Carina Lau (劉嘉玲) has suffered more than her share of hardship, but the actress is eager to let the public know she has moved on. In 1990, Lau was kidnapped, allegedly by gangsters angered by her refusal to take part in a film. Her captors forced her to pose for several topless photos, which remained out of the public eye until East Week (東週刊) magazine published them in 2002. The release of the shocking pictures, which showed Lau crying, caused a massive furor over media ethics in Hong Kong and forced the magazine to cease publication for a year.
In a display of public forgiveness, however, Lau recently granted East Week an interview. Though she has steadfastly refused to describe her ordeal in detail, Lau divulged that the publication of the photos lifted a weight off her shoulders.
“I was constantly waiting for that bomb to go off. When it finally did, I felt a sense of relief. I didn’t feel degraded,” she said. Lau added that she has moved past the trauma of the kidnapping and come to terms with the constant spotlight on her personal life.
Photo: Taipei Times
Lau and longtime love Tony Leung (梁朝偉) ended years of speculation about their relationship when they wed in 2008. Lau says she tries to see the media obsession with her love life as flattering instead of intrusive, but she is now subject to a different kind of scrutiny: the celebrity bumpwatch.
Dismissing rumors that the couple have desperately prayed for a child, Lau said she and Leung are happy being a family of two and have not pursued fertility treatments.
The stork has yet to arrive at the Lau-Leung household, but it made a stop at the home of Jeanette Wang (王芷蕾). When news broke last week that the singer is now the mother of a baby son, many assumed that the 54-year-old gave birth herself. Some reports even went so far as to declare that Wang set new medical reports and compared her to actress Brigitte Lin (林青霞), whose second child was born when she was 45.
Photo: Taipei Times
Wang, who is currently living in the US, quelled the furor with an email to media outlets stating that a gestational surrogate carried her baby. For many years, Wang wrote, she and husband James S. Cheng (鄭叔霆) had pursued fertility treatments without success. The couple said that their new child, named Joshua, is biologically theirs, but that they have also taken all steps to make sure that the pregnancy was in accordance with surrogacy laws.
In far less happy news, new developments continue to emerge in the Justin Lee (李宗瑞) sex video scandal. Lee, son of Yuanta Financial Holdings (元大金融控股公司) director Li Yueh-tsang (李岳蒼), has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting many of the women shown in the tapes.
Despite the allegations, Lee’s girlfriend Liu Shao-I (劉韶儀) is standing by her man. Last week Next Magazine (壹週刊) published a report stating that Liu planned to confront Lee over NT$30 million of her money that he lost in the stock market. Our sister newspaper The Liberty Times (自由時報) reports that in a meeting with prosecutors, Liu adamantly insisted the report was false and all of Lee’s investments had been made with her agreement.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
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Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless