Pop Stop begins this week with a warning to all Taiwanese celebrities heading to China: Don’t expect the personal details on your visa application to stay personal. This is what the notoriously private Jerry Yan (言承旭), of boy band F4, discovered a few days back.
Yan, unlike many in Taiwan’s celebrity firmament, maintains a strict code of secrecy regarding his family, which includes concealing the identity of his mother and sister. Apparently his mother’s neighbors don’t even know Yan is her son. He has never been photographed at his residence and his home address is kept secret from his colleagues.
But all that will probably change after his visa application — which included his flight number, passport photo and residential address — was leaked to the public, according to the Apple Daily.
Photo: Taipei Times
Stepping off an airplane in Shanghai to a crowd of screaming fans earlier this week, a visibly surprised Yan wondered aloud how fans knew about his arrival. Though clearly miffed by the exposure, Yan was still gracious enough to sign autographs for the assembled fans.
One celebrity whose family isn’t afraid of the spotlight is Selina Jen’s (任家萱). The starlet’s father, Jen Ming-ting (任明廷), dubbed “Father Jen” by the media, regularly comments on his daughter’s struggles to overcome serious burns incurred in an accident while filming a commercial in China last year.
The United Daily News recently reported that Jen’s hair is growing back, quoting her as saying every bit of growth reminds her of the pain she’s been through. Rumor has it that she will release an EP containing three new tracks and publish a book about her recovery process in October.
It seems as though publishing a memoir has become de rigueur among Taiwan’s celebrity firmament. Calvin Chen (辰亦儒) of boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海) launched Journey Backwards: Calvin Chen’s Vancouver Foreign Study Diary on Monday, and judging by the title, it may be of use to those suffering from insomnia.
Pop Stop would prefer a tell-all memoir by shutterbug Edison Chen (陳冠希), complete with pictures. And on the topic of Chen, a report published earlier this month in Apple Daily saying Chen and old flame Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) sat next to each other on a flight to Hong Kong continues to make headlines.
Chen, as if you needed reminding, left the entertainment biz in 2008 after explicit photos of him and several starlets, including Cheung, were stolen from his computer and posted on the Internet. He has gradually made a comeback over the past year but reportedly remained on bad terms with Cheung — until the “Airplane Incident” (機上事件), as Apple is now calling it.
At first, Cheung denied the report.
Chen confirmed it, however, stating that he had used his mobile phone to photograph himself with the Hong Kong beauty. But then Cheung’s father-in-law Patrick Tse (謝賢) refuted it again, asking, “Where’s the proof?” On Monday, Cheung’s manager basically admitted the meeting had taken place when he said it was only polite to acknowledge “someone you know on a flight.”
When Cheung was spotted at Taipei’s Xinyi Eslite on Wednesday shopping for her 31st birthday, her son Lucas in tow, the media, fixated as always, almost caused a riot trying to ask her if the “incident” was true. “Today is my birthday,” she said. “I don’t want to think about that.” Cheung was eventually escorted away by security.
Though Chen isn’t writing his memoirs — yet — he is in the process of penning a musical. Asked if he plans to include the sex scandal in the musical, he responded, “It’s not done yet,” leaving the paparazzi to wonder if he meant his sexual escapades or the script.
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
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The first Monopoly set I ever owned was the one everyone had — the classic edition with Mr Monopoly on the box. I bought it as a souvenir on holiday in my 30s. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got thousands of boxes stacked away in a warehouse, four Guinness World Records and have made several TV appearances. When Guinness visited my warehouse last year, they spent a whole day counting my collection. By the end, they confirmed I had 4,379 different sets. That was the fourth time I’d broken the record. There are many variants of Monopoly, and countries and businesses are constantly
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