The lavish press coverage of Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S) and Chinese restaurateur Wang Xiaofei’s (汪小菲) wedding on China’s Hainan Island on Tuesday last week quickly degenerated into finger-pointing and bitter obloquies this week.
Taiwanese media were up in arms because CEO of Chinese news portal Sohu.com, Zhang Chaoyang (張朝陽), who attended the nuptials as an invited guest, reported live from inside the event while other journalists had to brave scorching sun and mosquitoes to snap blurry photographs as they were cordoned off some distance away from the luxurious ceremony.
Having become the subject of fevered gossip since her engagement to multimillionaire Wang in October, Big S repeatedly said she wanted a “low-key” wedding, which meant no paparazzi. But since the wedding’s date and location were no secret, more than 100 reporters from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China assembled at the city of Sanya on Hainan Island to cover the ceremony.
Complaints from members of the media started when 50 security guards and police officers cleared the way for the couple’s guests to arrive on a charted flight.
Left waiting in vain outside the closely guarded beach resort where the ceremony took place, gossip hounds from the Apply Daily intrepidly traversed a foul-smelling junkyard and forest to find a spot from which to observe the ceremony through their telephoto lenses.
Wang’s mother, businesswoman Zhang Lan (張蘭), gave journalists NT$14 lunch boxes which, when compared with the swanky banquet enjoyed by the rich and the famous, seemed like handouts for “refugees,” quipped the Apple Daily.
At around 7pm, the bride’s sister, Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, aka Little S), and close friends Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), Christine Fan (范瑋琪) and Charles Chen (陳建州, better known as Blackie) were sent out for an interview session and tried to pacify the assembled media with witty words and jokes.
But the meeting soon descended into acrimony when the crowd of impatient reporters, who were told that Big S would show up at the interview but were then stood up, started hurling profanities.
At around 5pm — about five hours after the ceremony began — the bride supplied two photos of the wedding that did not even show the groom’s face clearly. The last straw was the online live report by Zhang, the groom’s friend-turned-enemy.
A journo from the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) concluded that that the whole experience was that of a “disaster” and that the treatment she received was “only slightly better than in disaster areas.”
Two days after the media fiasco, the newlyweds attempted to make good by threatening to take the matter to court if Zhang did not issue a public apology for invading their privacy. The CEO, however, refused, saying he had posted photographs of the wedding on Sohu’s microblog at t.sina.com.cn, the Twitter of the Chinese-speaking world, with the “acknowledgement of the groom’s family,” and put away his camera after being told to do so later in the evening.
Meanwhile, actress Kelly Lin (林熙蕾) tied the knot with entrepreneur Chris Young (楊晨) in the Maldives on Monday. Apple Daily paparazzi crashed the beach wedding, which was attended by 30 family members and close friends, but were greeted by the 37-year-old actress and her 39-year-old husband with smiles and a short interview.
Comparing Lin’s intimate nuptials with Big S’ extravagance, which was attended by some 300 guests on the bride’s side alone, the Chinese-language media said Big S has a lot to learn from Lin when it comes to holding a real “low-key” wedding.
The breakwater stretches out to sea from the sprawling Kaohsiung port in southern Taiwan. Normally, it’s crowded with massive tankers ferrying liquefied natural gas from Qatar to be stored in the bulbous white tanks that dot the shoreline. These are not normal times, though, and not a single shipment from Qatar has docked at the Yongan terminal since early March after the Strait of Hormuz was shuttered. The suspension has provided a realistic preview of a potential Chinese blockade, a move that would throttle an economy anchored by the world’s most advanced and power-hungry semiconductor industry. It is a stark reminder of
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS