiny belly pudge, leading the reporter to speculate that she was pregnant.
Spawning or not, Wang was doted over by her husband, who fed her spaghetti at an Italian restaurant and accompanied her as she went window shopping at several designer boutiques. At the end of their outing, the couple were spirited away in a chauffeured car to their luxury apartment in Xinyi District.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and