Marital strife was top of the pops this week on the gossip pages, and we begin with a tale of two CEOs, their glamorous wives and a pending divorce.
“Your wife is having an affair with my husband,” former supermodel Huang Hsiao-lei (洪曉蕾) was reported to have said in a tearful, late night phone call to businessman Tung Chien-san (董建三).
Tung, the CEO of a raw materials company, regaled the Apple Daily with details of how he found out his wife Chien Te-yueh (錢德月) was carrying on an affair with Huang’s husband Wang Shih-chun (王世均), the CEO of a jewelry company.
As Tung tells it, Huang discovered the infidelity earlier this year after hearing his mobile phone ring in the middle of night. Since Wang was passed out cold after a night of drinking, she looked through his text messages and stumbled upon some incriminating conversations with Chien, in which they referred to each other as “husband” (老公) and “wife” (老婆).
This appears to be yet another dent in what began as a fairy-tale marriage between Wang and Huang, who gave up the catwalk to be a housewife. Over the years, rumors of domestic violence have dogged the couple — on more than one occasion Huang has been spotted in public with bruises and scars, which she has always dismissed as having resulted from accidents.
Tung has been alone in airing everyone’s dirty laundry. When asked to respond to his story, Huang insisted that she and Wang had no plans to get divorced, saying that “Things are good now, and I am very satisfied with this stage of our marriage.”
That’s not the case for Tung and Chien, who are currently negotiating a divorce settlement. Tung took the opportunity to complain to Apple about Chien, who is asking for a settlement amounting to NT$200 million.
For her part, Chien refused to discuss the divorce and denied having an affair with Wang. “He’s paranoid,” Chien said of her husband. “If I just talk to another man, he gets upset — it’s a misunderstanding.”
And then there’s the story that refuses to go away: The cram school teacher soap opera involving school owner Kao Kuo-hua (高國華), his employee and new flame Chen Tzu-hsuan (陳子璇) and his ex-wife, news anchor Tsai Yu-hsuan (蔡郁璇).
By all accounts, the drama should be over — Kao officially divorced Tsai and has proclaimed Chen as his “true love.” But Tsai remained in the spotlight earlier this week with several talk show appearances. On one show, she admitted that her parents were right about their misgivings about Kao when they married eight years ago.
On Who Has the Last Word Tonight? (今晚誰當家), Tsai told her interviewer that she tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists on two different occasions since discovering her then-husband had fallen for Chen Tzu-hsuan.
Tsai was accompanied by her twin sister Tsai Yu-chieh (蔡郁潔), who lobbed some verbal abuse Chen’s way, referring to her as a “black mountain witch” and a “transvestite,” reported our sister paper, The Liberty Times.
And in a strange and cruel twist, Tsai received flowers on the set of the show from Kao, who had been contacted by a journalist who told him about her wrist-slashing attempts. The flowers came with a message from Kao: “A thousand faults, 10 thousand faults, all of this has been my fault ... it is like my heart has been cut with a knife, too.”
Tsai responded in tears. “This is the last set of flowers [I’ll ever receive from him].”
And here’s a marriage that almost didn’t begin. The day before his wedding last Friday, comedian Ma Kuo-pi (馬國畢) was discovered standing in a daze in front of his burning car on a road near Yangmingshan in Taipei, after a botched suicide attempt.
The 35-year-old pulled his car over to the side of the road, lit a charcoal grill in the backseat and then loaded up on sleeping pills, according to the Apple Daily. What saved Ma’s life wasn’t the police, who arrived shortly after receiving calls from the scene, but his bladder.
Apparently nature called at just the right time, prompting Ma to step out to take a leak just before his car burst into flames.
The Liberty Times reported that Ma often fought with his fiancee Hsieh Yi-chun (謝依純) and the two had just gotten into an argument before he tried to barbeque himself.
Hsieh, who arrived at the police station to pick him up, seemed unfazed. She told reporters that the wedding would go on the next day, and it did. The next day saw the couple presiding over a star-studded banquet that included guests such as comedy bigwigs Jacky Wu (吳宗憲) and Hu Gua (胡瓜).
Dressed in a white tuxedo, a beaming Ma told reporters that their tiff had been resolved and that he wouldn’t be touching sleeping pills anymore.
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