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.
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where