Last week was an exciting time for music fans. American rapper Snoop Dogg made his debut appearance in Taiwan, where he performed with Dr Dre at Luxy, music legend Lo Ta-yu (羅大佑) led groupies to relive his 1980s heyday, and current idol Hebe Tien (田馥甄) of S.H.E crooned to a full-house audience at the National Taiwan University Sports Center.
But no one was as hardworking as Hong Kong’s Eason Chen (陳奕迅), who broke multiple records with a six-concert tour in Taiwan and still felt the urge to let off some steam.
The tour saw Chen become the first Hong Kong singer to make it to Taichung Stadium (台中體育場) and Kaohsiung Arena (高雄巨蛋). He also became the new title-holder for most shows by a Hong Kong performer during one tour in Taiwan, and attracted a record-breaking 72,000 concertgoers.
Photo: Taipei Times
At the afterparty in Kaohsiung on Saturday last week, the usually mellow star suddenly lost his cool when the Apple Daily asked him about a Hong Kong gossip media story that reported he and his wife of five years are heading for a divorce.
“Screw you. You [the Hong Kong press] are full of crap,” he snapped.
To be fair, Chen might have fueled the rumors about his deteriorating marriage when he recently appeared on Here Comes Kang and Xi (康熙來了) to promote his concerts. The star told the program’s hosts, Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, aka Little S) and Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), that he and his wife Hilary Tsui (徐濠縈) rarely talk at home and sometimes rely on text messages to communicate.
Meanwhile, things are getting hot between Jay Chou (周杰倫) and his teenage sweetheart Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌). After trying to keep their romance as low profile as possible, the barely legal model was spotted cruising around Taipei in one of Chou’s sports cars last week. According to tailing paparazzi from the Apple Daily and the Liberty Times (the Taipei Time’s sister newspaper), Quinlivan’s itinerary included lunch at the Breeze Center (微風廣場) and a look-see around Chou’s restaurant at Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914), before returning to her home just one block away from the Mando-pop king’s apartment.
What surprised the paparazzi more was that Quinlivan neither denied nor admitted anything when reporters from the Liberty Times questioned her about whether or not the vehicle was a gift from Chou.
Gossip observers are saying it’s a sign that the 18-year-old model’s status as “J-wife” (J嫂) is cemented and official.
In film-related news, a pirated copy of You Are the Apple of My Eye (那些年,我們一起追的女孩) went viral online and received some 140,000 hits on YouTube within a couple of days before it was blocked on Sunday. It is said that the leak is likely to affect the film’s box-office takings when it opens in China next month.
Usually self-assured in public, the film’s director and noted writer Giddens Ko (柯景騰), better known as Jiubadao (九把刀 or “Nine Knives”), made the rare gesture of pleading to fans on his blog by saying the film is his “baby blessed with lots of love and prayers.”
Love or no love, Jiubadao’s baby is raking in a lot of dough for its creator. The romantic comedy has grossed more than NT$400 million at the box office in Taiwan and broken the NT$200 million mark at the Hong Kong box office since its release in October.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist