It’s not even April, and 2011 is already shaping up to be a bumper year of celebrity nuptials. The Apple Daily reported that more than 20 celebrity couples will tie the knot this year, which the gossip rag has dubbed a “Hundred Years of Good Fortune” (百年好合) in a nod to the ROC’s 100th birthday.
Singer and actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S) and Chinese restaurateur Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲) will say their vows (for the second time) later this month, this time on Hainan Island; Patty Hou (侯佩岑) and Ken Huang (黃伯俊) will head to Bali next month to tie the knot; and singer Christine Fan (范瑋琪) will make an honest man of entertainer Charles Chen (陳建州, better known as Blackie) in May, and in the same month infamous cram school owner Kao Kuo-hua (高國華) and Chen Tsu-hsuan (陳子璇) will get hitched.
A Yahoo poll asked Netizens: “Whose wedding would you want to attend?” Even though they’ve yet to set a date, pop singer Selina Jen (任家萱) and fiance Richard Chang (張承中) came out top.
Photo: Taipei Times
Not to worry, there are plenty more fish in the celebrity sea, and a few mollusks too.
One star who might have difficulty finding a marriage partner is singer Show Luo (羅志祥, also known as Alan Luo).
“Whenever I’ve brought my girlfriend home in the past, my mom would intentionally let the dog out to go to the toilet,” he was quoted as saying in a report by the China Times. “Then, mom would watch to see if the girl would voluntarily help clean up after the dog. It was a test to see whether or not she loves animals.”
If cleaning up animal droppings is a sign of love, it might be a while yet before Luo gets hitched.
Then again, a love of animals doesn’t necessarily equate to loyalty in a relationship. The one ex who “passed” Luo’s mother’s test was later caught cheating on him.
In other romance news, Jolin Tsai’s (蔡依林) relationship with Vivian Dawson seems to be cooling off amid rumors that the New Zealand hunk is an inconsiderate creep. At a promotional event earlier this week, Dawson remained tight-lipped when asked about his relationship with Taiwan’s queen of pop.
What would he give his love on Valentine’s Day, asked the assembled gossip hounds? He lamely responded that the present would be the beauty products he was plugging. His manager later told the media that the pair were just friends.
If Dawson’s romance is on the rocks, he can at least take comfort in his earning power, which has gone from NT$10,000 per appearance to NT$100,000. But will a breakup mean a smaller paycheck? Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, NOWnews revealed that manly singers Jam Hsiao (蕭敬騰) and JJ Lin (林俊傑) are an item after they were spotted having dinner together. This followed a series of flirtatious posts on their microblogs.
“I want to eat JJ,” (我要去吃JJ了) Hsiao wrote.
One “shocked” fan wrote: “He came out.”
Lin, who the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reports is a devout Christian, wrote that if Hsiao was hungry, “I’d better put some more sauce on me. Otherwise he’ll only be able to taste my sweat.”
Yum-yum.
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
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
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
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