In fairy tales, prince and princess live happily ever after. In real life, the happy days rarely last a lifetime, and in the case of Winston Wang Junior (王泉仁) and Lee Ching-ching (李晶晶), they last about a year and a half.
Next Magazine dropped a bombshell this week when it reported that Wang Junior, the son of tycoon Winston Wang (王文洋), and Lee, a transportation fortune heiress, have separated after 18 months of marriage. The husband is reported to have insisted on a divorce one week after the couple celebrated their baby daughter’s first birthday in June.
Devoted celebrity gossip fans might recall the couple’s nuptials in January last year. The sumptuous ceremony was dubbed “the wedding of the century” by local media as it signaled the union of the empires of Formosa Plastics (台灣塑膠公司) and Capital Bus (首都客運).
Photo: Taipei Times
According to Next Magazine, the reasons for the couple’s split-up are predictable: Both husband and wife are spoiled rich kids, so they refuse to make concessions when disagreements arise and sometimes resort to outbursts of anger. The report also attributes the separation to Wang Junior’s “decisive” temperament when it comes to handling relationships, noting that he and Lee held a lavish engagement party only one month after he dumped model Kelly Po (柏妍安) in 2008.
The reportedly estranged husband and wife have yet to respond to the news.
On a more upbeat note, Mando-pop man-of-war Jay Chou (周杰倫) may face fewer public sneers after his rumored girlfriend Hannah Quinlivan (昆淩) finally celebrated her 18th birthday on Friday last week. Tagged by the press as “the tenderest mixed-blood J-girl” (最嫩混血J女郎) — “J-girl” refers to female stars who have been romantically linked to Chou — the model of Taiwanese and Australian parentage has been hailed as the Chairman’s sweetheart since she was spotted leaving a party at Primo nightclub in Chou’s car in January.
The most up-to-date evidence of the two dating comes from Apple Daily, which reported on Sunday that one of its sources saw the couple strolling the streets of Paris last week. With Quinlivan publicly wishing to spend her birthday in Europe, the pomaceous gossipmonger reckoned the trip was Chou’s birthday gift to his younger girlfriend.
To the delight of local gossip media, Chou never directly denies dating Quinlivan, saying coyly that “I will admit it if you have photographs.”
Also, the 32-year-old Chou’s recent statement about how his mental age makes him more suitable for 18-year-old girls has been taken by gossip journos as confirmation of his rumored cradle-robbery.
The Chairman may be able to learn a lesson or two from senior entertainer Frankie Kao (高凌風). An infamous lothario during his youthful days, the 61-year-old Kao is now trying to win back the heart of 40-year-old wife Chin Yu-chuang (金友莊) after she was rumored to have had an extramarital affair with divorced businessman Chang Chih-chien (張志堅). Chin and Chang were spotted having an intimate moment in a car on Lover’s Day (七夕, aka Chinese Valentine’s Day) earlier this month.
When the news broke, Chin went into hiding for eight days in Kaohsiung. She returned to Taipei on Tuesday and denied having an affair with Chang, but said that her 16-year marriage to Kao has not been a smooth ride.
“He is quite demanding and a male chauvinist,” Chin was quoted as saying. “I’m running out of patience. All I ask for is the right to equality.”
In an attempt to persuade his wife to stay, the former lady’s man has listed eight “wife-loving rules” (愛妻守則) that he promises to follow, including gems like: “Don’t boss others around”; “Don’t think of myself as the most important person in the world”; “Don’t make the wife do things she doesn’t like”; and “The wife is at liberty to hang out with friends.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions