This week’s gossip pages have been filled with matrimonial lies, bickering action heroes and Lady Gaga’s little monsters. First up, television hostess and actress Chen Mei-fen (陳美鳳) made headlines when she revealed that she and her husband are heading for a divorce. The news came as a shock as very few people knew the couple were married in the first place.
Dubbed the country’s “most beautiful obasan” (最美麗的歐巴桑) — obasan is a Japanese word often used to refer to an older woman — the 55-year-old Chen made it public earlier this month that she had split from her lover, known as David by local media, because of the existence of a xiaosan (小三), or “other woman.”
In response to the star’s announcement, David issued a tell-all statement on Friday last week, revealing that he and Chen have been married for nine years and calling on his wife, who is currently refusing to communicate with him, to “peacefully negotiate a divorce settlement and start divorce proceedings.” Later, when questioned by the Apple Daily, David said he wanted to save the marriage.
Photo: Taipei Times
Chen apologized to her fans on Facebook for concealing the marriage, and has reportedly decided to implement a cooling off period instead of a legal separation. Meanwhile, the media are already hard at work figuring out how much a divorce will cost Chen, who has an estimated personal fortune exceeding NT$500 million. She is said to have been supporting not only David, but also his children from two previous marriages.
While Chen’s domestic affairs sound like an epic divorce case in the making, the curtain on the tired soap opera separation between TV entertainer Frankie Kao (高凌風) and his wife Chin Yu-chuang (金友莊) looks likely to finally fall.
Devoted celebrity gossip fans might recall the high-profile announcement Kao made in front of assembled media on his 62nd birthday last month, when he claimed that Chin had agreed to “maintain the status quo” (維持現狀) status of their marriage.
The next installment of this turgid soap opera unfolded last week when Kao held a press conference to claim he had evidence of Chin’s dalliance with another man. He then declared his undying faith to his wife. Chin, who is 20 years Kao’s junior, hit back by announcing she and Kao had already divorced last year. Yes, you heard it right the first time, divorced.
It turns out Pop Stop was correct when it suspected in an earlier report that the Kao-Chin affair smelled of a drama specially staged to whip up a media frenzy. But we’re not going to gloat.
On the music front, advance tickets for the Taipei leg of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Ball world tour went on sale at 9am on Saturday last week at the National Taiwan University Sports Center (台大體育館) in Taipei. By 5pm, 90 percent of the tickets were sold, and organizer Kuang Hong Arts (寬宏藝術) had to deploy armored carriers to transport a box office haul of NT$100 million in cash.
But not every little monster, a term used to describe Lady Gaga’s fans, is happy. Unable to afford the hefty ticket prices, which go up to NT$12,800, a group of Gaga devotees posted a petition on the pop diva’s fan site at littlemonsters.com, pleading for help from their idol. Stay tuned for Lady Gaga’s response. She will perform at the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall (台北世界貿易中心南港展覽館) on May 17.
In other pop diva-related news, Shu Qi (舒淇) has taken a blow for sticking up for her friend Donnie Yen (甄子丹). The Hong Kong martial arts superstar recently quarreled with Chinese action actor Vincent Chiu (趙文卓), who was to co-star in Yen’s latest kung fu flick Special Identity (特殊身份). Chiu was subsequently ousted from the production.
Shu voiced her support for Yen in a Weibo (微博) post. The star’s act of friendship for the Hong Kong actor reportedly irked some Chinese netizens who decided to unearth and circulate nude photographs of Shu from 1996, when the then unknown starlet featured in a soft-core skin flick. Seemingly unwilling to engage in this type of online brouhaha, Shu removed all of her Weibo micro blog entries on Monday.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would