It's no secret that Hong Kong singer/actress Anita Mui (梅艷芳) has had some health problems of late, but Next Magazine (壹週刊) seems to be wandering onto thin legal ice in its latest issue by announcing that Mui is suffering from cervical cancer.
Mui has tried to silence the reports in the Hong Kong media about her health problems, to no avail, and threatened to sue anyone who writes erroneous stories on the subject. Never one to fear a lawsuit, Next references unnamed sources to back its claim that Mui has come down with the deadly disease. As evidence, the report says her family allegedly has been burning a lot of ghost money and carrying out various prayer rituals. Also, she's wearing black-bead bracelets that carry religious significance, and spent a night in hospital two weeks ago, where she received numerous mid-night hospital visits from famous friends like William So (蘇永康) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒).
Mui said, however, that her hospital stay was not to treat anything as serious as the tabloids were suggesting. But so far, she hasn't clearly stated what ailment she is suffering from. The ominous element in the story is the fact that her sister died of cervical cancer three years ago at the age of 41.
Leaving the serious stuff behind and diving into the inane news that Pop Stop enjoys most, the gloves have come off and the claws are out in the battle between Sun Yanzi (孫燕姿) fans and S.H.E. fans after the g-music billboard chart was released last week. The chart showed that Yanzi had edged out the cutesy trio of Selina (S), Hebe (H) and Ella (E) to grab first place in sales and since then S.H.E. fans have been going for the jugular in online chat rooms. In the first week of its release on Aug. 22, Yanzi's album The Moment sold over 250,000 copies, just a few thousand more than S.H.E.
Selina and Hebe may have fed the flames of their fans' ire by telling media after the results came out that no matter what the chart says, "S.H.E.'s album will always be number one in our hearts and in the hearts of our fans."
The messages posted by rabid fans were so vitriolic, top executives for Yanzi and S.H.E.'s respective record labels tried to urge restraint from fans and praised their competitors. The calls for harmony are nice, but Pop Stop is really hoping for a rumble in Hsimenting between the two camps.
Leaving the pettiness of Taiwan teenie bopper fans behind, doe-eyed singer Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) took her show to Las Vegas, of all places, for a one-off concert last weekend at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino. It's not certain how many Chinese music fans made the trek to Las Vegas for the show, but she probably doesn't care, the one-hour show earned her a cool NT$2.5 million.
Also earning a quick American buck recently is Lee Hom Wang (王力宏), who signed up with McDonald's for the company's new international ad campaign. Lee Hom will be the voice in Chinese-speaking areas for the four-minute ditty composed by McDonald's headquarters. Just for recording the song, Lee Hom is reportedly raking in over seven figures, albeit in NT dollars.
Lee Hom will be performing in Taipei on Oct. 11 so if you haven't seen the ad on TV by then, you can probably hear the song at the show.
If we're to believe the Liberty Times (自由時報), the past week has seen an invasion of foreign stars looking to run off with Taiwanese people's money.
"If Taiwan's entertainment industry can't improve itself and create a larger space for the arts, then sooner or later, foreign artists will run away with our money," said the paper's column "Scissors" (剪刀) in its edition last Thursday. The column followed up on Tuesday in a piece titled "Korean stars aren't gods" by pillorying Korean TV star Han Jae-seok (韓在石) for failing to show up at a press conference. According to the column, the actor, who was reported to have had to attend an urgent meeting at the time, was not showing the proper respect to the Taiwanese press.
Pop Stop will be curious to see if "Scissors" has anything to say about Japanese E-cup porn star Asakawa Ran coming to Taiwan to launch a new career. Whatever she does, it won't be porn, because that's illegal here, and anyway, the market was cornered by that Taiwan Plumber (台灣水電工) movie that's all over the Web.
Wedged between beef noodle soup joints and cobwebbed Chinese medicine stores, we find organic kombucha vendors and surfers sipping coconut milk lattes. Weaving through alleyways of orange-roofed temples, I pass an elderly man downing Taiwan beers road side. Opposite, a backpacker beer garden hosts sunburned foreigners sampling locally brewed IPA. The unusual juxtaposition reflects a decade-long change slowly crawling upon Waiao (外澳), a sleepy beach town in Yilan County. The locale is jostling between becoming the next surfers’ paradise and its traditional farming and fishing roots. Hospitality is second nature here; my elderly taxi driver describes how the tight-knit rural
More people close to Ko Wen-je and his party are being implicated in the ongoing corruption scandal The past few weeks have seen crisis upon crisis hit the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), raising questions about the party’s future viability. It is also a wild, unpredictable story that is fascinating in a train wreck sort of way. Much of it has not been covered, or only briefly covered, in the English language press. Indeed, so much has happened that my previous column (“Donovan’s Deep Dives: The TPP careening towards catastrophe”) was almost entirely about the period of Aug. 8 through Aug. 12. The first big piece of bad news goes back to July 26, when Hsinchu Mayor Ann
Taiwan might be a land of scooters, but Joshua Dyer arrives via van to the cafe where we’ve we scheduled to meet. “I have my surf board,” he says, “there are waves today.” Dyer packs a lot into life. As well as a passion for surfing and music — he plays guitar, and previously had a job scouting folk musicians from Yunnan for US tours — Dyer works full time at Taipei-based literature agency Grayhawk. “I’m employed by the agency but most of the work I do is for the Ministry of Culture,” he says of his role as the editor-in-chief of
Some gamers who received a copy of Chinese game Black Myth: Wukong (黑神話:悟空) were given guidelines for what to talk about as they streamed it. Discussing its stunning cinematic graphics, mythical 16th-century plotline and engaging gameplay was permitted. But calling for equal rights for women? Off-limits. Hero Games, one of the early backers of Game Science, the studio behind Wukong, didn’t explain what it meant by including “feminist propaganda” on the list of forbidden talking points, and didn’t respond to my request for comment. Also among the don’t-mention topics were COVID-19, China’s game industry or anything instigating “negative discourse.” The made-in-China blockbuster