’Tis the season for celebrity weddings, as well as their trials and tribulations.
The media have been salivating at any sign of acrimony in the matrimony of recently married Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S) and Chinese restaurateur Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲). Earlier this week, the China Times reported that Wang’s former girlfriend Kitty Zhang (張雨綺) was still bitter over losing her billionaire beau to Big S.
Zhang supposedly has a new paramour, Chinese director Wang Quanan (王全安), and the two reportedly have plans to marry. But the China Times played up the fact that Zhang and Wang Xiaofei “remain in constant contact,” and in the headline to its report, implied that the former lovers still had feelings for each other by using the Chinese idiom, “The lotus root breaks but its fibers remain joined together (藕斷絲連).”
Photo: Taipei Times
For good measure, the China Times included a comment from Big S’ mother, Chin Shih-chen (金世珍), who was not amused. She responded coolly, “[Big S] is very clear about what’s going on with the person she loves. I too am very clear about the behavior of Xiaofei ... With regard to everyone’s respective marriages and how they spend their days, I ask everyone to please just wish each other well.”
Another set of newlyweds, newscaster-turned-TV celebrity Patty Hou (侯佩岑) and her banker husband Ken Huang (黃伯俊), returned to Taiwan after their wedding in Bali, Indonesia, last week only to be faced with a convoluted media hullabaloo over the former’s mother, Lin Yueh-yun (林月雲).
Lin, a well-known actress in the 1970s, caused somewhat of a stir by showing up at the wedding with her partner, construction magnate Chiu Chia-hsiung (邱嘉雄), who escorted Hou down the aisle for the ceremony.
The problem in the eyes of the Taiwanese press? Lin and Chiu’s 29-year relationship began as an extramarital affair, and to this day Chiu has yet to officially divorce his wife. At the wedding, Lin gave an interview in which she apologized to Chiu’s family for “interfering” in their marriage.
It hasn’t helped Lin that she was previously involved in a highly publicized affair with another married man, the late TV presenter Hou Shih-hong (侯世宏), Patty Hou’s father. And since being linked with Chiu, Lin has never been able to shake off the label given to her by the Taiwanese media as a “home wrecker” (xiaosan (小三), or “third party”).
The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) took an interest in how Hou’s mother offended the social mores of gossip-loving netizens, noting that “Internet fans’ image of the ‘perfect goddess’ has been cracked.” But Pop Stop thinks the fuss will die down — after all, Lin and Chiu’s relationship has been public knowledge since 2004.
As for Patty Hou, she acknowledged the matter in a television interview at the beginning of the week. “I don’t wish to trouble our elders,” she said. “A person’s life is a generation long, the news is just a momentary thing.”
Perhaps this is advice Singaporean pop diva Stefanie Sun (孫燕姿) should heed. Sun, who’s tying the knot on May 8, told reporters on a recent visit to Taiwan that while she was excited about her big day, preparing for her wedding has been “troublesome,” according to channelnewsasia.com. “I should have eloped,” she joked.
Pop Stop closes on a more savory note. Guests attending the May 7 wedding of TV entertainer Charles Chen (陳建州, better known as Blackie, 黑人) and singer-actress Christine Fan (范瑋琪) can expect a non-traditional dish at the banquet: beef noodles.
Channelnewsasia.com reports that the couple chose the dish to commemorate Chen’s father, a China Airlines crewmember who died in an air accident. The younger Chen holds fond memories of often sharing meals of beef noodles at the staff cafeteria in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, Fan wrote in a microblog post.
But Chen and Fan won’t be serving your run-of-the-mill beef noodles: Each guest will receive a bowl, worth NT$580 each, with high quality beef and tendon imported from the US, soaked in a stock that will have stewed for 10 hours.
This is the year that the demographic crisis will begin to impact people’s lives. This will create pressures on treatment and hiring of foreigners. Regardless of whatever technological breakthroughs happen, the real value will come from digesting and productively applying existing technologies in new and creative ways. INTRODUCING BASIC SERVICES BREAKDOWNS At some point soon, we will begin to witness a breakdown in basic services. Initially, it will be limited and sporadic, but the frequency and newsworthiness of the incidents will only continue to accelerate dramatically in the coming years. Here in central Taiwan, many basic services are severely understaffed, and
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 is a soulful folk song, filled with feeling and history: A love-stricken young man tells God about his hopes and dreams of happiness. Generations of Uighurs, the Turkic ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang region, have played it at parties and weddings. But today, if they download it, play it or share it online, they risk ending up in prison. Besh pede, a popular Uighur folk ballad, is among dozens of Uighur-language songs that have been deemed “problematic” by Xinjiang authorities, according to a recording of a meeting held by police and other local officials in the historic city of Kashgar in
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.
RSS