The unrelenting character assassination of Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) by the Hong Kong media seems to have rubbed off on the kids who should be her fans. On Monday night she and Andy Lau (劉德華) held a press conference to publicize the new movie Big Guy (
Not long ago, Cecilia was the media's sweetheart. So what brought about this spectacular fall from grace? Pop Stop recently reported that Hong Kong paparazzi had snapped shots of her with a voodoo doll, which was presumed to represent her ex Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒). She's also been spotted dressed in bombastic clothes and made a big splash at a concert in China two weeks ago where she provocatively spread her legs in a choreographed routine not unlike Madonna's fabled Like a Virgin performance at the MTV Music Awards.
Given the chauvinistic standards of the gossip rags, her supposedly unseemly behavior has been attributed to her breakup. But the only truly odd behavior on her part, as far as Pop Stop can discern, was her retraction this week of an earlier announcement that she had a foreigner boyfriend, which was reported in Hong Kong's edition of the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) and in The Great Daily News (大成報) as yet another case of her having gone off the rails. It was all a joke, she said. Ha ha.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Gigi Leung (梁詠琪) was reported in the current edition of Next Magazine (壹週刊) as having turned down a part in the next Johnny To (杜琪峰) film after the director had openly criticized her lackluster performance in Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走向右走), which he directed.
No matter how poorly He Li-hsiu (河莉秀) acts, the sultry South Korean starlet, whose main gimmick is that she started her life as a boy [and had a sex change], always overshadows the other actresses. Her limelight snatching rubbed actress Wu Pei-tsi (吳佩慈) up so badly this week that at a press conference about the show they both star in called Honey (親愛的), Wu lashed out complaining that she was, in fact, the star. "Why are her photos always so pretty [on the promotional posters] and the other actors' just ones taken at rehearsal?" Wu said. She even snapped at He's tendency to wear revealing blouses and dresses. "Ai ya, her chest can be made as big as she wants it to be."
This weekend's major pop event will be Lee Hom Wang's (
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
Tonight in front of the Presidential Office Shunza (順子) is billed to take the stage as part of the Double Ten Day celebrations. The selection of singers for any event related to celebrating Taiwan has been sensitive ever since A-mei (阿妹) was barred for a year from performances and product endorsements in China after she sang the national anthem at President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) inauguration in 2000. But Shunza was quoted in local papers as saying she's "not scared at all" of any repercussions from across the strait. Easy for her to say, she has an American passport.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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