Awards ceremonies in Taiwan — whether of the beauty pageant, music, television or film variety — are generally occasions for jealousy, name-calling and all around caterwauling. So it was with some surprise that there was little controversy reported at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (金馬獎), presented on Saturday night. The awards are considered the Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars.
Taiwan’s Leon Dai (戴立忍), who garnered five awards for his No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (不能沒有你), a black-and-white film about a father down on his luck who struggles to retain custody of his daughter, was the biggest news.
More important for gossip observers, however, was the hug Dai gave actress Guey Lun-mei (桂綸鎂), when she presented him with the award for Best Screenplay.
Dai, 43, and Guey, 26, have been rumored to be lovers for years, but kept their relationship under wraps. Under the microscopic scrutiny of gossip rags, a hug comes with a lot of significance (or at least a pretext for reporters to write whatever they want).
So tongues started wagging on Saturday night when the two embraced — for the first time in public, reported the Apple Daily.
As Dai walked off stage, one wag asked about the hug. “Especially warm (特別溫暖),” he replied. Which logically, for this paparazzo, led to a question about marriage. Dai responded with a shrug and a laugh.
The Liberty Times speculated that the age difference between the two celebs prevents them from going public with the relationship.
And speaking of leaps of logic, Apple was making a few of its own when it snapped pictures of sometimes-entertainer Allen Chao (趙樹海) and model Sonia Sui (隋棠) having dinner, in a report which suggested that the Chao is keeping love in the family.
Chao is the father of Mark Chao (趙又廷), who stars with Sui in the cop drama Black & White (痞子英雄). The two young actors have filmed a couple of love scenes together.
When asked if Chao knew that Sui was dating actor Yao Yuan-hao (姚元浩), he angrily responded,“Whether or not she has a boyfriend, it’s not my business. I’m her elder.” To which Sui added, “He is my father and I am his daughter.”
Meanwhile, netizens are giving TV host and pop singer Pauline Lan (藍心湄) a hard time, according to an Apple report. And it’s not over the 45-year-old’s notorious affairs with younger men. They claim that the outfit Lan wore for a photo shoot shown on TVBS and published in the Apple Daily was nearly identical to the mostly see-through costume worn by Britney Spears in her video Toxic.
But Lan’s “outfit,” which consists of a few strategically placed crystals, in the snaps — which look like the product of an epic Photoshop session — makes Britney’s Toxic duds look practically Amish by comparison.
“I just want to show audiences what the body of a 45-year-old woman looks like,” she said. “Are my breasts okay?”
Further up the cup-size alphabet, television host Chen Jin-pei (陳今佩) has lost 39kg in the past two years (and went from an H cup to an E). The 58 year-old, known in the entertainment world as the “Great White Shark” (大白鯊), told reporters that she trimmed down for a love interest in China.
Pop Stop wonders if Chen will take a leaf out of Taiwanese actress Vivian Hsu (徐若瑄) flab-fight book.
While on the set of the film Hot Summer Days (全城熱戀), which is set to hit theaters in February, Hsu found a way to rid herself of the copious amounts of sushi she was forced to eat for her role as a love-struck heiress, reported Sina.com.
“I didn’t want to gain weight. So when the director stopped filming, I’d throw up the sushi,” she said.
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
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