The paparazzi got more than just the thrill of the chase with Taiwanese pop singer Yoga Lin (林宥嘉) last weekend when the 23-year-old talent show star tried to rough up several photographers while on a visit to Hong Kong.
Lin became angry when four photographers from the local gossip rag FACE got their cameras a little too close to him and his sweetheart, pop singer G.E.M., aka 19-year-old Gloria Tang (鄧紫棋). The photographers had been following the couple, who donned facemasks for most of the evening as they went out for dinner and a movie.
The altercation, which took place on a sidewalk, culminated with Lin trying to grab one of the photographers’ cameras and yelling, “This is our private matter. I’m Taiwanese, I came to here to do music, and I don’t want to be in your magazine.”
Photo: Taipei times
Too late for that. FACE published photos of the two out on the town, canoodling on the street. And for good measure, the magazine threw in a shot of Lin trying to grab at the photographers, whose faces were blotted out to protect their, ahem, privacy.
The photos are a blow to Lin and G.E.M., who the Apple Daily calls “Hong Kong’s Jolin Tsai (蔡依林),” for another reason: Although the two had been rumored to be an item since April, they had consistently denied a romantic relationship and said they were just “good friends.”
Perhaps the young couple might take a cue from actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, otherwise known as Big S), who handled Taipei gossip reporters with ease in the wake of her secret marriage to 29-year-old Chinese restaurateur and multimillionaire Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲).
Big S, who is taking a break from a film shoot in Shanghai, brought her new hubby back to Taiwan to meet the parents last weekend, and the two greeted reporters outside a Taipei hot pot restaurant after a family dinner outing. While Wang mostly stayed silent — he was nursing a cold and was “shy” — Big S “generously answered” the reporters’ questions, as the China Times put it. She dismissed rumors that she was pregnant, saying, “Not yet, it’s too soon. Wish me luck!”
Public New Year’s Eve celebrations across Taiwan are usually star-studded affairs, and this year is no different. Pop diva Chang Hui-mei (張惠妹, better known as A-mei, 阿妹) and pop rock idols Mayday (五月天) are the headline entertainment for the New Year’s countdown at Taipei City Hall tonight. Singer Rainie Yang (楊丞琳) is on the lineup for Taichung’s celebration, and Jolin Tsai will be in Kaohsiung.
But if you want to greet 2011 with Wang Lee-hom (王力宏), Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) or S.H.E., you’d better hurry across the Taiwan Strait.
The Apple Daily lists the lucrative fees attracting these Mando-pop stars to various Chinese cities: Wang is raking in NT$7.5 million (US$255,000) for a concert in Shanghai (he’s also scheduled to appear in Taichung). Hsiao is collecting NT$4.45 million for a show in Nanjing, and girl group S.H.E. is performing as “H.E.” — without Selina Jen (任家萱), who is recovering from a burn injury — in Shenzhen to the tune of NT$3 million. Not a bad way to say goodbye to 2010.
And on that note, Pop Stop wishes its readers a Happy New Year.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
RSS