Jay Chou (周杰倫) and Patty Hou’s (侯佩岑) break-up continues to dominate gossip rag stories with local hacks this week claiming Hou’s new NT$2 million Jaguar is a parting gift.
Enraged by the accusation, the Mando-pop king lashed out with a series of counterattacks at gossip mongers on his official Web site, saying the car was bought through a car-dealer friend of his and paid for by Hou’s mother. Meanwhile, the former lady of the house is trying to put the whole ordeal behind her by following the wisdom of the ancient Chinese proverb, “grief is best forgotten by hard work.” A sparkling, new set of wheels may help as well.
On the other side of the Taiwan strait, Chou’s other ex, Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), sent audience members into a frenzy with acrobatic stunts and limber moves at her Hong Kong Colosseum gig. Despite the performance, and the star’s on-stage chemistry with co-performer ABT pop star Stanley Huang (黃立行), the Mando-pop queen failed to distract the media’s attention from the failed Double-J romance.
When asked by the press how she felt about Hou’s expensive “gift” while the only thing she got from Chou was a Hello Kitty flower basket, Tsai quipped, “that’s right, look how generous he was.”
Japan’s five-piece boy band Arashi has been in Taipei for two sold-out weekend concerts at Taipei Arena (台北巨蛋). The pretty-faced pop idols not only attracted a welcoming committee of over 200 screaming local fans at the airport, many of them skipping class and work to do so, but brought along some 1,200 devotees from Japan: a boost for Taipei’s tourism.
It is estimated that the weekend influx of Japanese fans could have spent NT$80 million. In return for their support, the organizers arranged an exclusive meeting for the Japanese fans to meet their idols in person, whereas local groupies had to slaver from a distance.
Ge You (葛優), the award-winning star of Feng Xiaogang’s (馮小剛) The Banquet (夜宴), was in town this week to promote the movie. He turned on the charm and wooed Taiwan’s hungry media hounds by throwing them morsels of information from behind the scenes of the historical drama, the most explosive of which was that 40-year-old megastar Gong Li (鞏俐) lost out to 27-year-old Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) for the leading female role.
“Li is in the prime of her life and her maturity as an actress serves her well on the international level. But in China, her age has become an obstacle,” Ge told members of the local press pack.
Not only do actresses need to be young these days, being cute helps a lot too. A glance at the local show-biz industry shows that ke ai (可愛), or the appropriation of “cuteness” in popular culture (and let’s not forget that cuteness is a perennial theme in Japan’s pop world) is manna for those who worship at the temple of youth.
The local music industry is a tough business. Having fallen on hard times, the members of rock combo Shin (信樂團) have taken second jobs.
While the band’s guitarist, Christ, recently opened a shop selling refreshments and desserts at Raoho Street night market (饒河街夜市), lead singer A-Shin (阿信) pays the bills by appearing as a character in a TV soap opera. Drummer Michael is perhaps the luckiest of all as he does what he loves most for a living: teaching children to play drums.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
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