Pop Stop reported last week that Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) was going to sue the Hong Kong edition of the Apple Daily, and its sister weekly Next Magazine, after both gossip rags said that she allegedly prostituted herself out to wealthy Chinese businessmen. Well, on Monday she made good on her word.
An article in the Apple last month alleged that Zhang “is a prostitute” and had sex with disgraced Chinese official Bo Xilai (薄熙來) and a wealthy associate for money, on numerous occasions, court documents showed.
The daily reported that the 33-year-old Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) and Rush Hour 2 star had sex with other top Chinese officials and had amassed a whopping fortune of close to NT$3.3 billion (US$110 million) as a result. Though the original story was removed from the tabloid’s Web site following Monday’s suit, pretty much every other media outlet in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China continue to report on it.
Photo: Taipei Times
Meanwhile, Chinese actress Fang Bingbing (范冰冰) has sued renowned Chinese playwright and film critic Bi Chenggong (畢成功) and a Guizhou-based news blog over allegations that she was the “mastermind” behind the Zhang sex scandal rumors.
Bi made a post on his microblog that suggested Fang was a notorious rabble rouser and had planned for months to spread the rumors before the release of Dangerous Liaisons (危險關係), a film starring Zhang that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Netizens speculated that the rumors were behind her absence from the festival.
Repeatedly denying the rumors, Fang has filed a defamation suit against Bi to the tune of NT$2.5 million.
Photo: Taipei Times
While some of Asia’s celebutantes are fighting off rumors of sexual impropriety (surprise, surprise), others are fighting off overzealous fans. S.H.E member Ella Chen (陳嘉樺) was stabbed by a female fan in France last week, reported the United Daily News.
The recently married Chen was in Paris with her cosmetics executive husband Alvin Lai (賴斯翔), who was on a business trip, when a fan approached the 30 year old while posting pictures of her trip on her Facebook account in a cafe.
The “lunatic,” as the popular singer later said, got angry when Chen refused to give her an interview or sign autographs, and lunged at her with a pen, stabbing her in the chest. She then drew on Chen’s left arm.
But Chen took it in her stride. Though shaken by the incident, warning other celebrities to “be careful,” she still took time out to meet up with fans for a photo session.
Crazy fans are something Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) knows something about. After arriving at an airport in Chongqing, China at the end of last month on her way to Beijing, the pop diva was accosted by an overzealous male fan.
“Jolin Tsai, I love you,” he bellowed as he attempted to wrap his arms around the songstress, according to NOWnews.
Though other assembled fans were clearly peeved by the fanboys’ presumptuous behavior, Tsai for her part laughed off the “attack.”
She was later quoted as saying that she was less concerned for her safety than the fan being blacklisted by other fans.
Meanwhile, the vernacular media have been reporting the possibility that bible-thumping chick magnet Van Ness Wu (吳建豪) might be getting hitched to on-again-off-again girlfriend Arissa Cheo (姚之寧).
The couple first hooked up in 2006 when Cheo helped Wu film a music video, but amicably broke up a year later. After getting back together in 2010, Wu allegedly proposed, only to be rebuffed by the Singaporean sweetheart’s parents because of his job as entertainer.
NOWnews reported that Wu had finally proposed to Cheo at the end of last month in Singapore. But he put the kibosh on the rumors this week.
“I’ll share the good news when it comes,” he said in a statement.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
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
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
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
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