Karen Mok (莫文蔚) was aglow last weekend at the Golden Melody Awards, and it wasn’t just because she won the Best Female Mandarin Singer award for the second time in her career.
In her acceptance speech on Saturday last week in Taipei, the 41-year-old singer and actress surprised the audience by announcing that she is planning to marry her “first love.”
“I want to celebrate well and the best way to celebrate is to get married ... I want to share my happiness with you all,” Agence France-Presse quoted her as saying.
Photo: Taipei Times
As Mok told reporters at a post-awards party, she first met her fiance, who has only been identified as a German national named “Johannes” in the gossip press, when she was 17. Johannes was her first boyfriend and the two met while studying at university in Italy.
They went out for a year until she broke up with him out of fear that “he would fall in love with his junior female students,” Channel News Asia quoted her as saying.
Mok also laughed off rumors that their breakup occurred because Johannes was gay, according to the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper).
Johannes has three children from a previous marriage; Mok has been romantically linked in the past to Hong Kong comedian Stephen Chow (周星馳) and actor and director Stephen Fung (馮德倫).
Mok says she and Johannes rekindled the flame two years ago, and that she was “happy to be a stepmother” to Johannes’ three children, who are “like friends.” The newlyweds-to-be are planning to hold their wedding in Florence, Italy, in October.
With all of the talk about love and marriage at the awards ceremony, the Liberty Times couldn’t help but linger over comments by another Golden Melody winner, Jay Chou (周杰倫).
The Chairman, who nabbed this year’s Best Male Mandarin Singer and Best Mandarin Album awards, said after the ceremony that when it comes to love, he was a “piece of driftwood floating in a vast sea” and that he hoped to get married within three years.
Chou kept mum about his current love life, but said that if he were to get married, he would announce it with the same fanfare Karen Mok did. He added that he would also obey his mother’s orders: “[She] said if you get married, don’t get divorced.”
The Mama’s boy then listed his prerequisites for a potential partner: “We have to get along, she has to accept that I will be the subject of many rumors regarding marriage, and most importantly, she has to be a fan of my music.”
Here’s a new twist to the marital fallout between Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒): Cheung is rumored to be two months pregnant, according to the Chinese gossip rag SE Weekly (南都娛樂).
Cheung and Tse’s souring marriage came to light several months ago after the so-called “airplane incident” (機上事件), in which Cheung was photographed with her ex-lover Edison Chen (陳冠希). The incident has reportedly sparked a spat in which the two have threatened each other with divorce.
Now Tse has changed his mind and wants to reconcile in light of the pregnancy, the SE Weekly reported.
But it’s hard to tell with Tse and Cheung, who have kept gossip media guessing. Tse has remained silent throughout the debacle as he continues to shoot an action movie in Malaysia, while rumors have been flying over the whereabouts of Cheung, who has been ducking the media spotlight. The Apple Daily reported that Cheung had planned to take their two children to Milan, Italy, to keep them away from Tse’s family, particularly Tse’s mother Deborah Lee (狄波拉), who is said to be a source of friction in the marriage.
Cheung was finally spotted in public on Tuesday by Hong Kong’s Orient Daily (東方日報), which published photos of the actress-singer with two children at a playground in Hong Kong. When asked for comment by reporters, she only replied with a slight smile, “I will not respond to untrue reports,” according to the United Daily News.
Meanwhile, TV heartthrob and pop star Wu Chun (吳尊) made headlines this week by quitting the popular boy band Fahrenheit (飛輪海). The Brunei-born Wu is leaving the band to pursue an acting career, but the group will continue with its three remaining members, according to a statement from Fahrenheit’s record company Him (華研唱片).
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