Frankie Gao’s (高凌風) domestic issues have reached a new level with the entertainer’s arrival back in Taiwan yesterday, after news that his wife Chin Yu-chuang (金友莊), who is nearly 20 years his junior, was seeing another man. Photos of Chin kissing a man identified as Chang Chih-chien (張志堅) were released by Chinese-language media, eliciting an anguished response from Gao.
Chang has denied the affair in an online statement, and Gao has announced — retracting previous statements that he would end things with Chin — that he would take this statement at face value, and not take issue with various inconsistencies and dubious points. In a Liberty Times report yesterday, Gao went so far as to say he would undergo plastic surgery to improve his looks.
“In the past, Chin saw me as shark’s fin, but now all she sees is tilapia [a common fish on Taiwanese tables],” he is quoted as saying. “I need to change that perception.”
Photo: Taipei times
Suggestions that he would also undergo penis enhancement, made after previous spats with his wife, were rejected. “I don’t have any problems in that area at the moment,” he said.
According to the Apple Daily, Chin has undergone surgery on four occasions to improve her looks over the past two years, including breast enhancement and liposuction. It was suggested that the surgery was directly related to her involvement with Chang. It is not a little ironic that Gao should resort to the same superficial remedies in saving his marriage: Perhaps the two really do deserve each other.
Another celebrity who has been undergoing close media scrutiny over the past week as been Dee Hsu (徐熙娣), better known as Little S, who has confirmed that she is pregnant once again. She has two daughters already, and this is yet another try at bringing forth a son and heir. Husband Mike Hsu (許雅鈞) and his family have notoriously put huge pressure on Dee to provide a son, and on this occasion there are also reports of her being pressed to use various folk medicines to ensure the birth of a baby boy.
Two well-known fortune-tellers consulted by the Apple Daily, using different methodologies, both suggest that a third girl was the more likely result. Given her husband’s reputation for domestic violence and his intense desire for a son, this does not bode well for domestic bliss.
Other shifts in the celebrity firmament were captured by the tireless cameras of Next Magazine, which is speculating on the possible ditching of Aboriginal singer Biung Tak-Banuaz (王宏恩) by busty beauty Chantel Liu (劉香慈). Following 18 days of surveillance, the magazine claims that she has fallen for an unnamed playboy who the magazine dubbed the “Bentley Man” (賓利男), after his ostentatious car.
Liu is a rapidly rising star who became a household name following the success of the series Rookies’ Diary (新兵日記) last year. Although she has consistently denied a romantic connection with Biung, Next magazine has equally insisted that she was “the other woman” in his long-term relationship with singer Irene Luo (羅美玲). According to Next, by heading out into the night with “Bentley Man” (two documented overnight visits to is lavish apartment in Dazhi), Liu has categorically left Biung out in the cold. In a side note, Luo has gained considerable media attention of late for her role in the big-budget war film Seediq Bale (賽德克‧巴萊), which has achieved unprecedented success for a local film in the multiplex.
There seem to be an increasing number of local celebrities who believe that taking off their clothes is the quickest way to fame and fortune. Kuo Yi-ling (郭怡伶), also known as Little Call (小Call), has been thirsting for exposure throughout her five years in the entertainment industry, and she has recently released a book of nude photos that leave nothing to the imagination.
“I have looked through many celebrity photo albums in recent years,” she is quoted in Next magazine as saying, “but I think these albums are little more than lingerie catalogues. I think you need to show it all.”
Kuo’s album, which has plenty of the coy and cute, does not shy away from “showing the three points” (露三點). The magazine reports that this willingness to show it all followed close on the heels of breast enhancement surgery that lifted the starlet into the 32C category of mammary excitation. Next has applauded her daring with a three-page spread, and it is likely that Kuo will be someone to watch — or at least salivate over on the sly.
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon