’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.
The depressing numbers continue to pile up, like casualty lists after a lost battle. This week, after the government announced the 19th straight month of population decline, the Ministry of the Interior said that Taiwan is expected to lose 6.67 million workers in two waves of retirement over the next 15 years. According to the Ministry of Labor (MOL), Taiwan has a workforce of 11.6 million (as of July). The over-15 population was 20.244 million last year. EARLY RETIREMENT Early retirement is going to make these waves a tsunami. According to the Directorate General of Budget Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Last week the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced that the legislature would again amend the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to separate fiscal allocations for the three outlying counties of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu from the 19 municipalities on Taiwan proper. The revisions to the act to redistribute the national tax revenues were passed in December last year. Prior to the new law, the central government received 75 percent of tax revenues, while the local governments took 25 percent. The revisions gave the central government 60 percent, and boosted the local government share to 40 percent,
Sept 22 to Sept 28 Hsu Hsih (許石) never forgot the international student gathering he attended in Japan, where participants were asked to sing a folk song from their homeland. When it came to the Taiwanese students, they looked at each other, unable to recall a single tune. Taiwan doesn’t have folk songs, they said. Their classmates were incredulous: “How can that be? How can a place have no folk songs?” The experience deeply embarrassed Hsu, who was studying music. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, he set out to collect the island’s forgotten tunes, from Hoklo (Taiwanese) epics to operatic
RSS