Ever since Edison Chen (陳冠希) was caught three years ago with a computer full of homemade sex photos featuring Hong Kong starlets, the actor-singer has been the gift that just keeps on giving to the showbiz gossip media.
The picture scandal died down but returned recently to haunt Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝), who starred in of one Chen’s hard drive indiscretions. She is now divorcing her husband Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒), thanks in part to a publicized reunion with her erstwhile lover. As Pop Stop readers will recall in the now infamous “airplane incident” from earlier this summer, Cheung was spotted sitting next to Chen on a flight to Hong Kong following a mutual friend’s wedding in Taipei.
Tse was said to be enraged over reports that Cheung and Chen were chatting happily and snapping photos together on the plane. Rumors of marital strife between Tse and Cheung proved to be true with the announcement of their split last week.
Photo: Taipei Times
And now, as if Cheung doesn’t have enough on her plate already, Hong Kong magazine Face is making a fuss over the discovery of an “S&M” video starring the actress. The 39-second clip, made by one of Chen’s friends, videographer Vernie Yeung (楊龍澄), has Cheung dressed in her underwear, tied to a chair and wearing a ball gag.
The video, easily found on Yeung’s Web site, is nothing but a mediocre art house-wannabe piece, but it’s hardly surprising that the media are milking it for all it’s worth. On its cover, Face plastered screen-shots of Cheung from the film with the headline “Cecilia in an S&M movie” (柏芝被虐片). The Apple Daily made light of the fact that the filmmaker was a “close and personal” friend of Edison Chen’s and that the pair were once rumored to be collaborators-in-porn.
Yeung took to his microblog to defend himself and his art, pointing out that the clip, titled Dog Prisoner (狗仔戰俘), was shown at a screening for an audience of 1,000 people five years ago. According to NowNews.com, Yeung defended Cheung, writing that she “was outstanding. Why is there no one praising her for her performance? If you don’t get it, then blame me for doing a bad job of filming it.”
The Apple Daily went on to note that Chen’s sexcapades appear to have cursed the love life of another former “co-star,” Canto-pop singer Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐). According to the paper, Chung announced online that she was still in search of Mr Right and would not rule out a matchmaker. “Right now I’m 30, and I think 35 is the ideal time to get married. If I’m not married by then, 40 is my absolute limit [to wait],” she said.
Singer Jam Hsiao (蕭敬騰) hasn’t had any trouble attracting attention. The Mando-popper, who was in China earlier this week to promote a new album, complained about getting harassed by fans in the middle of the night at his hotel.
According to the China Times, a group of fans found out Hsiao’s room number and spread the news on the Internet, with predictable results. Hsiao says he saw strangers hanging around in the hallways outside of his room, and on top of that, the singer received a steady stream of phone calls from callers who wouldn’t say anything when he answered.
After Hsiao and his management complained to the hotel and online, the “crazed” fans posted an apology, saying they had no ill intentions and that they were “seized with a sudden impulse.”
A would-be visiting pop star to Shanghai might consult Hsiao’s management about where not to stay on a future visit. According to the China Times report, Internet fans said that Hsiao’s room number was freely given out by the hotel, which wasn’t named in the article.
Pop Stop concludes with a brief introduction to Taiwan’s latest YouTube star, who goes by the name of Sister Hold You (Hold住姐).
The 20-something comedienne dresses in what she calls her “friend’s grandmother’s clothes,” speaks Mandarin with a put-on foreign accent (think California valley girl) and purports to be a teacher of “fashion” (her Facebook page lists her as a graduate of the “Paris Bonjour Fashion University”).
She’s been a hit since debuting her goofy schtick on CTV’s (中天電視) University (大學生了沒), which has racked up over 1,400,000 hits on YouTube. View Sister Hold You’s performance at www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNsaEL-wM4.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
Jan. 12 to Jan. 18 At the start of an Indigenous heritage tour of Beitou District (北投) in Taipei, I was handed a sheet of paper titled Ritual Song for the Various Peoples of Tamsui (淡水各社祭祀歌). The lyrics were in Chinese with no literal meaning, accompanied by romanized pronunciation that sounded closer to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) than any Indigenous language. The translation explained that the song offered food and drink to one’s ancestors and wished for a bountiful harvest and deer hunting season. The program moved through sites related to the Ketagalan, a collective term for the
As devices from toys to cars get smarter, gadget makers are grappling with a shortage of memory needed for them to work. Dwindling supplies and soaring costs of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) that provides space for computers, smartphones and game consoles to run applications or multitask was a hot topic behind the scenes at the annual gadget extravaganza in Las Vegas. Once cheap and plentiful, DRAM — along with memory chips to simply store data — are in short supply because of the demand spikes from AI in everything from data centers to wearable devices. Samsung Electronics last week put out word
RSS